.HE Memoirs of a WRPI president This document is intended to give future leaders of WRPI the benefit of my recently concluded experience as president. I do not wish to make any claims concerning the quality of my administration. I feel that without judging myself, I can save a lot of effort for a lot of people yet to come. Don't bother saying "But that's not what you said at the time," about anything in this document -- the whole point is that you can learn by experience. "Leadership by Example," a favorite saying of the R.O.T.C. corps, is, as I write this, serving as a catch phrase of the current administration of the station. It is also a concept that describes much of the attitude with which, in my time, I "ran" the station (or at least tried to). It works. There is nothing that gets people to help you out like seeing you do something yourself. On the other hand, the effort of setting that example can be a liability. One must be doing a fair amount of work to be setting a good example. However, the whole idea of doing such work is to inspire others into working also -- you don't want to do everything yourself. Quality leadership, by definition, gets the most done with the least amount of effort. The other side of the coin in the matter of setting an example is the damage done by a poor example. Executive commit tee members who do not get their jobs done or blatantly violate station policy are by such action immeasurably damaging the station. The question, of course, is what to do about it. Al though there is provision for impeachment of officers in the station constitution, that is such a major reaction that, short of gross misbehaviour, it would have to be considered an overre action. However, executive committee members must be encouraged to do a good job even more strongly than other members. It is very important that the executive committee members do a good job. Although each individual E-Comm members should be responsible for himself (pardon the male pronoun), the President should keep an eye out. The reason for the president's special responsibility is that the job of the president is essentially to keep some sort of tabs on everyone else anyway. The best way to do this sort of keeping tabs is to insist on regular reports, presumably at weekly E-Comm meetings, from everyone with any responsibility (not just the E-Comm, here), and make sure that the reports are substantive. Unless something goes wrong, the president is essentially a figurehead. Unlike, say, Players, this is not because the presi dency holds no power but just because it holds no responsibili ties. Ideally, the president should not need to do anything unless one of the people lower in the power structure screws up. At the risk of sounding like a management major, I want to point out that Radio Rensselaer does have an organizational chart. Incidentally, this is because the president before myself WAS a management major. It looks approximately like the following, but a fully detailed and current version should be in the president's notebook. .CP 18 ----------------------------------------------------------------- President \/ ------------------------------ \/ \/ Station Manager \/ \/ \/ ---------------------------------------- \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ Prog. Dir. PR Dir Chief Engineer Business Mgr. MAL subdepartment heads are under the appropriate department heads ----------------------------------------------------------------- Do not get carried away with the idea of leadership. "Lead ership by example" is nice as far as it goes, but in the case of WRPI, it doesn't happen to go very far. WRPI-ites do not, in my experience, tend to be very happy about being led. This is not a group-oriented organization. That last statement may seem like a contradiction, but the fact is that WRPI is very anarchistic and individualistic, and rightly so. If you are wondering why it should be the case that WRPI be anarchistic, then you don't understand the station very well. However, you're in luck, because I'll explain the phenomenon. It is, in fact, at the very heart of the organization itself. Most clubs exist for an occasional activity; very occasional compared to the approximately eighteen hours a day, every day, that the station is on the air. As opposed to Players, where for all the work that goes into a show, that show is only on stage for about a dozen hours total, or the basketball team, which only plays a couple of two-hour games a week for four months, WRPI is essen tially continuous. Furthermore, radio is not in a direct sense a group effort. Most shows are done by a single person -- those two or three hours per week are essentially "theirs." How can an organization which depends on continuous individual effort be anything but anarchistic? Although work parties, social events, and so forth, do a lot of good by alleviating some of this effect, the fact is that individualism is necessary. People who don't fit this individualistic stereotype are less likely to be happy with radio than those who don't. I'm not saying that there aren't any people who don't fit this stereotype at the station, just that radio is more arranged for those who do. One of the worst things an E-Comm member can do is to act like anything other than a completely calm, mature, reasonable adult. You don't have to get caught smoking pot in the stairwell to make the station look bad. Keep the station's best interests at heart and assume that others do as well. Freshmen will be freshmen, but the E-Comm members should not. A commonly accepted corollary to this is that freshmen should not be E-Comm members. This means minimizing the noise level starting with your own voice; it means keeping a lid on your temper; it means compromi sing, often, on things that don't matter or even on which you're completely right. This may seem awfully tough, but that is what "the good of the station" really means. A good rule of thumb for whether something does matter enough to get you hot under the collar is to decide how long it will seem important. This is called perspective. For example, if you won't care tomorrow, keep that perspective in mind. Final ly, even if you think the matter is of great importance, be sure that the issue's resolution is more important than the fuss you will make bringing it about (don't turn off the announcers in order to pass a format, and so on). Leadership should be concerned with the people you're lead ing, as well as with your own matters. It's not so important to know what's going on as it is to know that there at least are things going on. The best advice I can give you in this area is to keep people involved. [The station is a democracy, supposed ly.] Other college stations I've seen place everyone in a de partment. This way, the program director is responsible for the announcers, the chief engineer for the techies, the production director for the production and live-broadcast personnel, and so on and on. This wouldn't work perfectly at WRPI, since our some of our members are involved in ALL of the departments -- some thing that doesn't seem to happen elsewhere. On the other hand, a little bit of organization would help us, and if you need to be considered a member of a department in order to get a staff card (or something of the sort), you might be inclined to actually do something occasionally. Make sure people are enjoying the station. If they're not, they won't stay, and both their presence and eventual absence will make the station less pleasant for the rest of us. This is, after all, a student activity, and as much as some people would have it otherwise, the station really is here for students to do radio (if you disagree, just look at WAMC -- once those letters stood for Albany Medical College). Just because you've got some authority, you are not excluded from this -- "if you aren't having fun, you aren't doing it right." There are lots of things you can do to this end; not all of them necessarily have to do with radio. Throw some parties; make official station trips to Players' productions; spin tunes for other people's parties; go to concerts, bars, whatever, but make sure that there is some sort of social life besides sitting in the station lounge -- not everyone's into that, but they should not be excluded from the station "social scene," such as it is, just because they don't like being slugs. "After all, the fun is ALL the reason for it." It is worthy of note that WRPI's difficulties with losing people due to problems of academic standing are not recent or temporary. The earliest station records extant indicate that Radio Rensselaer was denied permission for a desired activity because of what a dean described as "the high fatality rate at WRPI" (his words). Furthermore, there are indications that this situation has been fairly consistent over the half century since. Any problem that has lasted that long is not about to be ignor able. Encouragement of studious endeavors ("yeah, but they don't collect the homework anyway") is a good concept. Perhaps invi ting the dean of academic advising to a general meeting would be desirable as well. Nothing you do is going to solve the problem; nevertheless, we've all seen a lot of friends go, and I would've thought it worth a lot of effort if I could've done anything about even one of them. For that matter, academic matters were not irrelevant to my own leaving RPI. Even if you're not into such sentimentalism as moaning over lost friends, you probably would admit that keeping people here until graduation is good for the station. Don't allow people to take on responsibilities for the station that you don't think they can handle -- after all, in many cases you are worse off if you lose someone from a certain job than you would've been if no one had been doing it at all. The campus overall tends to look at the whole lot of us as a bunch of weirdos -- we take pride in being different from average. It would behoove us to be very tolerant of each others' faults and problems. This makes the personal politics in the station ridiculous; nobody has any right to a "holier than thou" attitude because if we weren't all jerks, we'd be somewhere else anyway. At my last general meeting as president, I coined the term "comma, asshole," to refer to people who keep yelling when in reality the yelling is causing more problems than whatever they are yelling about; "comma, asshole," could be a suffix to every sentence of such a person. Keeping a set of priorities -- why the station does things and how important they are -- in mind is advisable. I recommend the following as good concepts: 1) hockey (never underestimate its importance) 2) educating listeners 3) educating ourselves 4) having fun The order is unimportant to my current purpose. For that matter, this list is an oversimplification because these priori ties are interrelated. Keep the station itself in mind. Whenever doing something "for the station," think about what the station needs and what is really to the station's advantage. Is the station really better off if you do that piece of production in Control-"B" while someone signs off the transmitter? Everyone, yourself included, is better off in the long run if you stop to think about the somewhat ambiguous good of the station before doing something stupid. Remember, however, that I DID say that being at the station is supposed to be fun. The whole problem is balancing between these extremes -- I didn't say it was going to be easy. Staying on good terms with the Union will help the station. The Union financial people are our friends, and if this changes, we will be in trouble. As I write this, the main such person to be concerned with is Caroline Trzcinski. If you are reading this far in the future, she might no longer be at RPI, but runs the Union financial office will deserve the same treatment. Life is greatly simplified by the Union admin. people so it is worth while getting to know them. I would advise special effort to get to know each of the secretaries in the office, too. Secretaries are the people who really run most of the offices of the world -- a useful thing to remember when dealing with any office, on or off campus. A regular (or even occasional) reception for faculty, administrators, and other such nice people would be a good way to get to know them and have a good time in the process. Spending some of the station's money to let officials know what we have and what we do would not be a waste of E-board politicking -- at last check some of a club's money could be spent once per semes ter for a "reception" following some club event. The Dean of Students (Eddie Knowles) recently suggested this idea to me when some of us complained that we had a tough time finding professors to advise E-lab projects even though we already had projects. It would make a good tradition to start, if it hasn't been already. Station records are a good thing. Read about the things that happened before you and write down what happens to you as time goes along. Much of what happens in the station goes in cycles several years long, just a little longer than the "undergraduate experience." There is a lot of benefit to be gained from experience, even if it isn't yours. Don't be so self-important as to think that whatever has just gone wrong has never happened before. Oldtimers are similarly a good thing. They may well have been around the last time the problem occurred. Don't under- estimate the good that they do, because there is a lot that there is insufficient time to learn in four years, much but not all of it technical. In short, make use of experience, if you can find some. After all, if you ignore any experience but your own, you are limiting yourself severely. Respect for oldtimers, while advisable to a great degree, can be overdone. Although they provide a needed type of stabili ty in an environment that changes a rather large percentage of its population every year, stability isn't always what radio needs. I have several times seen oldtimers railroad things (such as formats) past the students. The fact that I personally agreed with the intentions of the oldtimers on most of these occasions is incidental. The relevant point is that the students should still have had more of a share of the decision process. Although the greater experience of someone who's been around longer makes such a person better able to give advice, it does not give him any right to make decisions by himself. Distrust Big Brother; it's good practice for dealing with the 'Tute, anyway.