I served as president of the board of directors at CKMS for a year. Coincidentally, a year that Caitlin Crockard was also on the board. Needless to say, CKMS up to that point wasn’t ever really ‘campus/community radio’. It was always slanted towards the community, while always taking moneys from the campus. For that year, we tried our best to right that ship, and I think we made some good headway. In fact, our board were the ones who initiated the whole station manager process to get Heather in there in the first place. Unfortunately, from the looks of things, the move towards more student involvement never happened, and this is the end result. Back when I was on the board, this endgame was mentioned many times but was never taken seriously.

There was never a real effort to work with students. There was never a real effort to move closer to campus. There was never a real effort to cater programming to students. It was almost like they were TRYING to bite the hand that fed them.

Not surprised at all.

The opposition to the CKMS fee came from a diverse set of perspectives:

- Some are opposed to all opt-out fees. Some of these students are poor; some are cheap and selfish; and some have a principled opposition to the opt-out fee system, which involves a conflict of interest where the very parties whose interests are served by having as low a refund rate as possible are in charge of running the refunds. To get a CKMS refund, for example, one had to go to where many students consider is the middle of nowhere, on Bauer Warehouse Road (which wasn’t even paved until recently), in a narrow set of office hours on a narrow range of days at the beginning of the term. Some students study in Cambridge, and for them a round trip to get a refund would cost, in gasoline, most if not all of the refund.

- Some don’t value FM radio.

- Some might be open to, or even supportive of, campus radio, but were opposed to the repeated acts of corruption and abuse of power by the CKMS establishment. These include:

— holding meetings in a poisoned environment

— violating CKMS’s own bylaws to silence their critics (even CKMS’s own attorney is on the record in the meeting minutes of a meeting following a past AGM as saying that a vote that station manager Heather Majaury obstructed was perfectly legal)

— obstructing student access to budget and governance information that even CKMS’s own attorney stated was their right (the leader of the opposition campa
ign, who was entitled to the information, received some of it weeks after the referendum was over, and this information included the previous event of the v
iolation of bylaws, so if CKMS had not underhandedly obstructed the rightful access to this information the results of the referendum might have been an even more dramatic rejection of CKMS)

— breaking referendum rules repeatedly, including campaigning repeatedly before the allowed campaign period (an unfair advantage over the opposing campaig
n, which followed the rules) and distributing false information to voters
— using station resources for their campaign, which is forbidden by student council rules because it creates an unfair playing field (the opposing campaig
n spent only $34)

— the supporters of CKMS showing utter hostility and contempt for the democratic process by defacing and removing posters put up by the opposing campaign
(this can not be linked directly to the CKMS establishment)
Some references:

http://jeffaho.com/archives/ckms-referendum/
http://community.livejournal.com/uwaterloo/515664.html http://jeffaho.com/archives/synaesthetik/
http://community.livejournal.com/uwaterloo/518397.html
http://www.lunarluau.ca/blog/?p=249
http://atuw.ca/opinion-ckms-endgame-analysis/
(this comment may be of particular interest)
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/02/19/waterloo-students-say-enough-decide-to-keep-their-five-bucks/ http://spinningindie.blogspot.com/2008/04/canadian-college-radio-station-ckms-one.html

Jay