The storm had been brewing since the end of last year, but Andrew Tess and Tiffany Rapp never expected it to get to where they are now.
As co-managers of Student-Run Television, the two have seen their station’s charter amended to bar sexual forms of nudity, the passage of a bill that banned John Muir College senior Steve York and his “Koala TV” show from SRTV premises and the eventual shutdown of their entire station by the A.S. Council.
Locked out of the place he has known for five years, Tess’ feelings extended beyond disappointment.
“The council is supposed to represent the students, and they’re going to come to a rude awakening soon about what the students really want,” he said. “The councilmembers are closing their ears not only to us but to the whole UCSD community.”
That lack of communication has left SRTV managers, once the overseers of the channel’s programming, without a real function within the station, according to Rapp.
“Right now, I don’t feel like I have any real power,” she said. “After all, I’m currently managing something that doesn’t exist. They shut us down, and what’s frustrating to me is that the council is taking a lot of actions without a dialogue with us, the managers.”
That power struggle with the council ultimately reached its boiling point Nov. 3, when A.S. Commissioner of Student Services Maurice Junious requested via e-mail that Tess prescreen the material to air that night.
When the unscheduled show of Earl Warren College senior Daniel Watts — featuring a political interview with York — aired that night, A.S. Vice President Finance Greg Murphy, acting as Junious’ delegate, ordered that the station be shut down. A rift between Junious and the SRTV managers has been widening ever since.
“It’s a lot harder for me to defend them this week,” Junious said. “When I specifically asked Andy to do something, he did not. If everything had ran fluid on Thursday, I would have had full confidence that SRTV was fine. Andy had given me that assurance. But things weren’t taken care of the way it should have been.”
While Junious did have ultimate authority over SRTV, granted by a bill passed by the council the previous day, he did not explicitly order anything of the managers.
“In this situation, language is the most crucial thing out there,” Tess said. “The wording here was ‘please prescreen any material.’ Please is not an order and as a manager, I made a choice.”
Running unscheduled shows has been a long-running practice at SRTV, which reflects the free nature of the station, and the action taken against a single instance of this practice is indicative of the council’s sudden thirst for power, Rapp said.
“This is definitely a form of control,” she said. “It’s a difficult situation because, technically, we are an A.S. service, but [we are] a service to students. I was expecting administrative involvement of all things, but it’s been a surprise how much they’ve gotten involved with running the station, and it’s disappointing to have the council represent the students the way they have. But in the end, it’s a lack of faith in management and the people who run SRTV.”
Tess and Rapp have operated under a management style based on the principle of neutrality, irrespective of the content of shows. They say they will continue to do so.
“Personally, I hate the Koala and what it stands for,” Rapp said. “It’s been a weird situation working with them, and it was a conflict I had before. But you accept it when you’re part of a public space. You can’t always hear things you like. It’s not Tiffany’s station. It’s a station for the students.”
What the managers see as infringement on student rights has made their “last resort” a realistic possibility: bringing the council to court. Tess, who has consulted the Student Press Law Center from the beginning of the year on the station’s rights, dubbed the council’s decisions as a “big red button.”
“The council put the big red button back there when they discussed amending our charter,” he said. “Then they pushed it when they pulled the plug on us. So I’m heading down that legal path.”