Opinion: UMKC has failed to treat KCUR with the respect it deserves.

  UMKC has made an absolute clown of itself with its most recent blunders regarding a Kansas City treasure. From cutting the station off, to kicking them out in the cold, it’s clear that the administration doesn’t care about one of the city’s critical news outlets.

  In December, UMKC announced they would be vacating the building that KCUR and its sister station Classical KC have called home for 41 years due to “numerous challenges keeping the building in good repair.” They gave both stations and all the other tenants one month to move their entire operations. 

“As you are aware,it has been UMKC’s plan for some years to decommission the 4825 Troost building,” said Troy Bruun the Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration and Megan Gonzalez the Vice Chancellor for Human Resources in an open letter to the tenants of the old headquarters. “It is an older building with many of the typical problems that affect older buildings, including an HVAC system that has reached the end of its life span and numerous challenges in keeping the building in good repair”

  If UMKC had been planning this move for years, why was it so sloppy? Three days before Christmas they suddenly announced the entire building had one month to vacate. There was no backup plan, and despite the school saying they would hire movers, the stations required “dozens” of volunteers to complete the move. 

  In a statement to KCUR last year, Chancellor Mauli Agrawal said “KCUR is a bedrock institution in the Kansas City region and beyond”

  Agrawal is right, KCUR doesn’t just provide entertainment to the city, but it’s one of the only major locally owned and operated news institutions covering the entire city. Almost every other major news organization is owned by national corporate conglomerates and operated locally. I don’t mean to cast dispersions on the other news providers, but no one has the same investment in the community that KCUR has. 

  The fact that both stations continued to stay on the air despite their entire staff being forced to work from home is laudable, but they shouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place. 

  The school’s administration was quick to release a statement celebrating the identification of a new headquarters on the plaza. What UMKC also failed to mention is the temporary operations at 4747 Troost and what a mess that is.

 They even go so far as to describe the new space as an “upgrade.” This is something you could ask the staff’s opinions on… if they were allowed to comment on the situation.

  So, it’s critically important that KCUR continues to exist, and this move challenges that… So what? It’s not like any other catastrophic changes have occurred in the last year to place the organization in jeopardy, right? 

  Right…

  In August President Trump signed legislation slashing the funding of the Public Broadcasting System. This led to the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the destabilization of every publicly owned media franchise in the country, including KCUR. 

  Just seven months earlier, in February of last year, the station and UMKC announced they would be terminating their relationship.  Rumors as to why this happened swirled, but no official answer was given. 

  The idea of splitting the station from the school isn’t terrible: while operating independently KCUR might have to worry less about stepping on the school’s toes, and while the editorial and journalistic staff have always functioned separately from the school, this move could help solidify that.But it could also put the station in danger.

  A major change in ownership is a traumatic event for any company. It’s reasonable to assume that even if the change of ownership goes perfectly, the company is going to be unstable for the foreseeable future. Throw in a major loss of funding? That instability begins to look like an intense wobble. Navigating a change of headquarters with virtually no support is an unreasonable ask from a school that owns half the neighborhood its main campus resides in. 

  The official statement given by KCUR says that the decision to vacate 4825 Troost has nothing to do with the dissolution of their relationship, or with the defunding of PBS… But how could it not be about those things?

  UMKC separating itself from these stations is a message, one that has been clearly reinforced throughout the year. Despite what they insist, UMKC doesn’t care about KCUR, its staff or its community. 

  The situation isn’t isolated either. The same thing is happening across the state, with St. Louis Public Radio also being separated from the University of Missouri system in a similar timeframe. 

  It’s hard to believe this sudden lack of concern for the stations is not connected to the current presidential administration’s opinions on what makes for quality programming. Without any real explanation as to why the UM system has decided to cut its ties though, we can’t really know why this is happening.

All we can do is examine the oafish handling of the Kansas City stations. Judging from that, it sure seems like the administration would prefer there to just be less competent, critical and unbiased news rooms in the world. One doesn’t have to wonder too long why that might be.

[email protected]