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In June, Debbie Hiott, the general manager of KUT, an NPR affiliate licensed to the University of Texas at Austin, was invited to a meeting with Anita Vangelisti, the interim dean of the Moody College of Communication, and handed two letters. One offered her the option to resign; the other summarily fired her. Hiott took the latter. “You’re going to have to fire me,” she remembered saying. “The university is going to have to be known for firing me.” Hiott—who was about to turn fifty-six, with short brown hair and a slight Texas drawl—was told by an HR representative that she would not be able to go back to the radio station where she had worked since 2019 as general manager, and to which she had, over the years, donated more than sixty thousand dollars. A longtime journalist, Hiott had previously worked as the editor of the Austin American-Statesman. She had twice served on the Pulitzer Prize jury for local reporting and was well known in Texas editorial and reportorial circles, as well as beyond: part of being the general manager of an NPR station involves sitting on the board of directors at NPR.
Her firing raised immediate questions. In the letter Hiott had accepted, Vangelisti cited planning problems with the inaugural KUT festival, which Hiott had been working on. (When reached for comment, Vangelisti’s office referred me to the university’s marketing and communications team, which declined to speak on matters of personnel.) On the docket at the festival: Adriene Mishler, the famous Austinite of Yoga with Adriene; well-known players in the barbecue scene; authors from the Texas Book Festival; and some political figures—panels of candidates running against incumbents, a panel on Austin’s controversial light-rail project, and speakers such as congressmen Greg Casar (progressive) and Michael McCall (Republican). In the termination letter, Vangelisti asserted that the “oversight and management of planning” for the festival had not been adequate. But a subsequent KUT report on the university’s charges asserted that there had been a great deal of communication involving Hiott about drone cameras to be used for security, plans for inclement weather, etc. (A university spokesperson countered to me that the outdoor portion of the festival had not been planned according to the school’s safety standards.)
The festival had been Hiott’s idea, an attempt to solidify KUT as a cultural landmark for Austin, where new people have been moving in at record speed. “We really wanted a place to kind of convene conversations about Austin,” Hiott told me. Also: KUT, the city’s flagship NPR station, and KUTX, its partner music station, had just suffered a 1.2-million-dollar hit, thanks to the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in 2025’s Great Rescission. The festival, thought Hiott, might infuse the station with some much-needed cash. “We knew the first year wasn’t likely to be a great profit or anything,” she said. “But could this be something that would create a sustainable revenue source going into the future?”
Just a few months earlier, Hiott had been part of a team that hired Neena Satija for a job at KUT. An investigative reporter and editor at both KUT and the Texas Newsroom, who previously held posts at the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Post, Satija now found herself in the strange position of handling a breaking news story involving her new boss, whom she barely knew. “I called her,” Satija said. “She was willing to speak to me on the record about her experience at the meeting when she was fired.” Satija remembered: “I told Debbie, I was like, This is weird, but I’m going to talk to you as a reporter, as a reporter talks to a source, right now.”
Satija ended up working on the story from 4pm until midnight that day. The firing marked “an extraordinary and unprecedented intervention in the governance of the public radio station that has been housed at UT for decades,” she and her colleague Andrew Weber wrote, going point by point through the termination letter’s qualms with Hiott’s festival planning. She felt it to be a tremendous story, one much larger than the attention it seemed to initially get—it was journalism, higher education, and politics, all at once. The first two themes seemed obvious. But the third—politics—was more of an impression. After all, as Hiott put it to me, “although I have absolutely no direct evidence of any political interference, I believe that the university leadership is operating under a mode where they are so afraid of getting in trouble for anything that they don’t want anything that might create political disturbance.” She recalled conversations in which Vangelisti had mentioned to her that Jim Davis, the university president, seemed surprised and unnerved by the festival—though Hiott had, she told me, emailed him multiple times asking him to participate, and had never heard back. She believed that Davis’s “m.o. is to just try to operate as under the radar as possible, so nobody turns their sights on UT.”
This language—evoking a subterranean strategy on the part of universities—is particularly notable in Texas, where the state legislature has tightened its hold on the material that public universities are permitted to teach. (Until this academic year, I taught for three years at Texas Tech, which recently mandated that faculty not teach anything relating to “gender identity” or “sexual orientation.” Given that directive, professors removed Shakespeare, Plato, and Moby Dick from their syllabuses.) Brandon Creighton, the state legislator who crafted Senate Bill 37, which focuses on combating diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, is now the chancellor at Texas Tech. In August, Texas A&M professors filed suit against their university in federal court in Houston, citing “a draconian, censorial regime” meant to “root out prohibited ideas” in class discussion. “What does it mean,” the suit asked, citing the new restrictions, “to ban ‘course content that promotes activism on issues of race or ethnicity’ at Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black university founded in 1876 within the Texas A&M University System?” (In October, the defendants, members of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that “sincere disagreements between university administration and some faculty have always occurred and always will occur. But they are no basis for legal standing.” The case is ongoing.) At the University of Houston, faculty must now sign an oath promising not to “indoctrinate” their students.
But more of the same is visible outside of Texas, on the campuses of many public universities. In North Carolina, a rule requiring all University of North Carolina professors to publicly post their syllabuses amounted to “doxing,” the American Association of University Professors wrote. In Iowa, the state legislature mandated that students at the state’s major public universities take required courses through a new “Center for Intellectual Freedom.” There, Taylor Collins, a legislator who sponsored the bill, cited extant classes such as “Printmaking and the Politics of Protest,” “The Economics of Discrimination,” and “Identity, Diversity, and the Media” as “absurd.” “Meanwhile, graduates never study the history and tradition of our republic,” he wrote, in an op-ed titled “Iowa Makes History and Civics Great Again.”
Much of that rhetoric echoes the attacks on public media. In the fact sheet the Trump administration circulated about NPR, which precipitated the collapse of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, much space was given to public radio’s coverage of sexual orientation and race-related matters. In other words: attention to such topics, whether over the radio waves or in a classroom, might now put a target on your back. If it is not expressly forbidden, it is cause for potential financial or professional penalty. This poses problems for the many radio stations based at public universities: about half of NPR stations are affiliated with colleges or universities. Many of those sit at public universities. “The long-standing partnership between public media and higher education plays an important role in delivering trusted local journalism, cultural programming, and deep community connection,” a spokesperson for NPR told me. “While governance structures may evolve, maintaining strict editorial independence remains nonnegotiable.”
Hiott, for her part, had seen something like this coming. “My plan was two and a half to three more years at KUT,” she told me, “because I had felt like there were two important things to work on there.” The first: establish a financially stable path for the station post-rescission—this was where the festival fit in. “Number two was I felt that in my two and a half to three years left, it would be good if I started to work on what might be a pathway for KUT and KUTX out of university ownership, and that was because I was concerned that at any point the legislature might go, Why the hell do we have these state schools that have NPR stations?”
Katherine Rye Jewell, a professor of history at Fitchburg State University and the author of a book on college radio, told me that many of the “distribution and production facilities” of NPR and American Public Media “rest on an infrastructure of educational radio built at colleges and universities.” According to Jewell, about 80 percent of the charter NPR signals airing the first All Things Considered broadcast, in 1971, resided within public colleges or universities. Fitting, perhaps: that first broadcast devoted thirty-seven minutes to covering an antiwar demonstration in Washington, DC. The show then shifted to a dispatch from a member station broadcasting out of Iowa State’s station, WOI in Ames, where a local barber detailed his plan to shave women’s legs for extra cash.
Stations first sprouted at colleges and universities in the years after World War I, when federal restrictions on recreational radio dissolved, and operators returned from the military, surging into schools. At land grant universities, such as the University of Delaware, extension courses could be taught over the radio. The same went at the University of Wisconsin’s beautifully named School of the Air, which taught seventy thousand students between 1931 and 1938 and lasted through the 1960s. In those middle years, before Lyndon Johnson established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in 1967, college radio stations were “campus centers of power,” Jewell told me. When public radio emerged as a national system—NPR was formed in 1970—the idea “was that there would be this capacity where it would incentivize colleges and universities to professionalize that radio,” Jewell said. “It would go to more professional staff, to people who are trained in putting out high-quality radio, rather than being student-run, and they would produce high-quality programming that would then be resyndicated through the system.”
The development of NPR stations inside college facilities took place against the backdrop of campus protests, as well as the use of federal funding to expand universities into their surrounding neighborhoods. “We’re here to be an engine of economic development,” Jewell described the transforming stations—college-kid to professionally managed—as thinking. “To give you quality content and not something that’s going to, you know, stir up the rabbit hole.”
Today, Josh Shepperd, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Communication, Media, Design, and Information, told me, he would call public media “center liberal, but mostly centrists. Everyone keeps calling it ‘left,’ but I really think it’s un-leftist in a lot of ways. Their job is to do good news, to spotlight what’s happening in the community. Some cultural programming. It does a good job.” But “the breakaway from that was actually college media, and college media had a more determined First Amendment approach.”
See, for instance, the fallout at KCSB, a student station at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where a student DJ played a song one night in 1987 titled “Makin’ Bacon.” As Jon Pareles wrote later for the New York Times, “It took a vigilant listener to pick out two lines of ‘explicit’ lyrics under loud guitars and thick English accents. That listener, tuned to a 10-watt college radio station sometime after 10 on a Saturday night, forwarded his complaint to the Parents Musical Resource Center.” Before long, the station was reprimanded by the Federal Communications Commission. “The incident shook up college and community broadcasters across the country, raising the kind of complicated, thorny issues about hindrance of the press, unequal treatment of the media, and our very freedom of speech,” a columnist at the Santa Barbara Independent remembered years afterward.
The conflicts have recurred. Hiott wondered if I had heard about what happened in 2024 at UT Tyler, in East Texas. Its NPR station—KVUT, just three years old—was shut down suddenly, Hiott said, allegedly “because there was a legislator from that region who did not like that the University of Texas Tyler was transmitting NPR.” On May 24, 2024, the station announced it would be shutting down for good. When? In an hour. At 5pm, they played the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five,” and gave the final goodbye. Neil Gray, the dean of arts and sciences, released a statement framing the choice to shut the station down as a financial decision meant to benefit students. “Reinvesting in our students is crucial for fostering the next generation of communicators, journalists, and media professionals,” as he put it. “This move aligns with our core mission.”
Sarah Morris calls it a “conscious uncoupling.” She is the general manager of KCUR, the major NPR station in Kansas City; her station is licensed to the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and has been since 1957. The two entities—the University of Missouri and KCUR—decided in 2025 to separate in a style Morris characterized as “believed to be mutually beneficial, friendly and well down the path toward independence.” (When reached for comment, the University of Missouri–Kansas City referred me to a press release that framed the breakup in similar terms, as a “positive move” allowing the university to focus on education and research and the station to navigate “an increasingly dynamic and competitive media landscape.”) It’s a “win-win,” Morris said: “Independence is ultimately going to give KCUR the ability to be more nimble and flexible as we reimagine what it means to be a public radio station in 2026. Separation also gives the university the opportunity to stop operating a department that is not part of their core business of serving students.” On the internet, avid listeners of the station pointed out that the university had, in December, given the station a month to move out of its aging building. Morris assured me that though this “definitely did come as a surprise to staff,” and “the timing appears suspicious, I’m confident the two things are not related.”
In any case, the station would now be entirely community-funded. When we spoke over the phone, Morris was aware of what she called the “Deb situation”—Hiott, the firing, the political undertones or overtones. “More separations are coming in our future and are necessary for the long-term health of the system,” she told me.
Another was happening at St. Louis Public Radio, also at the University of Missouri, on that city’s campus. “This transition will empower the station to remain a vital resource of unbiased news for the St. Louis region and beyond,” Kristin Sobolik, the university’s chancellor, said in a statement to St. Louis Public Radio. “The public media industry is evolving at a rapid pace,” the university told me in a comment. The station, meanwhile, told me that “We can say that STLPR’s mission will not change.”
Elsewhere, at KTEP, the station out of the University of Texas at El Paso, management and university administrators have negotiated the possibility of a future semi-uncoupling. In this scenario, the El Paso Community Foundation would hire and fundraise, among other things, and the university would maintain the facilities, as well as generally oversee community programming. (No one at KTEP or UT El Paso responded to my requests for an interview.)
At Penn State, trustees on the school’s finance committee voted to “wind down” the NPR affiliate, WPSU, which in 2025 had lost around a quarter of its budget and suffered layoffs, thanks to the rescission and a decrease in school funding. The committee’s decision ruled against shifting ownership to WHYY, a community station in Philadelphia, which was offering to acquire WPSU and its sister public TV station; the transfer would have involved the university paying WHYY seventeen million dollars over five years, in decreasing amounts. “The University has been cutting costs,” according to a press release Penn State shared with me, “and has sold other assets to more acutely focus on its core academic mission.” But closing WPSU, which had operated for seventy years, meant eliminating the sole public radio outlet for about half a million listeners (the station’s TV and radio broadcasts reach roughly a million and a half people). Community pushback got loud. A month after the vote, the boards of both Penn State and WHYY decided to move forward after all with the transfer of ownership—but under this arrangement, Penn State would sell WPSU to WHYY for a single dollar. For now, WPSU is in a holding pattern. “We don’t have a major benefactor anymore,” Greg Petersen, formerly the director of broadcasting at WPSU, told me. “We have to do it all on our own.”
A wave of separations, belt-tightening, and employee-loosening seems to be breaking across university-affiliated public radio stations. At WBHM, the NPR affiliate licensed to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Will Dahlberg has worked as the general manager and executive director since 2022, though he has labored in various roles for fourteen years. WBHM is a vital member of the Gulf States Newsroom, a coalition of public media stations across the South. “We punch well above our weight,” Dahlberg told me. “We attract really great talent here. We do good work, but it’s always sort of been against tremendous odds. But now it is even harder.”
In the spring, Alabama passed a law requiring all state agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in accordance with Trump’s executive order. WBHM would seemingly have to comply, even though that goes against Associated Press style—but the university was not overt in its guidance. “What they have asked in the past several months has changed multiple times,” Dahlberg said. “At one point in time, they wanted us to come up with guidelines for if somebody said ‘Gulf of Mexico’ on the air—how would we address that with the employee? They were going to ask people in our newsroom to sign a document acknowledging that they knew what the law was.” He insisted that if these were the rules, they ought to be written down. “We’re not going to fashion the news to hang ourselves,” he told me. No written directive emerged, and this fall, Dahlberg pointedly said “Gulf of Mexico” on air, then mentioned on Facebook that he had done so. “Our trust with many of our listeners and donors is going to be in jeopardy,” he said, of the moment that people hear the phrase Gulf of America. “When or if they hear that on our airwaves, they’re going to lose their minds. Our credibility is hanging in the balance because of this law. And you know, our listeners: all they’re going to hear is capitulation.” When reached, the University of Alabama told me that the newsroom operates “within the law” and that “the station’s managing editor makes decisions regarding what is reported.”
Dahlberg feels that, in general, the station has been under a microscope. A couple of years ago, a WBHM reporter had interviewed Tommy Tuberville, a US senator for Alabama, and posed a question—“Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?”—to which Tuberville replied, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.” The response had been loud and immediate. After prodding from major outlets, toward both him and his Republican colleagues, Tuberville walked back his comments by conceding that “white nationalists are racists.” “All that is to say: Tuberville does not like us,” Dahlberg continued. “I imagine the university is also very concerned about blowback for them via us.” Now Tuberville is the Republican candidate for Alabama governor. The university, Dahlberg felt, is “clearly very afraid of him getting elected and what that could mean for the institution, and they don’t want us rocking the boat in any way.” (When asked for comment on Tuberville, the university did not provide a direct answer.) This year, as WBHM celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, Dahlberg said, “it feels less like a celebration and more like a slow funeral march.”
But leaving the university for a community-supported alternative, Dahlberg said, would be almost impossible. “There’s a number of markets where I don’t think the stations can survive if they’re not a part of a university,” he told me. “Our station could not function at the level it does now if it was not part of a university system.” In September, Dahlberg announced his resignation.
“The pattern,” Jewell, the historian, said, has “turned to what’s called online ‘culture war issues,’ to create a political constituency in favor of the policy thing, which is defunding of public goods.” Public universities, public radio stations, public universities’ public radio stations. “That’s the goal.”
But Shepperd has an optimistic take. “Administrators at universities will be more empowered to exert authority over something that was a university asset, but still had this huge panoptic mechanism around it from national eyes and within its own system,” he said. “So I think we can’t predict what’s going to happen.” Some universities, he continued, “exert more control over free speech. Other universities will leave it the same, especially if they’re self-sufficient and are able to fund themselves through pledges and all those things. Other ones will actually begin to work with other universities, and these kinds of mini networks, I think, will emerge,” Shepperd told me. “And if the university supports what they would call ‘innovation’ in these areas, we might actually see some of the most innovative moments in public media in a number of decades.”
Over the summer, shortly after Hiott parted ways with the University of Texas, JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, signed into law a first-of-its-kind revision to the state’s College Campus Press Act, adding protections for journalists at public media licensed to state universities. As NPR told me, legal efforts such as these “ensure local journalists can report freely and serve their communities without interference.” Both the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Illinois Public Broadcasting Council, which represents twelve public stations—most based at universities—noted that, as news deserts are spreading, the amendment “establishes a necessary and robust ‘firewall’ between public universities and their affiliated or licensed newsrooms, which will help protect the free flow of information generally and the freedom of public media specifically.”
In Austin, KUT has carried on, under interim leadership. The station has not yet advertised for a new general manager. “I do think that my firing was a very public effort by the tower,” Hiott said, referring to UT’s famous administrative building, “to make clear that they didn’t want anyone to push back against their narrative on things.” She described “turmoil” at the university, staff members being “moved out of jobs very quietly” and required to sign NDAs. A new dean named Cary Granat had slotted into Vangelisti’s old spot as the head of the Moody College of Communication. Granat, a longtime Hollywood producer named for Cary Grant, cofounded a family-oriented entertainment company named Walden Media. He describes his latest venture, Egeria Media, as focused on “faith and family.”
Hiott has considered applying to other general-manager jobs, but doesn’t want to uproot her child, who is a sophomore in high school. So instead of pursuing full-time employment, she has been consulting with various public radio stations. When I asked her how she would advise a public radio station licensed to a public university in times like these, Hiott paused, then said, “I would advise them to be talking with their most trusted donors and advisory board members about what a future as a community licensee might look like.” It was a “defensive position,” she told me: just in case a legislature decided, say, that a state university shouldn’t have a public radio station. Such stations, Hiott told me, shouldn’t “take for granted their current position.”
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