Ted Schmiedeler

By Iris Eisenman

Illustration by Truman Dickerson

Ted Schmiedeler, CC ’26, fills every moment.

Transported halfway across the country from Chicagoland, within weeks of setting foot on campus Ted threw himself into the historic corner of Lerner Hall occupied by WKCR, Columbia’s radio station. Eager to get involved, Ted flew through the licensing process and soon began staying overnight to program the radio show Transfigured Night from one to five in the morning. But instead of dozing off between mic breaks, he took advantage of the time he had to explore the library, discovering station history and great music. Ted learned from radio veterans as well as the notes, posters, and stories held in the cases and sleeves of the roughly forty thousand records and CDs preserved on WKCR’s shelves. WKCR has been more than just a radio station for Ted: It is his “bottomless pit of energy.” It was his fanatic passion for radio that led to WKCR leadership telling freshman-year Ted that one day he was going to be Station Manager, the leading executive board position. 

Ted recalls a strong sense of insularity at WKCR his freshman year, with generally only music-scene adjacent groups like Postcrypt or WBAR knowing about the station’s activities. With the Gaza Solidarity Encampments in April 2024, Ted’s influence quickly exploded. He had been appointed Station Manager that year, and the small WKCR News and Arts department (“NARTS” to station personnel) stepped up as the voice of the student zeitgeist during the historic protests. Regular programming at the station was halted for 24-hour coverage of the protests, including the occupation of Hamilton Hall and the shocking arrests of the student journalists’ own peers. Ted had been warned that the more of himself he poured into the station, the more that could suffer in other parts of his life. The Encampments brought that warning into fruition. Ted and the NARTS team worked tirelessly around the clock, sleeping at the radio station and working for sometimes thirty hours straight. It was a scramble to hold everything together, “like getting a car across the finish line, held together by duct tape [while] the wheels were coming off” in some exhausting race. 

To understand the chaos of campus, people worldwide tuned into WKCR 89.9 FM. Multiple major news outlets praised the NARTS team, but for many people, Ted was the face of that work. Ted was handed a protestor’s phone, their mother in Montana calling who felt she “really [had] a close relationship with him” after listening to him report for days on end. That “imbalance of information” he feels sometimes disturbs him; his large digital footprint means that people he meets seem to know far more about him than he does about them. To this day, the occasional mutual friend or classmate will bring up the positive impact of Ted’s work, and in these moments, Ted usually thinks, “Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. But I have no idea who you are.”

Today, WKCR does not function as the all-consuming beast in his life that it did, but he continuously finds new interests in the station. Ted and I most often cross paths in the WKCR archive, where around seven thousand historic reel-to-reel tapes, the fragile predecessors of vinyl recordings, are tucked away. Once a week, our small group of archivists unlock Ted’s final zone of mystery, the only place he couldn’t access in his freshman year: the tapes room. After cataloging recordings of music, interviews, and past broadcasts, we leave covered in a thin residue of dust.

While there are around three hundred licensed programmers who contribute to the music, news, and sports broadcasting that listeners hear on air, the archiving community is more tight-knit. These connections are another component of WKCR being Ted’s “everything club.” The archive is a home within the larger station community, and as his time in college goes on, community becomes more and more what he wants to focus on. Passing into a role as an elder on campus, he knows that he can help as a guide through the confusion of our current campus life. “There’s no clarity on what the rules are … You want to do the right thing, but if you do the right thing, like any sort of act of civil disobedience, you’re opening yourself up to throw your entire future away.”

The wealth of opportunities and the legacy of WCKR’s work opens up connections across space and time. Listening to Spotify alone in your room is a completely solitary experience, but tuning into a radio station connects you across even halfway around the world to a real person choosing songs, adjusting the output volume, and speaking into a microphone on the airwaves. Many alumni reached out during the Encampments coverage, sharing their own stories of past years’ WKCR crews and their experiences. One alumnus told Ted, “I’ve never met any of these people, but I know them because they’re at WKCR, and I know what it was like to be at WKCR, so I know the type of people that are there.” A large part of this is because, in Ted’s mind, WKCR remains essentially the same over time. Leadership turns over quickly. Knowledge is passed on year after year. I often ask Ted, when sifting through documents in reel-to-reel tape boxes, about documents from past station members. Some of the scrawled handwriting we’ve learned to decipher belongs to recurring figures of which he only knows small bites of history. 

Ted is not nervous to say that he knows he, too, will pass into obscurity. In his mind, becoming a name on a piece of paper is the only thing to do. There is nothing essentially unique or special about his tenure as Student Life Director, Station Manager, or Head Archivist, he insists. Ted was hesitant to claim the label of “Campus Character” when I pitched this interview to him. It didn’t matter that he was one of the reporters who took the task of supporting student voices in a time of need. The work was what mattered, it just happened to be him.

The best thing about radio for Ted, however, is that the work will never disappear. In the final moments of our interview, Ted had me imagine: If the two of us got in a supersonic spaceship right now and traveled way far out into the stars, we could tune to 89.9 FM and hear his very first show at WKCR. Out there, reverberating to the ends of the universe, the entire history of radio lives in space. Even if the memory of Ted at WKCR or at Columbia fades, the work will always be there, and the community persists beyond the individual memory. As Ted says, “FM waves never die.”