On Wednesday night at 7 p.m., less than 48 hours since KUSF was abruptly removed from the air, USF president Stephen Privett took the podium at a campus theater to address critics of the station's sale.

Presentation Theater was filled to capacity, as around 500 KUSF volunteers, USF students and faculty, free-form radio fans like musician Tommy Guerrero and community figures such as Supervisor Ross Mirakami, who represents USF's district, gathered for a tense few hours of question and answer.

The mood was set from Privett's opening remarks, where he noted that he had to leave by 9:30 p.m. to prepare for a funeral the next day. Immediately, the crowd got noisy. "This is a funeral, this is a wake!," one man shouted.

The tone varied from nasty to mournful, but never truly abusive. More than one questioner thanked the president for showing up — "taking your lumps," as a man said.

The questions seemed to be split in two directions — some attacked the decision to sell the 34-year old station, some focused on the way the sale was handled.

On Tuesday morning, at 10 a.m., the transmitter was cut without any notice to students or volunteer staff: it was a jolt to those, like music director Irwin Swirnoff, who were in the station at the time. Two of the four full-time KUSF employees, founder Steve Runyon and program director Trista Bernasconi, had been informed months ago of the sale, but were forbidden by confidentiality agreements to tell anyone.

And those confidentiality agreements were the source of much ire at the meeting. Father Privett, from the beginning, expressed forcefully that while he was bound by those legal agreements to not tell USF faculty, students or station volunteers, and perhaps would have handled things differently without those agreements, he viewed the decision as in the best interests of the school.

"Our primary responsibility is to our students," he said, "We teach broadcasting, we are not fundamentally a radio station." According to Privett, USF has 5,800 students and only 10% of the KUSF staff was made up of students.

The crowd disputed this, as they did a number of Privett's statements. The station was sold for $3.75 million to University of Southern California, in a complicated deal involving commercial radio company Entercom Communications. Classical station KDFC took over KUSF's 90.3 FM position on the radio dial.

Some queries were repeated, such as incompatibility of Jesuit values with the secret sale. Chad Heimann, a junior who frequently leads tours of campus to prospective students, told the president that he was "ashamed" to be a student. Dorothy Kidd, a media studies professor, said that the faculty hadn't released a statement yet but she didn't approve of the school's conduct.

"If this is to be a teaching institution, why was the first time I learned of this last night?," she said, to loud applause.

Details about the next stage of KUSF were not made clear, although Privett stressed that the future of the station would be as a student-run entity, leaving longtime volunteers such as David Pang, who has worked on Chinese Star Radio for 18 years, at loose ends. 

By the end of the testy two hour encounter, both Privett and the audience seemed unsatisfied. Swirnoff took the stage after Privett left, only to find the microphones turned off. It seemed a fitting ending to the evening.

As Tim Murphy, a fan of the station, noted, it seemed the biggest problem between USF and its radio station, a broadcast medium, was communication.