In the fall of 1959, three students at Siena College wanted a radio station and built one themselves, wiring carrier-current transmitters into the faculty and student residences by hand. WVCR, short for Voice of Collegiate Radio, went on air the following spring on 89.1 MHz with a Class D license, broadcasting six to twelve hours a day out of a tower on campus. The response from students and faculty was strong enough that Siena formally adopted the station as its own.
The frequency did not stay put. In 1970, public broadcaster WMHT secured a full-power construction permit for 89.1 MHz and paid WVCR to clear the spot. WMHT helped the college station relocate to 88.3 MHz in time for the 1971-72 school year, and the move came with an upgrade to Class A status and a 360-watt signal broadcasting from Pinnacle Mountain in New Scotland, New York, a stronger footprint than the original campus tower could ever have managed.
Today the station broadcasts as 88.3 The Saint under the tagline "We Play Anything," a variety hits format that mirrors the freewheeling spirit of the original 1959 setup. That same spirit carried into talk programming when senior Brian Dorrian revived the station's spoken-word side in 2012, building out student-run shows covering everything from Catholic Social Teaching to the supernatural. As general manager Darrin Scott Kibbey put it at the time, the idea was to let students express their thoughts on virtually any topic, with roughly eighty percent of the talk lineup produced entirely by students.
More than six decades after three students wired their dorm rooms for sound, WVCR still runs on the same basic premise: give students the microphone and let them decide what belongs on the air.