WRBC is the college radio station of Bates College, located in Lewiston, Maine and at 91.5 MHz on the FM dial. The WRBC studio is located in the basement of 31 Frye Street across from the student coffee house, The Ronj. The WRBC board of directors publish an online music blog called The Monkey. WRBC is currently ranked by The Princeton Review as the 12th best college radio station in the United States and Canada, making it the top college radio in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. WRBC was also the Maine headquarters for College Radio Day in October 2012. History Originally started as an AM station, radio at Bates began with the efforts of rhetoric professor and debate coach Brooks Quimby. A radio enthusiast, he ran his own amateur station, and wrote the FCC in 1942 asking to build a 10-watt radio station on campus. Though his efforts to secure a license were unsuccessful, he did not give up. "Bates On The Air", a weekly program produced by his Radio Class from studios in Chase Hall, debuted in 1945 on WCOU in Lewiston. This program was also occasionally carried on stations in Portland and Augusta, and continued into the mid-1950s. 1950s In the spring of 1951, interest in a campus radio station resurfaced among the student body. A group of students met to organize and plan for the construction. A professor in the Physics department volunteered to build the transmitting equipment for a carrier current AM station. That fall an organizational meeting drew 150 people. The station, calling itself WVBC (Voice of Bates College), signed on at 9:00 p.m. on Friday evening, November 2, 1951. Broadcasting from the Chase Hall studios, it initially featured a two-hour schedule of programming six nights a week. The signal could be heard at 640 kHz AM in all campus buildings, except the infirmary. Despite its beginning, technical problems plagued the station in the 1950s. Because of these problems Bates College again applied to the FCC for a 10-watt station on the then relatively new FM band. The staff suggested several possible call signs for the new station to the FCC including WVBC, WBCR, WRBC, WVOB, and WRJR (after the first initials of staff members Ron Cook, Joan Williams Lepper, Ray Hendess, and Robert Kalisher). The FCC decided on the call letters WRJR. The new station took to the public airwaves at