By: Ashton Burton, Managing Editor
At several locations across the Brooklyn Campus, there are television monitors mounted to the wall. There’s one on the third floor, right in front of Enrollment Services in the Metcalfe Building. There’s another one on the second floor of the Sloan Building. And there’s a third all around the cafeteria area known as Freshens.
For LIU-TV, those monitors offered the chance to share its productions to the campus community. But LIU- TV has yet to go on air this semester.
The problem began over the summer after a minor explosion had apparently been set off in the basement of the LLC Building during a construction- related mishap, which caused many classes and clubs to be relocated.
LIU-TV was also impacted because its production equipment and meeting space were located there. Rather than finding another location to move their supplies to though, the university has chosen to just let LIU-TV remain off-air this semester.
With the loss of LIU-TV’s production room and the University’s lack of concern to replace it, LIU-TV has not been able to create any work so far for the 2019-2020 school year. “We’re kinda down because the LLC Building has been down, so we haven’t had a space,” said LIU-TV General Manager Scotty Williams. “I thought that it was only going to take a couple of weeks to get a new workspace, but that didn’t happen. But we have so many empty spaces in the school at any given time, so if we just picked one for about an hour, we would be fine.
Entering the semester, the group had plans to capture footage of day-to-day student activities, filming games on campus and producing trailers for student theatrical productions. But the lack of a workspace has held them back from doing so.
Not only has this lack of space affected the work of LIU-TV, but it has affected their membership as well. Williams stated that “it’s very hard to have concrete members because we have no meeting space”. The GM adds though that “once we get our space up and running, we should have an easier time with that.”
When contacted about the current state of LIU-TV, Acting Dean of Students Janel Owens and Student Government Association President Moshe Rafailov did not respond.
Third-year biochemistry major, Stephanie Judkins has noticed LIU-TV’s disappearance. “Every time I turn on the TV and I turn to the LIU-TV channel, there’s never anything on. It’s just kind of blank or a black screen,” she said. Although hopes to be back next semester,
there is no clear timeline for its return.