The three stations share studios in the Communication Arts and Sciences Building, at the southeast corner of Wilson and Red Cedar Roads on the MSU campus in East Lansing; WKAR-TV's transmitter is located off Dobie Road near Kinawa Drive in Meridian Charter Township between East Lansing and Williamston.

WKAR-TV was the third educational TV station established in the United States and is the second-oldest still in operation, though its license history is not continuous.

It then teamed with Television Corporation of Michigan, a group with close ties to Lansing commercial radio station WILS, to propose a shared-time operation.

The proposal met with stiff opposition, even after the Federal Communications Commission granted a construction permit.

In 1970, MSU filed for the educational channel 23 in East Lansing, which was built and began broadcasting once more as WKAR-TV on September 6, 1972.

This ended the 13-year sharing of channel 10, whose facilities were sold to WILX-TV, and more than doubled the station's operating hours per week.

Shortly before the move, the station debuted Off the Record, a long-running Michigan political program still in production today.

On April 14, 1952, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved to end a years-long freeze on the assignment of new TV stations.

[3] The commission granted the construction permit on October 15, 1952; college officials began planning to build a transmitter site at Okemos to connect with the existing television studio.

[7] While the 1,034-foot (315 m) tower was completed and the antenna raised to the top,[8] college officials announced their plans for WKAR-TV to build on the Michigan State television operation, which had produced more than 750 programs since 1951, including the relocation of the studios from the electrical engineering building into a series of Quonset huts along Kalamazoo Street on the campus and the acquisition of mobile units for outside broadcasting.

[13] WKAR-TV was the third noncommercial educational TV station in the United States, following KUHT in Houston and KTHE in Los Angeles (which soon folded).

[18][15] In 1957, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) revised restrictions on college football telecasts, at the behest of several state legislatures, to permit the telecast of home games on a noncommercial basis by "the home college's institutionally owned educational television station", with WKAR-TV as a potential beneficiary.

[19] The station took advantage and carried a game between the Notre Dame and Michigan State from Spartan Stadium on November 9 of that year.

[20] That same year, WKAR-TV began airing educational television programs for seven Lansing elementary schools, where fifth-graders received art, science, and music lessons.

[24] In pursuing channel 10, Michigan State College officials fretted about their status on an increasingly second-class UHF band.

[45] MSU emerged victorious when the circuit judge lifted his temporary restraining order,[46] and the FCC denied last appeals made by Jackson Broadcasting and Telecasting.

WMSB was the first station to greet viewers with a dedication program from its East Lansing studios, but high winds caused the microwave link to be unreliable and the picture to be described as "jumpy" by the Jackson Citizen Patriot.

[21] The school system in Battle Creek became a formal member of Classroom 10 in 1961, paying 60 cents a student to defray the costs of the educational broadcasts.

[53] The programs produced in East Lansing by WMSB were distributed by Michigan Classroom Television, an independent entity from MSU, for use in areas outside Mid-Michigan, including Saginaw, Marquette, and Grand Rapids.

Page began to lobby Wharton and the MSU administration to return the university's television broadcasting to full-time status.

[59] Shortly before the move to channel 23, Michigan State debuted a new public affairs program, which consisted of a panel discussion of the week's events and an interview with a newsmaker.

[68] A 1980 budget crisis at MSU curtailed much of the station's local program production, though Off the Record and several other shows remained on channel 23's schedule.

It ceased airing in 1992 after Trost was forced into personal bankruptcy after a jury determined he had defamed a maker of deer scents.

[72] On January 15, 2004—the 50th anniversary of WKAR-TV, timed to coincide with the moment its transmitter turned on the first day on air[64]: 24 —the station began broadcasting a digital signal on channel 55.

[17][73] In 2007, the station began offering four subchannels on its digital signal, among them Create and World, which subsumed the previously cable-only KAR2 and KAR3 services.

[78] On January 11, 2016, WKAR-TV announced that it would partner with WTVS in Detroit to launch a 24-hour children's television service to be carried by both stations,[79] which was replaced by the new PBS Kids channel in 2017.