A Conversation with Our Readers                                                       

Where will Stukel lead the U of I?

Readers:

You don't have to be an Illinois political insider or a graduate of the University of Illinois to appreciate our interviews with two prominent leaders: Stanley O. Ikenberry, the outgoing U of I president; and James Stukel, who replaces Ikenberry August 1 after serving as chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Our projects editor, Donald Sevener, interviewed both men at length and asked each of them to reflect on what a university should be doing in the 1990s. It is noteworthy that Stukel believes a university — and hence, the U of I — should be doing more to address current problems in our society.

These interviews begin on page 28.

By the way, "projects editor" is a new title for Sevener. After he served as one of our associate editors for two years, we created the new position so that Illinois Issues can be in a better position to do what many journalistic publications do not have the resources to do: spend several months analyzing a complex issue by talking to many knowledgeable people and poring over documents.

The opposite of this is what journalists often call "one-source" articles or "he-said, she-said" articles. In such quickly written pieces, journalists rely primarily on interviews for all information and merely report what people say. The danger of such reporting is that the "truth" often cannot be reported simply by asking people, usually high-ranking officials, what they think. He may say one thing and she may say something else, but neither may be telling the whole story. The background and context are often missing.

Illinois Issues has always been known for going beyond such remarks. But with a new projects editor in place, we'll be able to do so on a broader range of topics, and more systematically.

Elsewhere in this issue, we hope to wow you a bit with our spread on migrant workers, which begins on page 10. As Editor Peggy Boyer Long explains in a sidebar to the story, writer Stephen Beaven and photographer Judy Lutz Spencer went to a migrant camp in Princeville (near Peoria) and spent the night to get a better feeling for how the people live.

Something was so obvious in last month's issue that I forgot to mention it: You may have noticed that the paper we now use inside the magazine is a glossy enamel stock — a higher quality paper to improve the publication of art and type. We got a good deal from our new printer, the Printing Center of Springfield, after carefully scrutinizing more than a dozen bids this spring. I hope you like the look.

Finally, I want to point out that we have formally changed from having a Chicago column every other month to rotating a column in the same space to reflect three key regions of the state. The three columnists who have been added to our masthead as contributing editors are: Madeleine Doubek, the political editor of the Daily Herald, who will write "A View from the Suburbs"; Patrick E. Gauen of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who will write "A View from Metro East"; and James Ylisela Jr., the consulting editor of The Chicago Reporter and a journalism teacher at Northwestern University in Evanston, who will write "A View from Chicago." *