Editor’s Note: This column was first published on April 22, 1964 and was the last column written by Roger Ebert as editor-in-chief of The Daily Illini.
Twenty-four hours after this column appears, The Daily Illini will have a new set of editors. The old names will continue to appear in the masthead for a few days, but the transfer of power will have taken place, at least in the minds of our staff members. And so I thought I would use this space today to set down some of the things which have occurred to me during a year of editing this newspaper.
The Daily Illini is one of the most remarkable college papers in the nation. It is one of the oldest, and one of the very best. For most of its 93 years, it has been one of the pace-setters in demonstrating that complete student editorial freedom can be maintained in a campus newspaper. It is one of the basic duties of each year’s staff to protect and extend The Daily Illini’s editorial freedom, so that this campus will never have to admit that its paper is controlled by the administration, the college of journalism, or any official source.
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Perhaps this campus should be reminded more often that the freedom enjoyed by The Daily Illini is not very common elsewhere. The vast majority of the nation’s 1,200 college newspapers are the mouthpieces of their administrations. Most of the others have various systems of “supervision” which guarantee that nothing embarrassing to the university will appear in the newspaper. Such a system of “supervision” is now in operation at four state colleges in Illinois–but The Daily Illini, which is financially independent and self-supporting, is not affected.
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This newspaper is part of a fraternity of free college papers. The fraternity is very small. Yet its members read like a list of America’s great college publications. Included are The Michigan Daily, The Harvard Crimson, The Cornell Daily Sun, The Daily Texan, The Colorado Daily, The Wisconsin Daily Cardinal, and not too many others.
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On the campus, the reputation of The Daily Illini varies from year to year. I suppose most readers are rather fond of the paper, as they might be fond of an eccentric uncle or of Lar (American First) Daly. I doubt if many readers realize the amount of time, energy and lost sleep that goes into the production of the DI.
There is, I believe, not an activity on this campus which demands more of its participants during the entire school year than The Daily Illini does. There are at least a dozen members of our staff whose jobs require a minimum of 30 hours of work a week. For most of these editors, 30 hours is just a start. During the State Tournament week, for example, the sports editor rarely sees the outside world. And, since most of the hard physical work on The Daily Illini is done between the hours of 3 p.m. and 3 a.m. the next morning, the time spent here by staff members is a considerable sacrifice.
Yet there have been editors nuts enough to go the route for 93 years, and I am convinced there will always be a sufficient supply. I think most of us spend our time working on the newspaper because we consider it to be one of the few outlets on campus for real, meaningful activity. Many of the other undergraduate activities have the quality of crayon-and-construction-paper games compared to The Daily Illini, we believe. Some undergraduate activities seem to maintain their momentum simply because social status and Greek activity points demand it. I cannot imagine, for example, how Star Course finds top leadership potential from a list of candidates who all had to start out as ushers for a year. Yet the potential is there–because the “ushers” were piling up their activity points without complaint.
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Against a backdrop of gally decorated bulletin boards and cute little Burma-shave signs on the quadrangle, the production of The Daily Illini takes on additional meaning. We try to exercise influence within the educational community at the University of Illinois, and we try to provide a consistent voice in defense of the student in such areas as housing and discipline. If we do not always get the names of all the IUSA major publicity chairmen into the paper, perhaps that is better than if The Daily Illini were like those sickening college papers which get ALL the names in–but never print anything of substance or controversy. That, at least, is our philosophy.
In a way, The Daily Illini creates and maintains an image of the campus. We put together a daily mosaic of events, opinions and facts in such a way that, over the period of a year or two, a regular reader can sense our general approach to this confused but dynamic campus. This year, we have been criticized for “undermining student confidence in their disciplinary system,” and indeed the student unrest on this score does seem larger than in past years. Yet it is hard to determine how much of the change is our “fault,” and how much is simply reflected in our pages.
Such a reflection is an important part of the way we operate the newspaper. This year, The Daily Illini has printed many more letters to the editor than in any other recent year. One estimate is that three times as many letters appeared this year as last year. By printing such a volume of mail (much of it, possibly, not very valuable to all readers) we have kept a door open to the campus. They are given the space and opportunity to express their opinions–and in this way, an open forum actually does develop.
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These have been random, disorganized thoughts. I doubt if I will be able to think objectively about The Daily Illini for several months. I can remember a night two years ago, when we were all standing around The Daily Illini offices waiting to learn the names of the new editors for the 1962-63 school editor. The outgoing editor that year was Wade Freeman, and about 11 p.m. he appeared with a sign on his shirt reading, “Has-Been.”
We all told Freeman he’d be back every afternoon to see how things were going. “Not me,” he said. “Four years of this place is enough. Now I need to recover.”
I think maybe Freeman was right. The Daily Illini is a tremendous opportunity to join in the mainstream of the University. It is an outstanding example of free student journalism. It is, perhaps more than anything, exciting and challenging every minute of every day.
But eventually you get the feeling that you’ve been around long enough, and that other people are waiting in the wings with ideas that could make The Daily Illini move in directions you didn’t even think of.
I’ve got that feeling. It’s been fun. But now it’s time to be a has-been, like Freeman and Karen Lucas and 90 other DI editors. And being a has-been might be fun, too.
Tune in tomorrow for the change in program.
