Alumni
Stentor—a person having a loud voice
At 120 years old, the Stentor is one of the oldest college newspapers in the Midwest. It’s currently 12 or more pages long, with color photos on the front and back pages. Some 1,300 copies of the large-scale broadsheet are printed each week—including 200 distributed in town in an effort to forge stronger ties to the community.
But just a few years ago the newspaper was barely limping along at about six pages. Some weeks there was no paper at all.
Such ups and downs punctuate the Stentor’s long history of innovation and agitation, which has been affected by finances, student interest, and outside forces, like national trends and events.
But that’s no longer acceptable, says Dean of Students Beth Tyler, who, along with President Stephen Schutt, has been instrumental in reviving both the Stentor and the College radio station. “The problem with both the radio station and the newspaper is that they’re student organizations—but unlike other organizations, we don’t really want them to ebb with the ebb of student interest,” Tyler says.
“I’m interested in making sure we remember that when you talk about the media, there is a benefit to the greater college community that goes beyond that of a standard student organization—the value goes far beyond that for the actual students who participate.”
President Schutt agrees: “I believe very strongly that a high-quality student newspaper and student radio station are vital organs of communication at a college, and provide valuable opportunities for student growth and experience.”
But in the late 1990s there was a lot of in-fighting among the staff, and money was scarce, recalls Susan Kunkle ’01, a former arts and entertainment editor. “There was a point where I think we were our own worst enemy," she says. The editors also spent a lot of time “fighting to show the administration that what we were doing was more than just a club activity—it was job. We wanted better equipment, we wanted to be given course credit.”
“Some of the time when there was no paper we only had enough [material] for maybe two pages,” says former editor Joe Stupar ’03, who recalls going through four editors and as many advisers during his tenure. “We did whatever we could to make it work. If we did not have enough articles, we would put in pictures, or create ads to fill the space.
“We were trying to improve things, but I think we were mainly struggling to keep going.”
The paper was a mess when Tyler came to the College in 2002. “One kid [currently] on the staff here was looking at the college with his parents and his mom said, ‘I don’t think you want to go there, because the paper is so bad,’” says current editor Will Pittinos ’06, who also arrived in 2002. “There was no consistency in publication. One week it would be published, and then it would go away for two or three weeks. There were stories on the front page that didn’t even have quotes in them.”
He was part of a group of freshmen with high school newspaper experience that wanted to improve the paper but felt thwarted by its management. So they requested and received funding from the General Assembly to start a new newspaper. “From the administrative side we were all little chagrined—that at an institution this small, a new organization would compete with the paper that has been around [almost] since the College opened,” Tyler says.
She sat down both groups in the fall of 2003 and “helped them pull off a bloodless coup,” as she puts it. All but one member of the old staff resigned.
The new editors got to work buying new computers, updating software, and rewriting the constitution. It was decided that the dean of faculty and the advisory board, which included a student representative, would select editors. A team of faculty advisors was recruited to help students with writing, reporting, and design skills, and gain access to different campus departments. “It’s 500 percent better now,” says Assistant Professor of English Davis Schneiderman, who became faculty adviser in spring 2002 and served for a year.
Indeed, some 50 students are now involved with the paper, which will move to the Mohr Student Center from an office in Johnson B—where it moved last fall after a pipe burst in the ceiling of the old digs in the basement of Commons. Since last year, regular contributors have been paid $10 to $15 per story, and editors also receive a small stipend (this year it was $80 per semester) that comes from advertising revenue the students generate themselves.
Much of the credit is due to the work of the newspaper’s current adviser, journalist Fern Schumer Chapman, a Lake Bluff resident and author of the 2001 memoir Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust – A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past. She was hired three years ago to oversee the newspaper, and it’s her only job on campus. “Our goal is that each newspaper should be better than the previous week’s,” she says. “For the most part we’ve been pretty successful at that. But we’re constantly trying to improve.”