CONVERSATION WITH THE PUBLISHER

Looking past the obvious as the new year gets rolling
by Ed Wojcicki

This could be a difficult time for people who make their living with crystal balls. A year from now, who will be preparing to lead Illinois as the new governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and comptroller? Will we have a new U.S. senator, attorney general or state treasurer? Illinois voters will answer those questions in March and November, of course, but not before pundits waste a lot of ink making predictions, then explaining why they were wrong. That's the way it often goes.

Still, just for fun, this month's tearout card invites you to become the pundits and predict the winners. We won't publish the results until December. Promise.

Meanwhile, you can count on us to go beyond the conventional wisdom by covering the campaigns, and the issues they raise, in depth.

We also plan two special projects in the coming year. The first is called the Illinois Issues Regionalism Project. We will publish a series about Illinois' regions and the historical roots of cultural and political differences. It has become a cliche to talk about three regions — the city of Chicago, the suburbs and downstate — but our series will examine regionalism from a broader perspective. As a result, we hope to enhance current efforts to achieve policy cooperation for the good of the whole state.

Thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation, we also plan to collaborate with other Illinois groups to promote a more informed public dialogue about regionalism in Illinois.

Our second special project will raise the level of debate about another important subject: What happens when scientific and medical issues enter the public policy arena, and how do public officials apply (or fail to consider) ethical issues to those policies? It seems to us that advances, especially in the biological sciences, have moved forward more quickly than our ability to consider the ethical ramifications. Thanks to the Illinois Humanities Council for funding for that project.

In the right-hand column on this page, you'll find three new names added to our list of board members: Jack Knott of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Diana Nelson of the Union League Club;

and Wim Wiewel of the University of Illinois at Chicago. We welcome these people to the board, which serves in an advisory role to Peggy Boyer Long, our editor, and to me.

We're delighted that former Senate President Phil Rock has agreed to be our board chairman another year.

Illinois Issues January 1998 / 3