Special Guests Electrify Reunion

04/11/2006

Nearly 100 alumni, students, and guests gathered on April 8 to discuss “Journalism in Crisis,” to honor Phil and Kathy Power for their $500,000 renovation gift, and to revel in the Student Publications Building once more before its renovation.

A panel consisting of Jonathan Miller and Christopher Carey, moderated by Sara Fitzgerald, challenged an audience of 60 alumni and students to fight for bravely addressing important issues, despite pressures to simply report what officials say. Jonathan Miller was ’72 Daily Features Editor, recently with the London Sunday Times, and how a book author. Chris Carey is a business reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and one of 12 U.S. journalists in the 2005-06 class of Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan. Sara Fitzgerald was ’73 Daily Editor, a Washington Post reporter, education consultant, and book author. Miller excoriated lack of coverage of scandals in Iraq and Washington, saying, “There’s a lot at stake here. This democracy — does it have any future at all? If we don’t use our skills as communicators, we should be ashamed.”

Carey shared Miller’s dark assessment, but offered one argument for optimism: “In business, people talk about the invisible hand of the market. If there is a void, something will fill it.”

Later in the day, the entire assemblage honored Phil Power, ’60 Daily Editorial Director and ’69-’73 Board for Student Publications member, and his wife Kathy for their recent $500,000 gift in support of the building renovation. Power told the group that he joined the Daily in 1959 because it had the reputation of attracting the smartest students on campus, and it still does.

The next reunion will be scheduled in the fall of 2007, a year and a half from now, celebrating the reopening of the renovated Student Publications Building in the 75th anniversary year of its original 1932 opening.