Back in January, when her colleagues on the staff of departing governor Jim Thompson were getting new business cards printed up, Paula Wolff told an Associated Press reporter that she had put her own job search “on hold.” For 14 years Wolff had whispered into the ear of power in Springfield as the head of Thompson’s program policy staff, but for the moment she was doing temp work as co-director of the transition team assembled by new governor Jim Edgar–waiting, she explained, “for lightning to strike.”
The facts were straightforward enough.
During February, the lobbying for Wolff began to resemble a political campaign; even rookie governor Jim Edgar was reported to have made an endorsement. Wolff’s other supporters–Thompson, some U. of I. trustees, and top aides to Mayor Daley as well as the mayor himself–stepped up their lobbying of trustees and Ikenberry on her behalf, urging them to consider her in spite of the search committee’s conclusion that she was unqualified. The mayor’s involvement in particular triggered public complaints of political meddling from UIC staff and some trustees; the Sun-Times editorialized that politics was “tainting” the selection process. With neither Stukel nor Wolff able to muster a certain majority on the board, Ikenberry asked the search committee to reopen the proceedings.
On March 14, the university trustees, joined by Edgar, met in Urbana. James Stukel was named the new UIC chancellor by a vote of eight to one (with one abstention). Everyone involved made a let’s-put-this-behind-us, Jim-Stukel-will-be-a-great-chancellor speech.
The fact that such appraisals were contradictory didn’t make them inaccurate, only incomplete. As director of Thompson’s program staff, Wolff ran a shop of some three dozen policy analysts who did most of the administration’s deep thinking about health care, the environment, social services, and education. “Paula’s people” liaised with agencies, set up new programs, and wrote the bill reviews that the governor studied before signing or amending new legislation.
Wolff probably influenced more people than programs. Because of the Thompson administration’s remarkable longevity, Wolff had the chance to mentor a whole generation of public servants, many of them women. Among the latter are Sally Jackson, Edgar’s new chief of operations, and Karen Witter, until recently director of the Department of Energy and Natural Resources, who describes Wolff as “one of the most principled people in state government.” It is said by some in Springfield that you could always spot Paula people by their tendency to be irritating during meetings, but perhaps they are more fairly remembered for opting to remain in public service in disproportionate numbers compared to other Thompson veterans who went on to pimp for corporations, law firms, and big-money lobbies.
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Most local commentators describe UIC as a sibling to the downstate campus rather than its child. This description satisfies local vanities but it distorts the school’s history. UIC owes its present robustness to the protection and patronage of its downstate parent, without which it would languish as another Governors State or Chicago State. (Its institutional robustness–that is, its intellectual robustness–may be traceable to its founding generation of deans.) A family resemblance is unmistakable, if only in UIC’s research-oriented mission. Indeed, the conflicts UIC suffers at the moment are almost oedipal–its need at 25 to define itself in its own terms, to find its own way in the world and demonstrate an end to its dependence on Urbana.
