The Northern Star’s integrity and fierce independence may have reached fruition in the 1960s and ’70s, but only after Paul Street helped plant those seeds decades earlier.

As adviser to the weekly Northern Illinois, he saw the paper through World War II, when few male students remained on campus, and for a decade of change thereafter. “The veterans got back and immediately you had a different complexion in the paper,” Paul says. “It became much more cosmopolitan.”

The son of a rural Missouri minister, Paul was hired by NIU (then called Northern Illinois State Teachers College) in 1938. He taught composition and journalism, and advised the yearbook, the alumni publication … and the Northern Illinois.

He stayed 17 years, serving as an advocate for student press freedom … and teaching that freedom comes with great responsibility.

“He would take the paper and put it on the bulletin board and circle all the errors with red pencil,” remembers Tom Woodstrup, editor in the late 1940s. “Many times that was kind of embarrassing, but what he was teaching us was good journalism.”

Paul also devised an ethics manual, outlining how students were completely responsible for anything they published. It included the admonition that if the newspaper planned to publish a story critical of someone, the reporter first should face the person, explain the criticism and allow a response in the same story.

Paul encountered skirmishes along the way, usually having to do with university presidents Karl Adams and, especially, Leslie Holmes complaining about something the students had published.

“Holmes didn’t believe much in ‘Let the students publish it if it’s true,'” Paul says. “My argument was, they’re never going to learn responsible journalism if you don’t let them check things and publish honestly.”

By the 1950s, students had grown tired of the newspaper’s nondescript name. Paul helped organize a student contest in 1954 to rename the paper, with Northern Star eventually winning out over Northern State News.

Paul left DeKalb in 1955 to teach at the University of Kentucky. He stayed there until his retirement in 1975, and eventually moved back to DeKalb with his wife, Lina, who died in 1997.

Today, at age 93, Paul serves as editor of the newspaper at Oak Crest retirement center in DeKalb.