The 36th Graham Hovey Lecture: Freedom of Information and the Public’s Right to Know

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Wallace House Journal.

Q&A with Anna Clark of ProPublica

The annual Graham Hovey Lecture was started by Charles Eisendrath in 1987 in honor of his predecessor Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980 to 1986, to recognize a Knight-Wallace journalist whose career exemplifies the benefits of a fellowship and whose ensuing work is at the forefront of our national conversations. This year we welcomed Anna Clark, a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow and currently a journalist with ProPublica living in Detroit. She is the author of “The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy,” which won the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is a nonfiction faculty member in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and was also a Fulbright fellow in creative writing in Kenya. Anna sat down with director Lynette Clemetson to discuss the dangers of a culture of secrecy and what it takes to push back.

Q: When I raised the idea of government transparency to you as a possible topic for your Hovey Lecture, I was concerned that you might think it was too wonky, but you were all in.

A: Freedom of information and public disclosure policies are part of our architecture for democracy and justice. I’m very passionate about it.

Q: Many people don’t know that Michigan ranks low in some areas of transparency.

A: I love this state, but I am sorry to say that we are not on the strongest side of this issue. We’re notable for being one of only two states in which the legislature and the governor’s office are exempt from public records requests.

Anna Clark returned to Wallace House not only with her infectious smile, but to offer insight into the restrictive laws preventing access to public records.

Q: It comes up for debate regularly, but the law hasn’t changed.

A: Well, interestingly, whatever party is not in power is really pro opening things up, and then once they are in power, they hesitate. (Laughs.) So yeah, people have been talking about this for years and years. And it has real stakes for the ability of reporters to do their jobs and for people to know what’s going on in their communities.

Q: For large institutions that get a lot of requests, public universities included, it can be easy to think of FOIA as a nuisance. How do we change that?

A: It’s true. Not every FOIA request is made in the name of democracy. There are frivolous requests, harassing ones, excessive ones, overly vague and broad ones that are a genuine burden to our public officials. Still, I think it is a virtue that you aren’t required to give a reason to make a request. If you’re an official who is doing the right thing, if you’re educating people, serving this state, this nation, in important ways, that should be evident in the details of the released records. Not making them available, even when you’re doing the right things, cultivates a kind of secrecy that breeds suspicion and distrust.

Q: There’s been a lot written about how a lack of government transparency exacerbated the water disaster in Flint. You document the downfalls in your book, “The Poisoned City.” You also recently wrote about a lack of transparency in a different part of the state—the ongoing wait for an external review of the 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School. How do larger government transparency issues relate to the situation in Oxford?

A: The Oxford school shooting in November 2021 was a very different kind of crisis than Flint. What’s similar is that the people in Oxford are starved for a clear, comprehensive telling of what happened, not just in the courts, which are prosecuting the shooter and his parents, but in the context of their school and the public school district that had a number of interactions with the shooter in the days and hours leading up to the shooting.

If you have a culture where the attitude is “just trust us” and you expect people to be okay with it, that trickles down to even the most locally elected, part-time, volunteer school board officials, who nonetheless are responsible for high-stakes decisions that could potentially cost people their lives. We’re creating a norm that is actually dangerous where this culture of secrecy is something we’re familiar with. That doesn’t mean it needs to be our normal.

Tabbye Chavous, Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion, Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Michigan and member of the Wallace House Executive Advisory Board, welcomes guests to the Wallace House gardens.

Q: How did the fellowship prepare you to tackle this issue of government secrecy, starting with your book on Flint?

A: Well, I was a completely fried, burned out, single, full-time freelancer working all the time and feeling increasingly depleted. Without the fellowship, I don’t know how I would have emotionally been able to sustain the work of reporting and writing the book, let alone the emotional toll. Having fun with people, sleeping more, not worrying about my bills all the time, it was so restorative. And that was essential to help me go forward to finish this book and bring it into the world.

Q: What did you gain from the university?

A: It was a powerful opportunity to come at the book with resources and tools I just never had before. I took classes in the law school on water policy and environmental justice. I took an urban planning class on metropolitan structures. Visiting cities in Brazil and South Korea gave me a new perspective to think about how cities in the U.S. are made and unmade. Not having any institutional affiliation or much money when I came to the fellowship, I never had access to archives like that. Suddenly, I got this university email address and all the resources of the campus libraries, including the library at the U-M’s Flint campus, became available.

Q: And yet, you didn’t come into the fellowship with a concrete plan for what you were going to do. That makes a lot of people nervous. What advice would you give to current or future fellows who worry about having everything mapped out?

A: Some of it is just trusting yourself. Like, if you have a Tuesday, and you don’t have any classes at all, you can trust that things will show up on that day that you will learn and grow from, including just empty space, which might be the thing you need most of all.

Q: That can be a hard case to make when people’s careers feel so perilous and the industry is under so much pressure.

A: The toll this work takes—even in the best of times, let alone in these times of scarcity and threat—is so excruciating. If people are going to do this work for years and decades, well, people are not machines. We’re not machines. You need to replenish yourself. We need journalists who are whole people, who have the internal and external resources to sustain themselves for the long run. This program is so rare for truly investing in journalists, not just in what they produce. That’s an investment in journalism for the long term, not just the news cycle.

Wallace House director Lynette Clemetson presents Anna Clark with the inscribed Hovey Bowl and her name added to the Hovey Lecture plaque.

Anna Clark is a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

The 36th Graham Hovey Lecture with ProPublica’s Anna Clark

“Government Secrecy from Flint to Oxford: Freedom of Information and the Public’s Right to Know”

September 12, 2023 | 5 p.m.
Reception following the lecture

Wallace House Gardens
620 Oxford Road, Ann Arbor

Welcome remarks by Tabbye Chavous,
Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer

Watch the video recording.

Michigan’s transparency laws are among the most restrictive in the nation. The state is one of only two that totally exempts the governor’s office and lawmakers from open records laws. With political polarization high and public trust in institutions low, a lack of transparency threatens to further weaken the social fabric. Pushing past the official version of events is essential to understanding abuses of power and exploring possible remedies.

For nearly two decades of reporting from and about Michigan, 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow and ProPublica journalist Anna Clark has covered numerous consequential stories, from the Flint water crisis to the mass shooting at Oxford High School. Join her for a discussion on the dangers of a culture of secrecy for Michigan and beyond, and what it takes to push back.

This event will not be livestreamed. A recording of the lecture will be available on our website following the event.

About the Speaker

Anna Clark is a ProPublica journalist who lives in Detroit. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, which won the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Clark’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Elle, The New Republic, Politico, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. She edited “A Detroit Anthology,” a 2015 Michigan Notable Book.

She is a nonfiction faculty member in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. She was a Fulbright fellow in creative writing in Kenya. As a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the Univeristy of Michigan, Clark explored how chronic underfunding of American cities imperils residents.

About the Graham Hovey Lecture

The annual Graham Hovey Lecture recognizes a Knight-Wallace journalist whose career exemplifies the benefits of a fellowship at the University of Michigan and whose ensuing work is at the forefront of our national conversations. The event is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980 to 1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.

 

The 35th Graham Hovey Lecture with Scott Tong, host of NPR’s “Here & Now”

“China’s Paradox: Authoritarianism and Weakness”

September 15, 2022 | 5 p.m.
Reception following lecture

Wallace House Gardens
620 Oxford Road, Ann Arbor

Welcome remarks by Tabbye Chavous,
Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer

This event is in-person.

Watch the video recording.

Wallace House announces the return of our outdoor, in-person Graham Hovey Lecture

In 2013, longtime China correspondent Scott Tong came to the Knight-Wallace Fellowships to research China’s on-again, off-again ties with the global community and how it connected with his own family. The resulting book, “A Village with My Name: A Family History of China’s Opening to the World,” examines nationalism and globalization through the stories of five generations of Tongs. China’s openness to the western world delivered great benefits to the country yet came at a devasting human price during Mao’s communist rule. In the end, this openness made it possible for Tong to become an American journalist covering China.

Today, Beijing’s increasingly antagonistic relations with Washington and many advanced economies present a great risk to its own economy and high-tech development.

Now a co-host of NPR’s Here & Now Tong returns to Wallace House to deliver the 35th Graham Hovey Lecture and discuss Beijing’s increasing authoritarianism and international aggression and what it signals for its own future and that of globalization.

About the Speaker

Scott Tong is an author and the co-host of Here & Now, NPR’s midday news magazine, produced at WBUR. Previously he spent 16 years at Marketplace as Shanghai bureau chief and senior correspondent. As a 2014 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, Tong explored comparative ecosystems, innovation and the history of China.

About the Graham Hovey Lecture

The annual Graham Hovey Lecture recognizes a Knight-Wallace journalist whose career exemplifies the benefits of a fellowship at the University of Michigan and whose ensuing work is at the forefront of our national conversations. The event is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980 to 1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.

 

This event is outdoors. Wallace House will follow the University of Michigan’s Covid protocol and guidelines for this in-person event.

Michigan Radio
Michigan Radio

Michigan Radio is a co-sponsor of this event.

Knight-Wallace Alumni Reunion Update

 

An update for all Knight-Wallace alumni

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and uncertainty in the coming months around travel, group gatherings and campus activity, we have made the tough decision to cancel our Knight-Wallace Reunion scheduled for Labor Day weekend, September 4-6, 2020.

We will look at ways to gather our Knight-Wallace family at a later time. Further updates will be posted on our website, social media channels and in our newsletter.

Now more than ever, each of us is reminded why journalists and the work they do every day matters. We look forward to a time when we can share in celebrating journalism, our support for each other and the enduring relationships of our Knight-Wallace family.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

 

Build Confidence and Skills with a Knight-Wallace Fellowship

Jennifer Guerra, Knight-Wallace alum, won a
Peabody Award for Michigan Radio’s podcast, “Believed.”

I wrapped up my Knight-Wallace Fellowship in April 2018. Thirteen months later I was at Cipriani’s in New York City, sharing the red carpet with Billy Porter and the cast of “The Good Place.” I was there with my colleagues from Michigan Radio, accepting a Peabody Award for “Believed,” our podcast about the women who brought down serial sexual predator Larry Nassar. I was the project’s executive producer and head of a newly launched podcasting unit – two roles that seemed out of reach before the fellowship.

“Believed” is the first nationally-produced podcast by Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate that covers news across the state. It is one of the most in-depth, significant projects that we’ve ever taken on as a newsroom and a station and it became the first podcast produced by a member station to be distributed by NPR. The series topped the Apple Podcast chart one week after its debut and remained in the top 30 throughout the next eight weeks. In addition, being recognized with a Peabody Award, my colleagues Lindsey Smith and Kate Wells received the Livingston Award for the podcast series. None of these honors mean as much to us as the many letters and emails we received from survivors who said they were moved by our story. They’re the reason why we did the podcast: to help people understand how Nassar was able to abuse so many girls and women for so long, and how you could have missed it, too.

The podcast was a remarkable team effort: reporters, editors, producers, fact-checkers, lawyers. You can hear each of their names in the credits, along with a list of thank yous to folks who helped out on individual episodes.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowship wasn’t mentioned in the credits, but it may as well have been. For me, the fellowship gave me the confidence and skills to advocate for myself as executive producer of this major new project. And it gave me time.

Time away from deadlines. Time to focus on craft. Time to envision the next phase of my career.

The Fellowship intentionally, methodically pushes reporters out of their comfort zones. For some, that means taking courses in rocket science or Russian literature. For others, it means taking a modern dance class and pushing past what it feels like to learn something new in a room with trained 20-year-olds who know what they are doing. The goal is to step beyond what we’re used to in the newsroom and, instead, to sit in that moment of tension and discomfort and let it affect you.

I don’t pretend to speak for everybody who’s gone through the fellowship, but I can wholeheartedly say that for me, having the opportunity to step away from the daily news grind for nine months was liberating, and career-changing.

A podcast bootcamp at Wallace House in
November 2017

When I got to the University of Michigan, I thought about stories in terms of how they fit into four-and-a-half-minute radio features because that’s what I knew how to do; it’s what got me in the fellowship in the first place. But during those nine months as a Knight-Wallace Fellow, I got to entertain the possibility of something bigger. I spent hours talking to students about campus climate and civil discourse and explored new (to me) books in an ethnographic writing class with Ruth Behar. Jeremy Levine’s class on nonprofit business strategies was particularly inspiring, and, with help from Wallace House director Lynette Clemetson, helped me hone my own plan for where I wanted to take my work. By the time I left the fellowship, I had developed a vision – and an editorial and business pitch – for how to create a podcast unit within Michigan Radio.

I took that pitch back to Michigan Radio and immediately started work on “Believed” as the executive producer. As an executive producer, I was responsible for the overall production and execution of the nine-episode podcast. Since “Believed,” I’ve been working on podcasts full time. I’m now in charge of our nascent podcast unit and am currently developing limited-run and serialized shows for the station. We just released a five-part series about identity called “Same Same Different,” featuring one of my incredibly talented fellow Fellows, Regina H. Boone. My team and I are hard at work on a narrative podcast that will drop around the 2020 election. Stay tuned!

All this is to say: Apply! I don’t know how many times in your life you’ll have the opportunity to talk anytime you want to with some of the smartest people on the planet, to spend time with journalists from all over the world, to take a minute to wonder about what stories the world really needs to hear, see and read right now… and to develop the methods and frameworks to tell them.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists at the University of Michigan are accepting applications from U.S. applicants for the 2020-21 academic year. We’re looking for accomplished journalists eager for growth and deeply committed to the future of journalism. The deadline to apply is February 1, 2020.

Learn more about the Knight-Wallace Fellowship »

Jennifer Guerra was a 2017-18 Knight-Wallace Fellow and is Executive Producer of Special Projects at Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate in Ann Arbor. 

Fellows Collaboration Leads to Coach’s Arrest

Mike Kessler ’17 and Mark Fainaru-Wada appeared on
ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” to discuss their reporting on Conrad Mainwaring
with host Ryan Smith.

It was a story that needed to be told, a story of young lives wrecked by alleged sexual abuse by a respected coach and mentor. And yet it was a story that may have never been told, were it not for the collaboration of former Knight-Wallace Fellows Mike Kessler ’17 and Greg Amante’16, who, along with investigative journalist Mark Fainaru-Wada, broke the news for ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” about Conrad Mainwaring, a 67-year-old track coach and former Olympian now accused of molesting 41 boys over the course of 44 years.

Mike was a Fellow when he first learned about the allegations against Mainwaring. It was the fall of 2016, and he was just settling in to life at Wallace House. One day he got a phone call from an acquaintance named Andrew Zenoff, who had a story he wanted to share about his late brother, Victor. In the 1970s, beginning at the age of 12, Victor had attended a boys’ sports camp for several summers at Camp Greylock in Massachusetts, where Conrad Mainwaring was a much-admired counselor. Friendly, easygoing and a natural athlete, Victor’s young life had abruptly veered off course after his time at Greylock, spiraling downward into drugs and self-destructive behavior that left his family struggling for answers. Then, just weeks before his death in a hiking accident at the age of 18, Victor revealed to his mother that he’d been sexually abused by Conrad Mainwaring. Now, decades later, Andrew Zenoff wanted the world to know what Mainwaring had done.

The problem was, Mike was unable to pursue the story. One of the conditions of the Fellowship is to agree to put aside professional work for the duration of the program. Mike remembers feeling frustrated with this, but he noted that he needed this time for himself.“The point is to step away from your primary life and not be consumed by your usual work.” Still, knowing how important Zenoff’s story was, Mike passed it along to another journalist.

Back working freelance in Los Angeles in 2018, Mike discovered that the story he had passed along had floundered. Determined to not let it slip away again, he tracked down half a dozen accusers willing to go on the record with their own accounts of sexual abuse by Mainwaring. He then approached former Knight-Wallace Fellow and ESPN producer Greg Amante ’16 with a proposal to write a magazine piece for ESPN. Mike and Greg had met in Ann Arbor in 2016. A recent graduate of the Fellowship at the time, Greg and his partner Debra had reached out to Mike and his wife when they arrived at Wallace House, and the two couples had become friends. As Mike recalls, “Greg and I got to talking about how fun it would be to work on something together.” Now, two years later, that day had come.

 

“I believe each of us enjoyed the feeling that we were not just doing something for ourselves, but also something positive for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program, perhaps laying the blueprint for future collaborations between Fellows.” – Greg Amante ’16, ESPN producer

 

With Greg’s backing as a producer, and with the support of editors Mike Drago and Chris Buckle, along with ESPN Vice President and KWF board member Kevin Merida (who presented a seminar at Wallace House during Mike’s Fellowship year), Mike teamed up with investigative journalist Mark Fainaru-Wada. What had begun as a possible twelve-week magazine piece quickly grew into an investigation that would stretch over a year. The challenges were immense. For the four decades Mainwaring was alleged to have carried on his abuse of young boys, he’d led a life of secrecy, moving from one prestigious university to another as a track coach and counselor, keeping his past and his whereabouts hidden. Working together, Mike, Greg and Mark gathered hundreds of hours of interviews from dozens of people, in an investigation that spanned two continents. In the end, 41 survivors of sexual abuse ranging in ages from 22 to 59 came forward. On June 19, 2019, Conrad Mainwaring was arrested in Los Angeles for felony sexual battery. Less than two months later, on August 1, “Outside the Lines” released the story that Mike, Greg and Mark, with the support of their colleagues at ESPN, had worked so hard to produce.

Looking back on their efforts, Greg says: “I believe each of us enjoyed the feeling that we were not just doing something for ourselves, but also something positive for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program, perhaps laying the blueprint for future collaborations between Fellows.” As for Mike, he sees their collaboration as a game-changer. “If I hadn’t met Greg, I wouldn’t have had the support of ESPN on such a massive scale.” He goes on to credit the Knight-Wallace Fellowship and his time at Wallace House. “Not to sound corny, but KWF gave me a chance to think about my career in a more holistic way, to let my mind wander and see what happens. That can also be very unnerving – that not-knowing – but I think it was a huge service to my personal and career growth.”

 

Travis Holland has been leading writing workshops at Wallace House since Fall 2008.  He is the author of “The Archivist‘s Story,” and a contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review.

Q & A with Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson and Hovey Speaker McKenzie Funk

McKenzie Funk’s seven-year old son, Wilson,
carefully inspected the Hovey Bowl presented
by Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson.

McKenzie Funk came to the Knight-Wallace Fellowship in the fall of 2011 to study the paradigm of endless economic growth and to unpack years of reporting on how governments and corporations were profiting from global warming. His 2014 book, “Windfall,” won a PEN Literary Award and was named a best book of the year by several publications. He returned to Wallace House in September to give the 34th annual Graham Hovey Lecture, and he sat down with Lynette Clemetson before the event to discuss writing on and living with the topic of climate change.

 

Clemetson: Discussions of climate change are most often presented through science or politics, or the clash between the two. What made you want to explore it through financial gain?

Funk: I wasn’t a climate change person. I grew up being interested in environmental issues because of my parents and where I grew up in Oregon. But precisely for the reasons you describe – that it’s a political fight or a scientific question – as a narrative writer, I had shied away from it.

Clemetson: And what changed that?

Funk: It was 2006, and I was living in New York trying to get my freelance career going. I got an email from the Environmental News Network, a short one or two line item about something called a sovereignty operation up in northern Canada, a group of Canadian Rangers there to defend the Northwest Passage. And I thought, “that’s really weird.” They mentioned a climate connection, and it just sounded very different from everything else I’d heard about people reacting to climate change. I called the PR people at the Canadian Forces to ask if I could go along on the next one. They were overjoyed because this was basically aimed at the United States. They wanted the world to know that the Canadian military was up there staking a claim to the melting North.

Clemetson: And what made you want to follow the thread and keep reporting?

Funk: In the background of all of this, “An Inconvenient Truth” had just come out. There was an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report coming up the next year. There was the prospect of climate legislation coming up in the Senate. It was all sort of bubbling. My story from the Canadian Forces expedition was published in Harpers in August 2007. Around the same time, the Russian government sent two mini subs down to the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole and planted a Russian flag, and suddenly people were saying, “Wait a minute, what’s going on?

Clemetson: You approach the global crisis through three broad themes – melt, drought, deluge. And your themes are starkly organized around geography.

Funk: Yes, the north versus the global south, high latitudes versus middle latitudes. It’s obvious if you pull back and think about it. The northern countries are the ones that have been wealthiest. We not only have enough in our war chest, as it were, to survive some of these impacts, but we can, in some cases, benefit. And of course, we’re the biggest historic emitters of the carbon that’s causing this problem. That remains true even as we outsource our industrial production to China. We are the end users of much of that carbon.

Clemetson: In the weeks leading up to your talk, this topic seemed to be ever present. President Trump was angling to buy Greenland. The Bahamas was devastated by a hurricane. Do you see this issue everywhere now?

Funk: Once you see it, it’s everywhere. We just moved to Oregon, to a town called Ashland, which is at the very bottom of the state, near the border of California, not so far from Paradise, California. The town is famous for its Shakespeare Festival, which brings in tourists. The economy is basically built on how nice the town is. When we arrived, it had the worst air quality in the entire country because it was ringed with wildfires. It’s something that’s happened consistently summer after summer for the last several years. This part of southern Oregon is just burning, and the smoke permeates everything. My wife Jenny had to stay to attend school but the kids and I, we dumped our bags, our boxes and left immediately, because we were wearing smoke masks out on the street. It was like this apocalyptic new reality.

Clemetson: And how did you feel about leaving?

Funk: I was very aware that we had the privilege to be able to pack up, get in our car and drive somewhere. There were many families in the region that couldn’t get away and were just suffering through the smoke. Businesses were collapsing. It was actually the first time that it became real for my life. I started to think strategically about moving north, back to Seattle, back to a place where, if you look at the impacts, it will be safer.

Clemetson: Your book paints a picture in which the people who can afford to win will win. And people who can’t will lose.

Funk: Yeah. The gaps between rich and poor, between dark and light, between black, brown and white are set to grow unless we’re really careful about this. It’s a justice story essentially. The hope is that if we can more collectively recognize the systemic issues, the more we will take steps to adapt more fairly. A lot of the justice questions have to do with how we adapt and who we adapt for. We’ve done so little in terms of making cities more resilient and in terms of thinking about how we’re going to prepare for the storms or heatwaves or fires. There is still a lot of room to make our responses more equitable.

Clemetson: Some people come to the fellowship to pursue something new. You were already deeply involved in this reporting and in writing a book when you arrived. So how did you approach your time?

Funk: There was a Great Lakes Water Wars class that was outstanding, and Andy Hoffman’s class in the Business School on how corporations were confronting climate change. A lot of the section in the book about Shell Oil was informed by that class. But I also spent a lot of time in the fellowship on seemingly unproductive things. Jenny was pregnant. We spent time hiking in the Bird Hills Nature Area, canoeing on the Huron River. And I spent a lot of time chasing my dog.

Clemetson: Chasing your dog?

Funk: We lived in the house that Matt Power had lived in when he was a Fellow. It was donut shaped, with a central staircase. It was perfect for running in circles. And I would just chase the dog around and around, for a really long time, every day. It was great. It was one of the most important things, just having time to think. To think about what I had gathered and to put it all together.

 
 

Wallace House Presents McKenzie Funk on Climate Change

The 34th Graham Hovey Lecture

“Seeing Green: The Business and Inequity of Climate Change” with McKenzie Funk ’12

September 10, 2019 | 5 p.m.

Wallace House Gardens
620 Oxford Road, Ann Arbor

Welcome remarks by Mark S. Schlissel, President, University of Michigan

Watch the discussion here »

While the issue of climate change rises in importance to the U.S. electorate, players in energy, banking and business are cashing in on the environmental crisis. McKenzie Funk, 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow, is the author of “Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming.” Join him for a critical discussion of drought, rising seas, profiteering, and the hardest truth about climate change: It’s not equally bad for everyone.

Funk writes for Harper’s, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. His 2014 book “Windfall” won a PEN Literary Award and was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Salon and Amazon.com. A National Magazine Award and Livingston Award finalist, Funk won the Oakes Prize for Environmental Journalism for his reporting on the melting Arctic and has received fellowships at the Open Society Foundations and MacDowell Colony for his forthcoming work on data and privacy.

Funk studied philosophy and comparative literature at Swarthmore College and capitalism and the paradigm of endless growth as a 2012 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. He speaks five languages and is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife and sons.

The annual Graham Hovey Lecture recognizes a Knight-Wallace journalist whose career exemplifies the benefits of a fellowship at the University of Michigan and whose ensuing work is at the forefront of national conversation. The event is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980 to 1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.

Hop Off the Hamster Wheel, Apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship

 

2017 Knight-Wallace Fellows Laurent Richard and Delece Smith-Barrow
2017 Knight-Wallace Fellows, Laurent Richard and Delece Smith-Barrow, at a multimedia workshop.

 

After producing 280 stories within three years, a busy reporter takes a Knight-Wallace Fellowship and an eight-month dive into research on under-reported education stories.

 

Education reporter and editor Delece Smith-Barrow goes to Medium to share how a Knight-Wallace Fellowship gave her the time and resources to pursue ambitious, thoughtful stories.  Taking a deep dive into how top-tier universities recruit faculty of color, Smith-Barrow writes about auditing education courses at Michigan, doing comparative research into other universities and having time to acquire new skills and enjoy life.

Read Smith-Barrow’s reflection of her fellowship year and return to the work world on Medium.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists at the University of Michigan are accepting applications from U.S. applicants for the 2019-20 academic year. We’re looking for accomplished journalists eager for growth and deeply committed to the future of journalism. The deadline to apply is February 1, 2019.

Delece Smith-Barrow is a senior editor at The Hechinger Report. As a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow, she studied how top-tier universities recruit faculty of color.

Room for Something New: Apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship

 

Anna Clark and her cohort of Fellows visit a Korean open-air museum during a Knight-Wallace news tour to South Korea.

 

How an independent journalist breaking stories on the Flint water-crisis found inspiration and turned her reporting into a book.

Need time away from daily deadlines to dig deeper and become an expert on an issue or topic? Anna Clark goes to Medium and shares how a Knight-Wallace Fellowship brought something new to her life: intellectual space.  From taking classes at the University of Michigan Law School to workshops and collaborative learning with her fellow Fellows, Clark writes “The Knight-Wallace year replenished my spirit at the time I needed it most.”

Clark wrote many of  the early stories about the lead discovered in Flint’s drinking water before coming to the program. Following the fellowship, she spent 14 months writing the first full account of the Flint water crisis. Her book, “The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy,” was published this July.

Read Clark’s reflection of her fellowship journey on Medium.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists at the University of Michigan are accepting applications from U.S. applicants for the 2019-20 academic year. We’re looking for accomplished journalists eager for growth and deeply committed to the future of journalism. The deadline to apply is February 1, 2019.

Anna Clark is an independent journalist based in Detroit and author of “The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy.” As a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow, she studied how chronic underfunding of American cities imperils its residents.