Living the Bill of Rights: Professor Clem Work Sets a High Bar for Journalists and Citizens

Clem Work, a professor of journalism at The University of Montana and one of the greatest journalists I have ever met, is retiring. He was honored last week at the school's annual Dean Stone Night. I sent a version of this tribute to be part of the celebration.

Clem Work found me on Twitter a year or so ago, and my first thought was, "I wonder if the inventors of Twitter ever took a class with Clem Work."

The scrappy social media platform that is credited with helping spark and then fan the flames of government protests around the world has the spirit of the scrappy University of Montana journalism professor written all over it. If you have ever been fortunate enough to sit in one of his classrooms, you will know why.

Clem Work could make you feel that the pamphleteer proselytizing door-to-door about an obscure religion is an American hero worth putting on a dollar bill. That laws making it harder to see inside the halls of government are more dangerous than the specter of foreign submarines circling somewhere in the Caribbean. That words are precious and should not be wasted any more than they should be locked away.

I learned much from every instructor at UM, but Clem Work taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson: that being a good journalist was an extension of being a good citizen. And that being a good citizen meant not just enjoying the freedoms that come with living in a country as great as ours but that it meant guarding against threats to those freedoms. Threats from government overreach. Threats from bigotry and xenophobia, misogyny and classism, fear and hate. Above all, Clem taught us to guard against laziness, especially our own.

Early in my career, I found it hard to live up to his high standard. There are deadlines to meet, man. Can I really be expected to all but argue a case before the Supreme Court just to get access to a single sheet of paper from a city manager's desk drawer?

But I also found that I when I pushed, when I fought for those high ideals, when I lived the Bill of Rights, I got results.

During my first internship at The Mexico Ledger, I stood up at a school board meeting and asked why the board had voted in secret to bar a girl with a disability from becoming the student body president of her high school. The superintendent of schools pulled me aside after the meeting and said, "You're like a puppy dog. Everybody thought it was cute when you showed up, but now you're pissing on everybody's shoes."

I should have called Clem Work and thanked him.

It's Clem's spirit that continues to inspire me to push for greater transparency in medical oversight and to chafe against federal laws being used to block local access to public records. And it's not just me.

Kathleen McLaughlin has been living up to Clem's high ideal under often-difficult circumstances in China. A few weeks ago, everyone decided to start writing about problems with worker safety in the factories that make our favorite Apple products. For years, though, McLaughlin has been living up to Clem's high ideal by documenting abuses in factories.

Karen Coates has traveled the world with Clem's spirit, giving a voice to those who might otherwise go unheard. To read her book about Cambodia is to live for a while in a country that is still reeling from genocide and war.

Thomas Nybo, one of the bravest journalists I know, has taken up Clem's challenge to show the value of a free press by making the best use of press freedom. If you find a spot on the map where everyone else is fleeing, you'll find Nybo snapping photos, capturing video, and, above all, treating people in crisis with deference and compassion.

And then there's Kyle Wood, a huge journalistic talent who quit the business early in his career to live the civic life that Clem showed us was possible. He prosecutes war criminals in the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Netherlands.

"When I was a senior, Clem gave me my first real legal assignment. It consisted of helping him create a compilation of answers to commonly asked questions about Montana's open meetings law," Wood told me. "It was my first taste of work that is now my career, and I have Clem to thank for that."

Clem, you inspired all of us with soft -poken insistence in our collective power to expose wrongs and then right them. You were never heavy handed or doctrinaire. You were always generous with your thinking and your expertise. You were and are a gift to journalism and to civic life.

That's why I hope that even in retirement I can count on seeing you continue to push for more vigilance, more digging, more active participation in our democracy locally and nationally.

Every time I see a 140-character call for a wall to come down, I will think of you.

Photo credit: Nathan Gibbs via Flickr