In a Crisis-Stricken City, a Public University Searches for Its Role

“Right there,” says David Yeoman, a senior at the University of Michigan at Flint. “That’s me.”

He points to a small, inky rectangle on a map: a parcel on the upper east side of Flint, where Mr. Yeoman, 38, lives with his wife and two children, ages 8 and 9.

About a year and a half ago, Mr. Yeoman’s kids started getting rashes after bathing. City officials reassured residents that the water was safe. But when General Motors said that Flint’s water was corroding parts in the local engine factory, in October 2014, the family started stocking bottled water and taking the kids to bathe at Mr. Yeoman’s mother-in-law’s house, in Genesee Township, outside the city.

Then, in September 2015, researchers announced that they had found lead in the city’s water supply and in blood samples at the local pediatric hospital. The story of Flint’s water crisis has since become a national story about decline, neglect, and, now, atonement. How did it take so long for state and local governments to acknowledge that an entire city was being poisoned? What, if anything, can be done to reverse the damage?

Those questions face the Flint campus along with the rest of the city. The regional university, with just over 8,000 students, grew by more than 30 percent in the decade before the water crisis, as workers laid off by an auto industry in free fall sought retraining. This winter, as it stands at ground zero of a public-health disaster, enrollment has dipped. Its leaders have called in communications experts from the university’s flagship campus, in Ann Arbor, to help ease the fears of current and future students.

The Flint campus also faces fallout of a different kind. The bad water has eroded not only the city’s physical infrastructure but also its trust in public institutions. Some activists see the university as yet another complacent bureaucracy that failed to protect them.

After all, it was not a Michigan researcher but an outsider — Marc Edwards, a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech — who challenged state authorities and exposed the lead problem. The University of Michigan has since pledged $100,000 in grants to researchers who want to study the problems in Flint, but faculty members across the system doubt if that’s enough to yield any real breakthroughs.

UM-Flint wants to help. As a regional university that markets itself as a place for “engaged learning” and public service, it has long considered itself loyal to the people of Flint and the surrounding counties. Now, as the city scrambles to recover from a devastating blow, campus leaders have been challenged to prove exactly what that loyalty is worth.

Town-gown relations are typically framed by ordinary questions about land use, business partnerships, and dealing with rowdy students. The Flint campus now faces an extraordinary one: What role should a public university play when its city plunges into crisis?

The big picture of Flint’s lead problem came to the university in fragments.

In January, city officials sent 240 image files to Martin M. Kaufman, an environmental hydrologist who is chairman of the department of earth and resource science. Together the images formed a map from 1984 showing all the land parcels in the city and information about the pipes that brought them water.

Some of the service lines were simply marked for their width, with no information about what kind of metal they were made of. But others were coded with handwritten letters: “C” for copper, “G” for galvanized steel or iron, “L” for lead, and “L-C” for lead and copper.

Over the phone in late January, Mr. Kaufman’s voice was hoarse from doing interviews. “We’ve got the hottest data set in the world right now,” he said. “We have the data that indicates where the lead pipes are in the city.”

Mr. Kaufman, a thin man with a slight beard and dark, narrow eyes, said he was as surprised as anyone to learn that there was lead in Flint’s drinking water. He said the Flint campus at the time did not have the right instruments to analyze water for lead, and besides, his specialties are groundwater and storm water, not pipes. “I wish I had that expertise — I would have sounded the alarm earlier,” he said. “But I don’t.”

Instead it was the Virginia Tech researchers who sounded the alarm: Improperly treated water from the Flint River, drawn into the water supply in recent years to save money, was leaching lead out of the pipes and into the veins of the city and its people. Afterward, the city’s public-works department contracted with the Flint campus to combine the pipe data with other information to make an up-to-date, digital map of the city that officials could use to figure out which homes and businesses have been at the highest risk for lead exposure.

There are limits to the project. About a third of the service lines were unlabeled. And the map was drafted two years before the federal government banned lead pipes and plumbing fixtures, meaning that there might be additional lead components unaccounted for. “It’s incomplete,” said Mr. Kaufman, “but it’s a start.” He plans to apply for $1.5 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to expand on the work.

Much of the grunt work of assembling those puzzle pieces fell to a group of students working in the university’s geographic-information-systems center, a fluorescent-lit room down the hall from Mr. Kaufman’s office.

One of those students was David Yeoman, the 38-year-old senior. He went to community college years ago, but for most of the past decade he worked as the manager of a party-supply store. He still appears relatively young, with moist eyes and a faint strip of facial hair from his lower lip to his chin, but he wears the staid countenance and business-casual affect of a man of responsibility. He and his wife bought their home, a modest, single-family unit with a green lantern next to the front door, about eight years ago, for $12,000. They also bought the house next door, for $7,000, intending to rent it out — an idea they abandoned after a tenant “screwed over the wrong person” and somebody sprayed the house with bullets.

As Flint slipped deeper into economic depression, Mr. Yeoman decided to go back to school for his bachelor’s degree. He enrolled at UM-Flint and took a part-time job at a funeral home. He also bought several foreclosed properties on his block for $100 each, hoping to build a “buffer” between his home and the bad elements in his neighborhood. He hopes to build a community garden there someday.

“There’s still a lot of rundown houses and vacant properties that are blighted and in rough shape,” he said, “but the people who are left care about the neighborhood.”

On a Thursday afternoon in late January, he surveyed the parcel map on a classmate’s computer and found his properties, rendered on the map as featureless rectangles in a seemingly endless grid. The lines for his vacant lots were marked “L-C,” for lead and copper. The line into his home was not marked. Still, the picture looked grim.

“Now that I know there’s lead-copper on my block,” he said, “I’m going to assume that my house has lead.”

Grim assumptions are not necessarily good science. Then again, the analysis that Michigan authorities used to dismiss the concerns of Flint residents for a year and a half was not good science, either.

These days, many residents tend to trust their grim assumptions more than any reassurances from the powers that be, and UM-Flint students are no exception.

The water fountains in campus buildings now have blue stickers with the UM-Flint seal and the words “Filtered water.” Although the university has occasionally reported elevated levels of lead and other chemicals at certain locations around the campus, it has repeatedly assured students that it has proactively installed filters, and that there is nothing to fear.

That’s no comfort to Valerie Forrest, a senior nursing student here. Last year, when she was living in a downtown dormitory, Ms. Forrest had acne breakouts after showering. She has since moved to the suburb of Holly, about 20 miles south of Flint. Friends drive all the way out to her new place, sometimes three times a week, to shower. She refuses to drink the campus water, stickers be damned. She doesn’t drink the water at downtown restaurants, either.

This is a problem for Susan E. Borrego, chancellor of UM-Flint. Ms. Borrego took the job in 2014, just as the crisis was emerging. She doesn’t fear the water, but she does fear the fear of the water. Specifically, she worries about what prospective students might be thinking.

The Flint campus, though smaller than the university’s Ann Arbor flagship or its outpost in Dearborn, has been growing. In 2005 there were 6,422 students enrolled here; in 2015 there were 8,470. The growth of the student body has figured prominently in the city’s efforts to revitalize downtown Flint. Officials are banking on UM-Flint’s ability to recruit more foreign students who will plow cash into the local economy. The poisoned water could pose a problem.

“We were in a room today,” she said, “for several hours, talking about, How are we going to message? How are we going to start working on yield?”

Ms. Borrego, a gregarious woman with short brown hair and glasses, was sitting at a wine bar a few blocks from the campus with a full glass of red and an empty glass of tap water. “I’m actually working with the community to get people to come downtown to the restaurants,” she said, “because there’s a crisis here that the whip on the fear is bigger than it needs to be.”

The university says it has been monitoring water quality on the campus for more than a year. Dangerous lead levels have been reported in one older building. UM-Flint began replacing drinking fountains campuswide with filtered stations over the course of the year, according to Marjory Raymer, a spokeswoman, and by the fall it had accounted for all of the sources that people were likely to drink from. Most campus sinks still give unfiltered water, she said, but they have been marked with warnings to use the water for handwashing only.

“The simple, straightforward message,” said Ms. Borrego, “is that we’ve taken every precaution to keep students safe on campus, and will continue to do so.”

But the chancellor doesn’t want to just play defense. Ms. Borrego is determined not to let enrollment shrink over the stigma of tainted water. That could mean embarking on the somewhat awkward project of spinning Flint’s water crisis for recruiting purposes. Maybe it could help UM-Flint double down on its “service learning” brand, something that other universities have done in the wake of high-profile disasters.

“Universities all over the country send their students on urban semesters or urban rotations,” she mused. “Students here are going to get to be part of the solution. Part of figuring out, What do we do next in Flint?”

What do we do next? That’s the $100,000 question.

Mark S. Schlissel, president of the University of Michigan, last month announced that he would disburse that amount in seed funding to faculty members on any of the three campuses who wanted to study solutions to the water crisis.

And so the research cavalry descended on Flint. More than 100 academics from across the Michigan system gathered in a lecture hall in early February to talk about what they had to offer.

Lawrence Reynolds, president of a local children’s-health center, set the tone by reminding the assembled faculty members that this was no smash-and-grab research opportunity. “If you have a publication deadline, we don’t care,” he said. “We want to see that research answering a problem that will move things forward.”

In a breakout session, a group of public-health and public-policy experts spitballed research ideas.

How might the bad publicity affect economic development in the city? How might those economic implications affect homeowners?

How might water policies and child-health policies intersect with the economic fragility of households?

How are media narratives shaping the “horizons and potential” of local residents?

How do we reorient the discourse in a way that “inspires people to think beyond the enclosed realm of both current policy and some kind of economic parameter of what’s possible”?

What are our “deliverables”?

How do we find a “non-narcissistic way” to have this discussion?

Questions, questions.

The University of Michigan is hardly the only public institution on the case. Gov. Rick Snyder has committed $28 million to rebuilding Flint’s infrastructure. President Obama has pledged $80 million in federal aid. Michigan’s state-supported academics may be sincere in their desire to help, but they are also relatively underfunded.

“Quite frankly, $100,000 is a drop in the bucket,” said one professor from Ann Arbor.

“Can I note that there was broad agreement, through nodding, around the table?” said another, who had volunteered to take the minutes.

The room chuckled. Permission granted.

“Finally,” someone said, “a ‘deliverable’!”

A public regional university can try to jump-start a local economy. It can encourage its faculty members to ask questions and seek answers. But it can also do the thing it does most of all: teach.

UM-Flint is offering an eight-part course this semester on the Flint water crisis, which students can take for credit and residents can attend free. The university has arranged for expert panels to discuss the historical context, the science, the politics, the economics. University officials who organized the course have emphasized the importance of providing a place where anybody — students, Flint residents, people from surrounding suburbs — can gather in an educational setting to get reliable information and ask questions.

David Yeoman sat in the first row at a recent session on water safety. He listened as Jennifer S. Carrera, an assistant professor of sociology and environmental science at Michigan State University, explained what lead does to the human body. It’s a neurotoxin that interferes with the ability to send oxygen to vital organs, she said. It causes learning delays, mood disorders, hearing loss, pain, fatigue, high blood pressure, memory loss, and other ailments. It goes into your blood and lurks in the bones before returning to the bloodstream, sometimes years later.

Mr. Yeoman has resolved not to lose sleep over whether he and his family were drinking lead-heavy water during the months before they switched to bottled water. If they did, he knows he might not have an answer for years, if ever. “I’m not going to freak out now,” he said. “There may be a time that I do, but not now.”

He doesn’t think he can leave Flint. His wife’s family is here, and it’s not exactly a seller’s market for real estate. He inspected the exposed segment of pipe that carries water into his house. The pipe itself does not appear to be lead, but the fitting where it connects to his water meter is. He sent samples of his tap water to the city to be tested for lead and copper. If it comes back positive, he’s going to pray that his tax refund will cover the cost of replacing the service line.

In the meantime, Mr. Yeoman is trying to stay focused on finishing his coursework. If all goes according to plan, he will graduate in May with a degree in environmental science and resource planning. He says he wants to be an urban planner for Flint. The city could use the help.