* * Rebuilding public trust

Flint, Michigan’s recent municipal water supply contamination resulted in a Virginia Tech Civil Engineering professor becoming a hero. But that’s hardly a happy ending. Professor Marc Edwards has no hesitancy in decrying the state of our national infrastructure and decries the death of academic freedom to call out anybody and everybody who isn’t doing their job. Sadly, he may be in the minority.

Back in 2003, he correctly identified that there was lead, a virulent neurotoxin, in the municipal water of Washington, DC. Last year he said the same thing about the water in Flint and he was correct again.

To the people of Flint, the 51-year old academic is a folk hero, confirming their worst fears while local authorities and the professors at their own University of Michigan stayed on the sidelines. So enamored were the residents of Flint towards him and his students that they spray-painted on a local landmark this succinct message: “You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!”

As proud as I am for Edwards and his merry band of Hokies who put into practice the best of Tech’s motto Ut Prosim, (That I Might Serve), it’s still a tragedy. In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Dr. Edwards said in effect that universities, municipalities, and state and federal governments have long been employing CYA (cover your posterior) approaches to dire problems. And he’d like to see it fixed.

 He complained that the metrics of academic achievement were fame, funding, and quantities of research papers published, rather than public good. Funding in particular is problematic, as universities are now increasingly forced to find funding wherever they can. Formerly, state universities got significant funding directly from their respective states. As that funding has diminished, they have been forced to go elsewhere, and elsewhere is typically corporations, many of which are loathe to fund research that may look too closely at their practices. Graduate students who work to uncover unsavory industry practices may find employment doors closed to them after graduation.

Our next problem is our failure to address the needs of an aging national infrastructure of roads, sewers, pipelines, bridges, and water systems. Consider that in the 1960s, our nation built a space program that sent a man to the moon, engaged in a significant foreign war, and constructed the bulk of the Interstate Highway System at the same time, all the while seeing impressive economic growth. We did this by extraordinary levels of taxation on our wealthiest individuals. Today, we’re still mired in the Reagan-era thinking of trickle-down economics, convinced against all evidence to the contrary that if we channel more money to the top of the wealth food chain, it will trickle down to the rest of us. It is astounding that this roundly discredited theory persists.

And our next problem is general disdain for the regulatory agencies that protect our air, water, ground, and food. Again, part of the Reagan legacy was one of the most potent political statements of the modern era, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This has had two horrible effects. The first is that the regulatory agencies have been chronically underfunded and unable to truly protect us from serious threats. Witness our own congressman who repeatedly hammers the EPA, desperate to cut their funding by at least 15% when they’re underfunded already. The second is that there are too many people today staffing government positions who bought into the Reagan poison and don’t believe in the mission or worthiness of their agencies.

In the Flint situation, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the federal EPA weren’t doing their jobs. But what professor would risk his or her position by taking them on? A professor can destroy his funding network by publicizing a single critical finding.

When the public can no longer trust our corporations, when we can no longer trust our governmental institutions, and we can no longer rely on our scientific and academic communities to call them out, we can expect one disaster after another. That’s where we are now.

Lest we think about these problems as being exotic and distant, we must remind ourselves that the nearby Radford Army Ammunition Plant is routinely, almost daily, open-burning toxic materials, dispersing them into the air not 2 miles from the Belview Elementary School, poisoning those children and their own employees to an extent we don’t even know.

Edwards teaches a course in heroism at Tech. When asked about it, he said, “You’re born heroic. I go into these animal studies, and heroism is actually in our nature. ... It’s not fun. These are gut-wrenching things. But the main thing is, ‘Do not let our educational institutions make you into something that you will be ashamed of.’” Indeed.