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The Flint Water Crisis: Overturning the Research Paradigm to Advance Science and Defend Public Welfare Marc A. Edwards* and Amy Pruden Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, United States upend the top-down academic model with a bottom-up approach (Figure 1). Our alternative model overturned the current paradigm by first listening to the public to understand the problem,4 then volunteering scientific expertise, time and our financial resources toward research needed to expose the problem. This created a public demand to find solutions as expediently as possible. To date, the Flint disaster recovery effort has amounted to nearly a half billion dollars, including $232 million from the State of Michigan, $125 million in foundation grants, and $80 million in U.S. Federal Emergency Funds. Other broader impacts include countless hours of science-based media coverage, and a national conversation on government accountability, societal priorities, ethics, and decaying water infrastructure. Flint reminds us to open our eyes to injustice and our ears to the voices of the public, and to be cognizant of limitations of our top-down funding model. An inherently unbiased funding source does not exist, and we must be prepared to exercise our academic freedom to advance the science needed to address
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hen the federal government began to dominate funding of U.S. scientific research after World War II, critics from professors to President Eisenhower warned of possible adverse consequences to academic freedom and scientific progress.1,2 Their concerns have at least partly been realized in today’s dangerously formulaic top-down funding paradigm: (1) await a solicitation promulgated by a federal agency, often with the voluntary input of external scientists; (2) compile a proposal and wait approximately six months for funding decision; (3) collect data, typically over several years, keeping results proprietary to protect intellectual property and other academic rewards; (4) disseminate knowledge via conferences and peer-review publications, with direct benefit to the public as a desired, but rarely realized, afterthought (Figure 1). At best, the public is told about the results upon completion of this cycle and rarely participates. In the case of the Flint, Michigan disaster, if we had been constrained to this top-down research model, injustices of childhood lead poisoning, vital infrastructure damage and one of the largest Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks in U.S. history may never have been brought to light. Unless academics exercise their academic freedom and occasionally break the rules that implicitly govern conduct of research, practically important and societally relevant problems such as decaying vital infrastructure and environmental injustice3 will continue to remain out of sight and out of mind. To help expose what is arguably one of the most shocking environmental crimes ever perpetrated by government agencies, it was necessary for us to © XXXX American Chemical Society
Figure 1.
urgent issues facing society today. After all, academic freedom was the original rationale for the concept of tenure,5 which is much defended but rarely exercised in academia. Still, the personal and professional peril arising from potentially offending research sponsors, cannot be understated. Exposing the Flint disaster was a high stakes financial and professional venture, with failure being the most likely outcome in such an endeavor, especially in today’s academic culture that rewards collaboration and avoids confrontation. Similar work might be less unusual and risky if federal funds were diverted from “top down” research toward “bottom up” research, especially in the environmental sciences. This would embolden research that fills Received: July 16, 2016
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b03573 Environ. Sci. Technol. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
Environmental Science & Technology
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unchampioned knowledge gaps, especially those that fall between the cracks (or against interests) of agencies or industries. Based on our experience with Flint, we offer some advice on how the above barriers might be overcome: 1. Be alert to urgent problems that directly affect the public, and consider partnering with them. 2. Be courageous in taking necessary risks, which may involve calling out bad actors, losing friends, funding networks, personal financial security and your time. Our biggest problems are often unchampioned for a reason-traditional academic rewards may never come. 3. You may need to use alternative sources of funding. Our Flint Water Study was initially funded by discretionary sources and volunteer effort. We were extremely fortunate to later benefit from crowdsourcing and donations, but this was after the fact and, even accounting for two small NSF RAPID-type Federal grants (∼$100,000), to-date we have covered only 70% of our out-of-pocket costs for the Flint effort. 4. If danger to the public is imminent, it is necessary to forego academic rewards and openly share data in realtime. This was critical to tapping the expertise of those who had access to other critical data, such as medical doctors, who helped stop harmful exposures as soon as possible. 5. Work with an ever-evolving and woefully underfunded fourth estate (i.e., the media) to engage the public and allow democracy to function. Provide the media free and unrestricted access to photos, footage, data, graphs to support their role. The media coverage in Flint had a high level of scientific accuracy, in large part because we made ourselves and supporting materials freely available. 6. Build a cohesive scientific team that puts ethics first and is ready to volunteer for a good cause. Many of our team members drew motivation from a Virginia Tech graduate class “Engineering Ethics and the Public”.4 Still, be cognizant that you are asking a great deal from your team. To date, our team has volunteered about six person-years effort on the Flint disaster. This last point is vital. As role models we should be conscientious of what we are teaching our students, explicitly and implicitly. Are we reinforcing their desire to “make the world a better place,” or are we teaching them to be willfully blind and cynical by a focus on the top down model, which unfortunately has an incentive structure that too often rewards bad behavior. Surely there is a place in every student’s undergraduate and graduate experience, where they can pursue science as a public good. Flint has also inspired a national conversation on sustaining civilization, for those who have been left behind in depopulated postindustrial cities and rural American towns. Residents there are often fighting for their lives and suffer from stark environmental injustices. Their practical scientific concerns are not being addressed via our top down model or current academic reward structureour inaction as academics could be viewed as acquiescence. We can do much more to advance the cause of our disenfranchised through science, while also reaping priceless personal rewards that transcend a modern Curriculum Vitae.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*Phone: (540) 231-7236; fax: (540) 231-7916; e-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge the original core Flint Water Study Team: Laurel Strom, Victoria Nystrom, Ni “Joyce” Zhu, Min Tang, Sid Roy, Jacob Metch, Colin Richards, Rebekah Martin, Pan Ji, Emily Garner, William Rhoads, Anurag Mantha, Christina Devine, Maggie Carolan, Kimberly Hughes, Jeff Parks, and Dongjuan Dai. Our effort was partly funded by NSF RAPID Award 1556258, a supplement to CBET Award 1336650, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Thanks also to Yanna Lambrinidou for her inspiration and codeveloping our graduate ethics curriculum through the National Science Foundation Grant EEC 1135328.
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REFERENCES
(1) Eisenhower, D. Farewell address January 17th, 1961. (2) Rich, J. National Science FoundationA Peril to American Universities. Science 1948, 107, 505. (3) Flint Water Advisory Task Force. Final Report. https://www. michigan.gov/documents/snyder/FWATF_FINAL_REPORT_ 21March2016_517805_7.pdf. (4) Lambrinidou, Y.; M., Edwards Learning to Listen: An Ethnographic Approach to Engineering Ethics Education. Paper #8224. In Proceedings of the 2013 ASEE Annual Conference. (5) 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. https://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/A6520A9D0A9A-47B3-B550-C006B5B224E7/0/1915Declaration.pdf.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b03573 Environ. Sci. Technol. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
