Calvin News

The State of Michigan is no stranger to clean water issues. As the Flint and Benton Harbor water crises continue to have environmental and financial impacts on their residents, the need to find an environmentally just and politically feasible solution is pressing. This kind of solution requires an interdisciplinary approach to research and community engagement, which is just the kind of work Michael Dirksen is doing with Calvin University’s Clean Water Institute. 

Professor Dirksen is a de Vries Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, part of a cohort that spends two years at Calvin University developing their teaching and shaping their work as Christian scholars. As part of this program, Professor Dirksen teaches for Calvin’s political science department, works on his own research, and participates in professional development with faculty mentors and other members of the postdoc cohort. His time at Calvin has also included a partnership with the Clean Water Institute and the City of Grand Rapids to research the state-mandated process of removing all lead service lines. 

What are lead service lines? Service lines are pipes that connect individual homes to water mains, millions of which predate the 1986 federal ban of leaded pipes in plumbing systems. Changes made to the Michigan Safe Water Drinking Act in 2018 require that the state replace all lead service lines within the next twenty years—an extremely costly and time-consuming project. Due to a lack of comprehensive records, rural communities are at a disadvantage when it comes to service line assessment, and due to a lack of adequate funding most Michigan communities struggle with how to afford this project. Dirksen’s question: is there a better way to do this? 

This summer Dirksen will work with three Calvin student researchers—Ben Enos, Micah Machiela, and Adham Rishmawi—as part of a McGregor Summer Research Fellowship to examine this question from different angles. Douglas Vander Griend, the director of the Clean Water Institute, is “very grateful to Prof. Dirksen for being our resident expert who is willing to shape the opportunity for Calvin students to partner with the City of Grand Rapids.” According to Dirksen, both sides of the partnership have reasons to invest in such a project, such as raising awareness about clean water issues in Michigan and the city’s response to them. 

A particularly important aspect of the project is the interdisciplinary approach to research and its application. A political scientist may not be the first kind of scientist that comes to mind when thinking about clean water issues, but as Vander Griend explains, “to introduce lasting solutions inevitably takes expertise from many different disciplines: business, sociology, psychology, world languages, and of course political science. Political scientists, for instance, can help navigate the role of government in building and supporting the infrastructure that is relied on to deliver clean water throughout a city.” 

Dirksen is also excited about the way this project combines the interests and skills of different fields. For example, he highlights the need for Urban Studies “to study how this impacts urban and rural communities differently.” Vander Griend added that “[the Clean Water Institute] has experts in all of these [fields] and should find various Calvin students who are passionate about making a difference with regard to clean water and skilled in these areas, and ready to learn more.” 

Dirksen’s time with the de Vries postdoc cohort continues to shape his scholarship and research efforts. While he has long believed that Christian values could inform teaching and scholarship, he “used to think there’s no way to be a Christian teacher or researcher.” His time at Calvin as a post-doctoral fellow has convinced him otherwise. Whether about research or classroom practices, he has benefited from the opportunity to think further about the role faith can play in academic work. As De Vries Institute director Matt Lundberg observes, “Michael Dirksen has thrown himself into the various opportunities offered by this fellowship. It has been especially gratifying to see how his research skills are contributing to the transformative work of Calvin’s Clean Water Institute.”