The Board of Regents will take its July meeting on the road to northern Michigan to strengthen the ties that bind the university to all corners of the Great Lakes state.
The northern Michigan visit will cover several days and include visits to the U-M Biological Station near Pellston, Camp Michigania at Walloon Lake and a July 21 regents meeting across the Mackinac Bridge in St. Ignace.
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Regent Paul Brown, a Democrat from northern Michigan who called St. Ignace his “ancestral home,” provided a brief preview of the July events during the board’s May 19 meeting on the UM-Dearborn campus.
“Having come to U-M from a public school in a small town in northern Michigan, I know first hand the positive impact U-M has on students,” Brown said. “As a small business owner, I’ve come to appreciate the huge impact U-M has on health care and the economy in every part of the state.”
Accompanying the board in July will be the university’s executive officers and other campus leaders. They will meet and engage with local officials, business owners, students, alumni, researchers and residents in northern lower Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.
The Biological Station has been home to scientific discovery since its founding in 1909. Under the guidance of dedicated faculty experts, students engage with ecological concepts and learn how to do science in the forests, lakes and wetlands of northern Michigan.
In this cross-disciplinary, interactive community, students, faculty and researchers from around the globe come together to learn about the natural world and seek solutions to the critical environmental challenges of our time.
Camp Michigania, which sits on the shore of Walloon Lake and is operated by U-M, is open to all U-M alumni and their families. It offers activities from boating and tennis to horseback riding and archery.
The university will host several events July 21 in St. Ignace.
The Office of Undergraduate Admissions will host an admissions event where local students and their families can get valuable information on the admissions processes for each of the university’s three campuses.
Regents will conduct university business in a public formal session scheduled for 4-5:30 p.m. at the Little Bear Arena. A community gathering at the Museum of Ojibwa Culture, also open to the public, will follow the meeting.
The northern Michigan visit is one of three university-related tours of the state taking campus leaders and students well beyond the southeast Michigan home turf for the three U-M campuses.
The Michigan football program announced earlier this year that it will restart its series of education and experiential learning opportunities for student-athletes with a trip around the state of Michigan this summer that will stretch from Detroit to the U.P.
The annual Michigan Road Scholars program, which takes a group of faculty members on a weekly bus tour of the state, also resumed its tour this year after a two-year break during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2022 tour took place May 2-6 and included stops in Lansing, Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Traverse City, Pellston, Sault Ste. Marie, Brimley, Midland, Warren and Detroit.
Sixteen faculty members toured the state, hearing directly from community members and discussing a wide range of topics, including equitable development, educational needs on tribal lands and the problem of homelessness.
