ANN ARBOR—Twenty-two University of Michigan faculty are boarding a bus and driving into 13 communities throughout the state next week as the Michigan Road Scholars tour shows how U-M is tied to the entire state.

Top: A plant official at an apple processing plant in Alpine Township, near Grand Rapids, describes the operation to U-M faculty members during the Road Scholars’ first state tour in 2000.Bottom: Workers in the plant.The goal: getting more researchers involved with the areas of the state that a majority of U-M students call home and encouraging more service to the public and research addressing the state’s needs.

“We get a cross section of people from all disciplines and one of the rules is you can’t sit next to the same person more than once, so this gets them introduced to each other as well as being a crash course on the issues the state faces,” said tour organizer David Lossing, who is associate director of government relations for U-M.

The five-day, 1,300 mile tour runs through Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Traverse City, Suttons Bay, Glen Arbor, Empire, Mackinaw City, Sault Ste. Marie and Pellston before heading back to Ann Arbor.

The tour, begun in 1999, was suspended last year due to budget constraints. It returns this year with fewer participants to reduce costs. Members of the U-M community called for its return, saying it was important to reinstate the tour to continue the linkages that have proven helpful to U-M faculty and to communities across the state.

The last time scholars took the trip in 2003, they met Keith Cooley, a U-M engineering graduate and former General Motors executive who promised the U-M scholars as they toured Detroit, “This experience will change your life.”

The tour touches on most of the major issues facing Michigan including learning about rebuilding Detroit neighborhoods, a GM plant in Flint, legislative issues at the State Capitol, a prison in Muskegon and environmental issues at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

The trip often inspires the creative thinkers who participate to embark on more projects to aid the communities they visited.

For example, several veterans of past Roads Scholars tour later returned to Detroit to participate in a Habitat for Humanity Workathon. Reynolds Farley, a veteran of the 2000 Road Scholar Trip, developed a class called, “Metropolitan Detroit: Social, Economic and Racial Trends.”

This year’s tour will be the first to visit Mackinaw City and will be updated daily with sound and written files with the tour?s first blog, which is available at:http://www.mrs-umich.blogspot.com

Here is a run-down of the stops:

• Monday, May 2: Focus: HOPE in Detroit and a community tour of Detroit. The bus then moves to Flint for a tour of the GM Truck and Bus Plant and for a reception at the U-M-Flint campus.

• Tuesday, May 3. Saginaw Public Schools visit in Saginaw followed by a tour of the State Capitol in Lansing and then on to Grand Rapids for a U-M Scholarship reception.

• Wednesday,
• Thursday, May 5. Cherry Bay Farms, Suttons Bay followed by a visit to Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Empire then Colonial Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City then a dinner in Sault Ste. Marie.

• Friday, May 6. A visit with the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Indian Tribe followed by a tour of the U-M Biological Station in Pellston before returning to Ann Arbor.

Related links:

• Previous tours
• Future tours