A pipe burst does not discriminate.
Hot/cold. Low-pressure/high-pressure. These are simplistic, predictable mechanics within nature. Their behavior can be measured as they spread through an environment.
Entropy: chaos, the primordial disorder that follows such mechanisms, is not so predictable. The sciences at Oakland University display that beautiful principle.
Strolling around Pyrale House, nothing seems immediately atypical. Unaffected by the loss of hot water, Pyrale House stands a flickering candle on an altar surrounded by the smoke of its extinguished brethren.
Certain niche psychology labs require the use of external facilities, such as Animal Psychology, have not been spared from the madness. Animals will have a much more challenging time achieving their highest self at the once peaceful—now stagnant—grounds of OU.
The campus itself is sporadic, to say so politely. The student body walks about, generally poorly informed and with minimal idea of how they are affected.
The Human Health Building is also generally unaffected by the water pipe bedlam. Juniors and seniors in the Nursing Program who were available for comment insisted that aside from the core-eds being online—which one even scoffed was a bonus, nothing in their schedule has changed.
An amateur looking at this situation may call this the story: operations could be conducted largely as normal. This is a glaring mistake.
The true story lies in the fact that all those most affected by the pipe were not readily available for any comment. Information on the closure is also scant. Communication seems to be sent to faculty and students on a need-to-know basis. This has resulted in a terrible culture.
One can easily find gossip about what’s going on in the absence of hot water. Forgotten esoteric techniques being used to heat dorms. Dissections being performed while using space heaters to keep the space remotely livable. What is harder to nail down is anyone suffering from maladies caused by the pipe maintenance.
Just as many of the students with cold housing decided to go home for the holidays a month early, many of the labs and sciences have gone off the radar. Not only did the air freeze with the snowstorm, but life on campus itself reached absolute zero.
In the halls with water access, one might stick around to commiserate about how dead campus is and how a university can offer such third world living conditions at a one-percent price tag. Instead, it is like a true commuter college. Students escape the classroom like celebrities fleeing paparazzi—only into much less glamorous vehicles.
The roads between the labs are torn apart by construction, snow, and ice.
In a roundabout way, that feels like the overall state of the sciences at Oakland University in this administrative chaos. Much as Pyrale and the Human Health Building still get heat; some enclaves of science persist in the tundra.
Professor Todd Shackleford still sits in his office in Pyrale listening to Dream Theatre, reading two books at the same time while managing a team of graduate students and research assistants investigating the mechanisms behind psychological selection pressures in human mating.
Medical students and nursing students are still gallivanting about sleep deprived as if they own the place. It’s as if those most affected by the failure simply disappeared into thin air, like water evaporating shortly after bursting from a pipe.
This story was written by a journalist with intense connections to a handful of labs with a 24-hour window to understand how the sciences were coping with the shutdown from the water main break.
Short answer: they didn’t.
In the absence of heat during the coldest Cyber Monday in recent Michigan history, students decided that warmth is more comfortable than the science that costs them thousands of dollars a semester—at an institution that seems more interested in parlaying with the press than the student body.