The Origins of UM-Flint’s Student Support Services Centers

Project Structure

The Center for Global Engagement (CGE) at their Third Annual Open House, 2025 | Courtesy of the Center for Global Engagement, University of Michigan-Flint

The project investigated the origins and trajectories of five student services centers on the UM-Flint campus — the Center for Global Engagement (CGE), the Center for Gender and Sexuality (CGS), the Intercultural Center (ICC), the Office of Educational Opportunity Initiatives (EOI), and the Student Veterans Resource Center (SVRC). Each center is dedicated to a segment of the University of Michigan-Flint community with its own needs and challenges. Staff members from each of the five centers served as project fellows and research co-investigators. The SSSC fellows helped develop the project’s research questions and led data collection and analysis. Each fellow was supported by a research assistant, all of them current or former UM-Flint students.

New Histories

To recover the unique histories of the student support services centers at UM-Flint, each center conducted oral history interviews with former and current faculty, staff, and students. SSSC fellows, drawing on their positions within the centers, synthesized interview data with their own lived experience and knowledge and also examined records from university archives and other sources. Because these histories had been left largely undocumented, the project uncovered a great deal about the push and pull factors that have shaped the structure of student support at UM-Flint, and the analysis of these varied forms of evidence draws honest conclusions about the strengths and shortcomings of that support.

The research has produced two lasting sets of deliverables.

The first is a boxed set of history booklets, one for each of the five centers and a sixth that provides an overview of the project itself. Each booklet tells the story of its center’s founding and evolution and includes a timeline of key milestones, historical photographs, and a QR code linking readers to the center’s website. Designed for new hires, students, and visitors seeking historical context, the booklets ensure that each center’s history is documented, accessible, and portable.

The second is a set of what we consider to be historical markers. Each center will receive permanent signage presenting its history in its own space so that the stories recovered by this project remain visible to the students who rely on the centers.

For the Future of the Centers

The Origins of UM-Flint’s Student Support Services Centers project showed that the people who successfully steered their centers through change often wore many hats. This is fitting, since the project’s research was done not by professional researchers but by center staff who took it upon themselves to cement their centers’ histories. The work shows the importance of helping first-time researchers become experts in their own stories– and that inclusive history is not just about the stories we tell, but also about who gets to tell them. Some centers, like the Intercultural Center and the Center for Gender and Sexuality, already had a strong sense of their histories and used the project to investigate specific historical questions; others gained insight into the challenges and triumphs of their centers for the first time. With the booklets and markers now anchoring those histories in a permanent, public form, that knowledge is transferable across generations of students, staff, and community members associated with the centers.

The Center for Gender and Sexuality (CGS) at Pride Outside, part of Campus Pride Week, June 2023 | Courtesy of the Center for Gender and Sexuality, University of Michigan-Flint