PEMBINA, N.D.

University of North Dakota President Kendall Baker has offered his university to Grand Forks.

The idea is to allow the residents of the city to live at UND while they get their homes and livelihoods in order. As evacuees move back home, others can move into the university.

UND is a city within a city and has housing and infrastructure to support 4,000 to 5,000 people. At the western edge of Grand Forks, it’s relatively high and was one of the last parts of the city to go under. It’s relatively undamaged, Baker said Wednesday.

‘‘We want to be the hub, the core for the reconstruction of Grand Forks,’’ he said from his office at the UND plant services building.

‘‘We can provide housing, we can provide space for business and industry, we can provide day care for their children,’’ Baker said. ‘‘We want to use the university in that effort.’’

This will obviously be a big change for the university and its students, who left frantically after Baker’s decision to close the university for the school year.

‘‘We’re going to do everything we can possibly do to facilitate that transition,’’ Baker said. ‘‘The campus will be cleaned, and the residence halls will be fresh.’’

Baker praised his students, thousands of whom turned out to fight the flood.

‘‘I want to congratulate them and commend them on the effort they made to save their city,’’ said Baker who worked along with students at dikes and at Sandbag Central, he said.

‘‘The stories that I heard from people about our students were really something to behold,’’ Baker said. ‘‘I was on the dike with our students the night we tried to save Smith Hall; we had to pull those students off the dike.’’

Smith Hall, along with other buildings on campus, suffered damage despite all the work.

The Medical Science North building suffered the most damage on campus, taking 4- to 6-feet of water, Baker said.

‘‘We’ll reconstruct it,’’ he said.

The Hughes Fine Arts building on the west bank of the English Coulee was surrounded by water, but water reached only the lower-level storage area. Baker said no musical instruments or equipment were damaged.

Baker’s home, also next to the coulee, has water in the basement.

Baker said he and others ‘literally built a bunker’’ to save a transformer that provides electricity to most of the campus.

Faculty and staff saved books and records at the Chester Fritz Library and the Law Library.

‘‘We worked so hard to save things so we could preserve our university,’’ Baker said.

The English Coulee was dropping Wednesday. The bridge over it was passable for the first time since the city was evacuated. A day earlier, Baker said, it took a large military truck to get him across.

‘‘That’s what enabled us as a community to take the valiant stand they did,’’ Baker said.