Food poisoning lawyer Bill Marler calls Washington State University’s bluff over Michael Pollan cancellation threat

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Here’s an excerpt from the NY Times story by Patricia Cohen:

Controversial author Michael Pollan

Among the things that Bill Marler feels passionately about are Washington State University (his alma mater), food safety and negotiation. So after he heard about a dustup on campus over the cancellation of a program requiring all freshmen to read the same book — Michael Pollan’s double-fisted examination of agribusiness, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — he stepped in to resolve it.

This month administrators said budget cuts forced them to suspend this year’s program, but some faculty members and students were skeptical. They suspected that the decision had less to do with money than with pressure from the state’s powerful agribusiness interests.

The nearly "uncommon" reading.

After all, they pointed out, the university had already purchased 4,000 copies of the book (published by Penguin Press), which links the agriculture industry to obesity, food poisoning and environmental damage.

So Mr. Marler, a personal-injury lawyer who has received a Distinguished Alumnus award and served on the university’s Board of Regents for six years, figured that he would find out if money was really the issue by offering to pay the program’s estimated $40,000 shortfall. The result is that the common reading is back on.

“I’m glad to see it wasn’t politics, it was finances,” Mr. Marler, who has frequently sued food companies, said from his office in Seattle.

Mr. Marler said a friend e-mailed him an article from The Spokesman-Review newspaper of Spokane, Wash., which reported that “a member of the Board of Regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.”

Reached at his office, Elson S. Floyd, the university president, dismissed what he called rumors, saying that no one from the board spoke to him before this part of the freshmen’s orientation was canceled. The decision was made after the state cut the university’s budget by $54 million over two years, Dr. Floyd said. A crucial aspect of the reading program involves bringing the author to campus, he added, and the university could not afford to do that.

Other people involved told a somewhat different version of events. Patricia Freitag Ericsson, an English professor and member of the university’s Common Reading Implementation Committee, wrote in an e-mail message that the panel was told that the program was suspended, and that “a substantial part of the reason was because of political pressure growing from the book choice.”

“This statement was made by someone who was involved in the controversy at the administrative level,” she added. “There were questions asked about academic freedom, and most people attending the meeting were upset.”…” 

Read the whole NT Times story here.

And here’s an excerpt from a more detailed report on Grist.com:

“EVEN MORE UPDATES: Now that the NYT has weighed in, I guess it’s fair to say this story broke through to the mainstream. I’ll spare you all the assurances from WSU that this Bill Marler-funded resolution proves that the driving issue really was financial. In my view, Marler graciously provided a fig-leaf to a university administration that was very much caught by surprise that anyone would have ever noticed what they’d done. There remain too many bits of evidence that the book was originally canceled due to political pressure. Indeed, Spokane’s newspaper evenclaims to have identified the culprit:

That political pressure apparently was brought to bear by a member of the board of regents, Harold Cochran, who disapproved of the author’s characterization of agribusiness. Cochran owns and operates a 5,500-acre farm near Walla Walla, is a founding stockholder in the Bank of the West in Walla Walla and is a member of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers.

There likely wasn’t a Big Ag conspiracy (althought what does this say about Walla Walla?). It was all caused by few people who thought they could fly under the radar and keep an irritating book out of circulation on campus. But reality, or rather the Internet, intervened. I leave you with none other than Pollan himself to put this whole scandale littéraire into perspective. Said he to the NYT:

Holding a common reading program “at a land grant university is especially important because we are in the midst of this national conversation about the future of food and agriculture, and land grant universities have a critical role to play,” he said. “That’s why this really mattered to me.

UPDATE 5/27 9PM EST: It’s official WSU announces that it “will reinstate the original plan for distribution of its Common Reading book, ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ as a result of a private contribution to support the program.” Nothing like a little help from your friends.

UPDATE 5/27 8PM EST: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that WSU has taken up food safety lawyer and alumnus Bill Marler on his offer to pay the costs of bringing Michael Pollan to the WSU campus to speak about Omnivore’s Dilemma. Marler, on his own blog, also claims that all 4,000 books will be distributed as planned.

So much for academic freedom—at least where books about our industrial food system are concerned. It’s hard to believe this really happened, but according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the president at Washington State University canceled a “common-reading” for all incoming freshman of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma due to political pressure budgetary constraints. Really:

An explanation on the university’s Web site is vague and implies the withdrawal of the book was due to budget constraints. But some people on the campus say that the university, which has a prominent agriculture college, bowed to pressure from agribusiness interests.

They also question the budget argument, noting that the university has already purchased more than 4,000 copies of the book. …

Many people connected with the common-reading program were evasive; either they did not return calls or insisted that they could not talk about the issue.

And while there were reports that Pollan was proving too expensive to bring as a speaker (thus implying his greed was a factor in the cancellation), others observed that there was never any money budgeted for events—the cost of the books were the only expense. In other words, all the money that was to be spent HAD BEEN spent (on the books).

And if you still have any doubts that it was political, I offer this passage:

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Patricia Freitag Ericsson, an assistant professor of rhetoric and professional writing who also sits on the implementation committee, said that in a meeting on May 4, an administrator told panel members that the common-reading program would be canceled, in large part because of political pressure arising from this year’s book choice. Members of the committee were upset. She says the committee was also told that potential books for next year’s common-reading program would be sent to the provost, who would make the selection.

Letting the provost dictate such details is an excellent idea. Best to let a grown-up, preferably one with a firm sense of which “political pressures” to bend to, decide what books are safe to read. University faculty do have an awful tendency toward a dangerous intellectual curiousity coupled with a suspicious openness to new ideas. We certainly wouldn’t want young minds to be overthrown by “revelations” about the world they inhabit….”

Read the full Grist.com story here.

 

Author Michael Pollan

We first learned of this story on The Complete Patient blog where it was mentioned at the end of this post. The story has also been well-covered on the Salt Spring News Wed. May 27th, 2009. Nothing in the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail yet though.

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Tags: Bill Marler, censorship, Michael Pollan