Creator: John Cantlon, Jeff Charnley

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Date: March 27, 2000

Format: Text/pdf

Original Format: Word Document

Resource Identifier: Cantlon.pdf

Collection Number: UA 3

Language: English

Rights Management: Educational use only, no other permissions given. Copyright to this resource is held by Michigan State University and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the University Archives & Historical Collections, Michigan State University.

Contributing Institution: University Archives & Historical Collections

Relation: Sesquicentennial Oral History Project

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections

Text File: Download

Transcript: JOHN CANTLON

March 27, 2000

Jeff Charnley,
interviewer




Charnley: Today is Monday, the 27th of March, in the year of 2000. We’re in East Lansing. I am Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. John Cantlon, for the MSU [Michigan State University] Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial of the institution to be celebrated or commemorated in the year 2005.
As you can see, we’re tape-recording this oral history today, Dr. Cantlon. Do you give us permission to do that for this interview?

Cantlon: I do.

Charnley: I’d like to start first with a little bit about your own educational and professional background. Where did you do your undergraduate work? Where did you grow up?

Cantlon: I grew up in Sparks, Nevada. Did my primary school in the public schools of Sparks. Graduated from Sparks High in 1939 and started at the University of Nevada. I completed three years, but by then the war was under way. So I joined the Navy in 1942 and spent four years with the Navy. Then came out and took roughly a year to get things worked out, and I got back to the University of Nevada and finished in 1947.
Then I went to Rutgers University, where I did my doctorate. I had enough accumulated work that I finished my doctorate in 1950. I then went to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and was on the faculty there in the Department of Botany for two years.
Then I took a leave of absence to conduct the ecology of the Arctic Slope of Alaska. That was an Air Force project, and at the time very hush-hush, because what it was engaged in was getting the ground truth that would determine the quality control on the camera that would go into the U-2 spy plane. They were doing the optics for that camera, the big folded optical axis. We didn’t know that at the time. It was very hush-hush. Our project then lasted, and I went to Boston University for a year, worked in the Arctic.
Then while I was there, Michigan State University recruited me. They had recruited me earlier and I couldn’t come because I had committed to go to Boston University. So I came here in 1954.

Charnley: Could you talk a little bit about your war experience, in terms of what were your main duties in the Navy? Where did you serve?

Cantlon: I was a Navy flier. For the first two years of my service, I instructed, first instructed pilots in how to instrument fly, and then in the last part of my instructor experience, I taught fighter pilots. Then I joined the fleet, and ended up in a VF-37. Air Group 37 was the whole group, but the fighter squadron was VF, and another one was VT. It was a joint torpedo fighter-bomber squadron, and I was a fighter pilot with F-6Fs.
We were supposed to go aboard the USS Sangamon [phonetic], which had gotten badly damaged in retreating from--let’s see, I don’t know whether it was Saipan, one of the island battles in the late part of the war. The Sangamon was so badly damaged, we couldn’t go aboard, so we ended up stationed in Klamath Falls, Oregon, with further training, while a new carrier came off the lines, one of the jeep carriers. I had been qualified in jeep carrier landings in the Atlantic. So we then got on the USS Sadar [phonetic], and we were there when the war ended. We were getting ready for the invasion of Japan.

Charnley: Most of your overseas, then, was in the Pacific.

Cantlon: Yes.

Charnley: After you got out of service, what rank did you end up when you got out?

Cantlon: I was a lieutenant, Navy. Captain in the-- [Laughter]

Charnley: Then did you use the GI Bill after?

Cantlon: Oh, yes, and finished my last year at the University of Nevada and then finished three years. I was entitled to four years, so that’s why I hurried my Ph.D., so that I could cover it.

Charnley: You mentioned you were recruited by Michigan State. Who did the recruiting?

Cantlon: Bill Drew. Bill Drew was the chairman. He just died recently. He would have been a good one to interview.

Charnley: What department was he in?

Cantlon: Botany and plant pathology.

Charnley: So he was familiar with your published work and research?

Cantlon: Yes. And he knew my major professor at Rutgers, and he knew my professor at the University of Nevada who had gotten me interested in ecology.

Charnley: Would you say that that was a new field at that time or just only a name?

Cantlon: Yes, it’s interesting. Ecology, of course, has been around since the turn of the century really, the 1880s, 1890s. There were already a few books in ecology. But as my wife has often commented, "Nobody knew what ecology was, and just about the time it began to be interesting, you became provost, and nobody knew what the provost was.” [Laughter]

Charnley: So your early years at Michigan State, when you first arrived, how would you say the campus was different?

Cantlon: Well, I had been, of course, for four years at the University of Nevada, spread over a total of almost eight years, and I had been at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and the first dramatic thing is the scale and scope of this campus. It’s one of the bigger campuses in the country, and beautifully landscaped, and I think in the old days was even better landscaping quality because it was cheaper to do, there was less of it to take care of. So it was a beautiful place, particularly for a person trained in the botanical sciences, ecology. So that was one aspect of it.
The other thing that was interesting is that the graduate program in botany here, while it was one of the older graduate programs on campus, was still very small, so it was a time to recruit graduate students who were thinking about coming here. It was a place that hadn’t a long tradition of graduate programs in ecology, in my field, so it was a while to recruit graduate students.

Charnley: So you took part in that expansion in the department?

Cantlon: Oh, very much so.

Charnley: Who were some of your first students that you recall, your graduate students? Do you remember any of those people?

Cantlon: Oh, yes, sure. Yes.

Charnley: From those early years?

Cantlon: Yes. Bill Gillis comes to mind. He was kind of an institution here for a while. And Bill Malcolm, who got his Ph.D. degree here, who is now in New Zealand and is in the cattle business and teaches at a community college, I guess it is, in New Zealand, in Nelson. Bill Overlease, another grad student who got his degree here, Ph.D.

Charnley: Did some of them stay here at Michigan State, or did most of them leave?

Cantlon: No, all of my graduate students left.

Charnley: You came as an associate professor?

Cantlon: Yes. Came as an associate professor.

Charnley: Were you ever department chair here in that department?

Cantlon: No, no. I served for a few days for Bill Drew, but never formally designated.

Charnley: What did you see in terms of your own research when you first came?

Cantlon: Well, the kind of interesting thing was I was interested in getting a major study area to do experimental ecological work, which was not very common in those days. Much of the early ecological research was descriptive, describing communities. I had done my own thesis and I’d done an undergraduate thesis at the University of Nevada on descriptions of vegetation and that sort of thing. But I wanted to actually do some experiments to see cause and effect and that sort of thing. I had very great difficulty getting a research area. Much of the land at that time was under the control of the College of Agriculture. We were in the College of Natural Science. There was a certain amount of--

Charnley: Turf battles?

Cantlon: Oh, yes. Yes, I got into some very interesting turf battles with Agriculture. So it was a long time before I got a really satisfactory research site. Interestingly, I had gone to Michigan State University’s biological station at Gull Lake to see if I could get a research area down there. I got no sympathy at all. It was also under control of Agriculture, and they were running it as a dairy farm.
So about that time, the University of Michigan offered me a summer faculty appointment at their biological station at Douglas Lake, which I accepted. Then, for several years taught ecology at the University of Michigan at Douglas Lake and did some research work.

Charnley: Did it open up after you came back?

Cantlon: Yes. We recruited a new director for the biological station, George Lauff, came in. By the way, you might be very interested in getting him to talk to you, because that biological station has now become a national ecological research center.

Charnley: Is he still in the area?

Cantlon: Yes. He’s down there. Retired, too.
So I set up and had a research center there and had several other graduate students. John Caruso and Buford Holt both got their research completed down there.

Charnley: Now your specific study at KBS--

Cantlon: What we were interested in is what are the sorting mechanisms that determines how a biological community gets structured. How does that happen? There are two very opposing theories, one based on more the European view that a community is an organized thing like a human body or an individual body, very tightly organized. Most Americans don’t really think that way, and we don’t have the same tradition that European ecologists have, where ecology sort of came out of taxonomy descriptions. We really are more physiologically or process oriented. By the time we were getting involved in it, the science of statistics and so on, mathematics of statistics were coming out. So the other opposing view is that there’s no structure at all; it’s just a probabilistic thing. Well, that’s not true either. There’s a fair amount of structure there, but there’s a high level of chance involved in precisely how it gets organized. So we were trying to look at those processes.

Charnley: In those early years in the fifties, how would you characterize the student body here at Michigan State?

Cantlon: Oh, well, it was almost entirely undergraduate in the early fifties, when I came in ‘54. Very few graduate students. Since the university was in a very, very rapidly growing point in the 1950s, when I came here it was 18,000 students. By the time I came into central administration, it was 40,000. Not quite a factor of three, but more than double.
So the interesting thing is that the legislature never really funded the growth of the university. [John A.] Hannah had a strategy that, “If you build it, they'll come.” Meaning the money. [Laughter] Well, in part it was true, but it wasn’t one for one. So the budget of the university became more and more constrained for the size of the student body, and a lot of ingenuity went into improving the quality of how you can instruct students at a lower cost. University College was one of those inventions.

Charnley: Were you involved in that at all?

Cantlon: No. I guess I would be classed as an opponent of the idea. [Laughter]

Charnley: Against the traditional disciplines?

Cantlon: Well, no, it was more a matter that the concept was to bring about the integration. I have a very strong feeling, and still hold it today, that you’ve got to have something to integrate. So you really need to build your fundamentals early and get your integrating courses later in the program. As they did away with the University College as it was and built it later, I think we eventually brought that about. But those initial general courses, while very good in what they set about to do, tried to integrate before the youngsters really had enough basis to really see what was going on. You could learn what was being presented to you, obviously, but the significance of it and the depth to which you could apply it was very circumscribed over what I think the later model became.

Charnley: In your early teaching, were you primarily involved in graduate education?

Cantlon: No, primarily in undergraduate because there were no graduate students when I first got here. [Laughter] What graduate students we had, we had mostly in undergraduate classes. During my career, we built almost all those graduate courses in the department during the time I was here.

Charnley: Were these large lecture, or small, or a variety?

Cantlon: Well, a mixture. In my ecology class, I had about eighty in the ecology class, and probably about forty in plant geography, systematics, maybe forty or fifty. So they were not big, not multi-hundreds like some of the old instructional courses they had. Beginning psych, beginning business courses, and so on, were monstrous.

Charnley: In terms of administration, how did you first get involved in administration here at Michigan State?

Cantlon: Well, it’s kind of an interesting tale. I took a leave of absence. I’d been very active at the federal level since I had gotten started at George Washington University and ecology was just really beginning to get under way. I had been advising Oak Ridge National Laboratory and some of the National Academy committees, and reviewing papers proposals for the National Science Foundation.
So in 1965, the National Science Foundation invited--I had been on their review committee and panel for quite a while-–they invited me to be the program director for environmental biology, which was ecology. So I accepted, with the understanding that I’d only do it for one year, because I was building a graduate program here. Frankly, the department didn’t want me to be gone more than a year, and I felt it wasn’t wise for the university to give up and have a temporary in for more than a year.

Charnley: So you took a one-year leave of absence?

Cantlon: I took a one-year leave of absence, went to Washington, D.C., and was present as NSF really got the big environmental programs under way. It was very interesting. Had a lot of fun doing it.

Charnley: In the [Lyndon B.] Johnson administration?

Cantlon: Yes. Johnson administration.

Charnley: Who was the head of NSF at that time? It wasn’t meant to be a quiz. [Laughter] Or anybody that you worked with closely in the government?

Cantlon: Well, Harvey Carlson was the head of the biology division. Glen Seabourg was head of the National Science Foundation, who was a chemist from University of California-Berkeley.
We had a lot of work going on. I had been on the National Academy’s National Research Council Division of Biology and Agriculture for a while before then, so I had been involved in a lot of big national ecological and environmental questions.
When I came back to campus after 1965, ‘65-‘66, when I was at NSF, I was pretty active on campus on the environmental issues. Of course they were very hot as we were coming up to the seventies, Earth Day. First Earth Day was 1970.
Just the year before, in 1969, John Hannah retired. Walter Adams was the acting president. I think it was Walter’s view that the provost should also retire, or be relieved, I should say. So Jake Nevel, who had been the provost--and I had been very active with Jake Nevel. I was on the University Committee for the Residential Colleges. I was on the Educational Policies Committee here.
So Walter Adams called me over one day after I got back in 1969, it must have been early in the year of 1969, March, April, somewhere in there, maybe a little later. But he said he’d like to have me come over and be the provost. [Laughter] I said, “I’m not interested, Walter, in being a provost, for God’s sake. Jake is doing a great job.”
“Did you know Jake is leaving?”
I said, “No, I just wouldn’t do it. I’m just getting back on campus. I’m getting my graduate program back up. I’ve got my research grants now active again, so I don’t want to do it.” So I left.
I got a call a few days later, and he said, “John, either you take this or I’m going to have to give it--" and he named another name. I said, “Jeez, that would be a mistake.” [Laughter]

Charnley: So you were drafted again.

Cantlon: He said, “Take it for a year or two.” He said, “I’m only go to stay in this a year or two. Take it for a year or two, and then you can get out.” So that’s how I got into it.

Charnley: And the irony is, he got out. [Laughter]

Cantlon: He got out and I stayed in because the student unrest, see, took off. I came in July 1 of ‘69, and that fall, things were really getting hot.

Charnley: On those issues of the war and other things that the students were involved in, challenges to the administration, what are some of your recollections about that?

Cantlon: Well, the most dramatic thing is that our son was a Marine and was killed in Vietnam. [Tape recorder turned off.]
Getting back to the issues, the students, of course, were agitated in part about that. But it was a much, much broader set of things, because the blacks, of course, were pressing for more equitable treatment. That was a subset of what was going on. The typical thing, like our big riot last year, there’s a certain amount of chemistry of rioting which has very little to do with what I would call the national psychological importance of the event. Losing a damn basketball game is trivial. [Laughter] So you had that kind of thing going on, which is just the chemistry of youth and mob behavior.
So just about that time, Walter Adams stepped down as president, and Cliff [Clifford R.] Wharton [Jr.] came in. I tendered my resignation to Cliff Wharton, and he said, “Well, jeez, I don’t want to have to replace senior officials right in the middle of this mess.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll stay on.” And I did. Of course, by then the thing was really gathering momentum and there was damage on campus. The tent city was set up here on the banks of the Red Cedar, and the board was ticked off.
One of the funniest events--and by the way, my text that I’ve given you there, I’ve tried to focus on the humorous aspects of my career, entertaining to my grandkids, see, that’s why I wrote it, so I keep these humorous ones in. The board had been berating Cliff Wharton, who, of course, was a black, so some of the board members, I think, recognized that there was a racial aspect to some of their thoughts about him. I never felt that; he was far from black, as far as I was concerned.
We were over at the Kellogg Center, and the board was just really beating up on all of us administrators because the tent city was out there. They were getting hate letters from taxpayers and everything, and telling us that we had to clean this up, we couldn’t do anything. At the time, they had members of the campus police monitoring what the student activists were doing. It later came out that they weren’t supposed to be doing this, but anyway, they did.
So one of the fellows came in and told President Wharton, “The activists have learned that the board is meeting over here in Kellogg Center and they’re on their way.” He whispered that in his ear, and Cliff Wharton said, “I understand that the student activists are on their way here.” Like a covey of quail, the trustees disappeared. [Laughter]

Charnley: Meeting was adjourned, was it?

Cantlon: They didn’t want to face the activists. So there were a lot of things like that. Very tense. We had long, long days, because we would try to recap what was going on, get things under way.
But it would be a mistake to say that that period of great unrest was a period in which nothing happened. We got the medical school started during that period, the human medical school. We were doing very well. Most of the students here were not involved.

Charnley: It was a core.

Cantlon: Oh, yes, and a lot of them were off campus. As a matter of fact, see, our worst problems came after the University of Michigan closed its doors the end of April. We went into June at that time with the quarter system. So we get their red-hots plus all of the hangers-on. We had high school kids in. So very much like this riot here, most of the activists and so on were not Michigan State students.

Charnley: Was there any degree of resentment about the way that Hannah--I know that Hannah had been gone, but the students, how did they react to his style of leadership?

Cantlon: Well, Hannah brooked no nonsense. He came out of a time when the president was the president, and he had full authority because he had the full backing of the board. Well, you may recall that late in his term here as president, they had the Constitutional Convention. The Constitutional Convention changed the makeup of the board from governor appointees where you could get real statesmen to serve, to elected trustees. You get a totally different class of people, because these are non-paying. In Michigan politics, the Democratic party essentially were controlled largely by the unions. Still are. So you had a very different board of trustees that came in and viewed Hannah’s running of the university much the way union people would view an autocratic thing.

Charnley: Labor-management issues.

Cantlon: Exactly. They thought the faculty ought to be organized and all the workers ought to be organized and to heck with this business. Don Stevens, who was one of the real active union-oriented guys, said, “There’s no due process here.” [Laughter] So anyway, he would have tossed out students that did things of the ilk that later happened here. He would have tossed them out unilaterally.

Charnley: You came to the provost at a really tough time in the university in some respects, but would you talk a little bit about the medical schools? What role did you play in that in bringing them?

Cantlon: Well, I was the provost, came in after the first two-year medical program had gotten started.

Charnley: Two-year?

Cantlon: Two-year. So I presided over bringing them to the four-year and did some of the arguments down at the legislature. I have to tell you a story about that. I don’t know whether you’ve heard the name Jerry Faberman.

Charnley: Yes. He just died not too long ago.

Cantlon: Unfortunately. You should have interviewed him.

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Cantlon: ...for the osteopaths.

Charnley: As a lobbyist?

Cantlon: As a lobbyist. He had gotten his degree at Boston University, where I had been, and so we very early on hit it off quite well. I was down there being thoroughly beaten up by the legislators, who dearly love to tweak academics. [Laughter] Earlier, the president of the University of Michigan was Hatcher, who was, I think, from literature, and he would try to lecture the legislature, which does not work. So they kind of looked at all academics as being sort of other people.
So they had been beating me up for, oh gosh, forty minutes over our getting the medical school going, and so on. Finally I’d gotten to the end of my testimony, and they let me go. I’d gone out in the hall. I was visibly, just absolutely furious at the way I’d been treated.
Jerry Faberman, a big tall guy, about 6'6". He came out, he put his arm on my shoulder, and he says, “Cantlon, when you go to the bank, you pay interest. When you come to the legislature, you pay in abuse. Get used to it! Get used to it!” [Laughter] Which was some of the cagiest advice I’d had. It never bothered me again, all of the time that I’ve been there. I did some testifying in Washington when I was there, for the NSF budget and later on for some of the other budgets.

Charnley: So the Michigan legislative interviews were a tough one. They were a good preparation for the Washington ones.

Cantlon: Good preparation for Washington.

Charnley: Was there any opposition in terms of organized med schools like at Wayne State and U. of M.?

Cantlon: Ann Arbor especially was opposed to it and fought it tooth and nail, but fortunately at that time there was a great shortage of doctors, and so medical schools were growing all around the country. Later on, they had reason to believe they had overdone it, but at that time, not so.
That’s how the D.O.s came on. It was kind of interesting that the osteopaths had had no publicly supported College of Osteopathic Medicine anywhere in the country. They were all private. The State of California, a couple of years earlier, had made the so-called California Solution--and you should interview Mike Magen, who’s the dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, has just stepped down. He’s retired now. But he was the initial dean, and there’s some things in my opus there that you’ll find.
The D.O.s wanted to get a College of Osteopathic Medicine supported in the public. When the California legislature decreed that every physician practicing in the State of California would have to pass the standard board examinations, nobody could practice medicine who hadn’t passed those boards. So the D.O.s could go and take the board exams, and if they passed, they stayed there as licensed physicians. Well the D.O.s felt that that was going to eliminate the D.O. profession in California, so there was a big exodus. Many of them came to Michigan. Michigan had a very high number of D.O.s, and they got into the legislature. I won’t go into the details of that.
They eventually got real strong friends there, and Garth--gosh, what was his name? But anyway, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Garleen [phonetic]. Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, had been badly injured in World War II, a leg injury. He was very derogatory about how the M.D.s had handled his injuries and recovery from his injuries. He had gotten to know a D.O. who had treated him like a person. Military M.D.s--and I have a cousin who was one, and our old family doctor had been a World War I Army surgeon. They’re not famous for their bedside manner. Anyway, Garleen liked the D.O., and so he gave them an inside entree, and so they eventually got the D.O. school here. I was involved, very much, in having the D.O.s here.

Charnley: Was there any difference in terms of focus that MSU could offer in that?

Cantlon: Well, we insisted that the students who went into these two schools have all of the basic sciences together. No separate basic sciences. Physiology of human beings is the same, whether you’re a D.O. or an M.D. Bill Niesly [phonetic]--I’m not sure whether he is still alive or not, but he left here--Bill Niesly was the director of biology and medicine and was the key point at which our existing veterinary medical school and the two-year program articulated with the D.O.s.
I was committed to keeping the medical schools internal to the university and not allowing them to be separate as they are in all other campuses. This came from Hannah’s initial approach to getting the medical schools. He wanted the Michigan State medical school to be land-grant in its focus. In other words, the central focus shouldn’t be on improving the arts of medicine and the science and the technology of medicine; it should be centered, as the land-grant philosophy said, on improving the health of the people of Michigan. Very land-grant in its orientation.
Now, if you have people coming out of the U.S. medical schools whose training is in the central research focus, you don’t have the best preparation for the land-grant approach. Many of them would say, “Hell, that’s a public health issue, not a medical issue. It’s a public health issue.” Well, the reason public health is in the condition it’s in is the M.D.s have ignored it all along.

Charnley: The G.P.s and the family practices?

Cantlon: Yes. So that’s what we did. We made the emphasis on the G.P.s and the family practice, and I actively resisted getting a campus hospital. There were several attempts to get a campus hospital here. The last thing in the world we need is to have the medical school have its own darn hospital. They should learn how to work with the existing hospitals.

Charnley: So you saw the partnerships being--

Cantlon: Absolutely central to a land-grant approach to medicine. So that was the interesting thing going on while all the high jinks were going on.

Charnley: So your role in that was important, of course.

Cantlon: Well, I was so adamant about not getting a hospital, and making the medical school stay–-

Charnley: You took the lead?

Cantlon: Oh, absolutely. Yes, I did. And Bill Niesly did not support me in a lot of it because he felt they needed a vice president for medical affairs, which they eventually got. And I think they cut away too soon. I think they really need more articulation with human ecology, and with public health, and with the social and behavioral sciences, and with the business school, and with engineering. See, a lot of medicine is going out into those directions, and if you go there, then they’re going to have to repeat it. So if they are in the university, you can build these interniche, which has been the power of the land-grant universities, is building those interdisciplinary things. School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, no old traditional university would add such a thing.

Charnley: Did that expand significantly under your tenure as provost, the hotel/restaurant?

Cantlon: Well, we helped it along, yes.

Charnley: While you were provost, was the cyclotron important?

Cantlon: Oh, yes.

Charnley: How were you involved with that?

Cantlon: Well, it really got its initial start when Milt Molidor was in, before I got started.

Charnley: He was what, vice president for graduate research?

Cantlon: Research. Vice president for research, and later became dean of the graduate school, after retirement.
The cyclotron, the part I got involved in, was when they went from their initial small cyclotron to the next big one. Then I took an active role, with Hank Glosser. We went to NSF and argued for it, and I wheedled the matching money that the university had to have.

Charnley: So your experience in having done research and been recognized at NSF probably helped.

Cantlon: A little. Yes.

Charnley: Were you involved at all in bringing Dr. Glosser to campus, or was he already here?

Cantlon: No, he was already here. He was recruited by the former graduate dean when he was chairman of physics. He recruited him from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Charnley: He was part of a high-energy physics group that was on campus?

Cantlon: Not high-energy physics. Nuclear physics. He designed the most accurately focusable small cyclotron. That was his design. It did a lot of very important work with light elements, when the competition came to build the first superconducting magnets for the big heavier ions to accelerate. See, if you used regular electricity, it generates so much heat that you have to have an enormous machine in order to get the power and the strength that you’d get if you now supercool, so you can get superconducting going on. Then you can have very high current levels, very high voltage levels, without the heat problem. So Hank Glosser took the lead in doing that, and he built some of the very early superconducting magnets. We were successful in winning the first contract, which was to build the magnets for the big heavy ion accelerator, without any idea where they would be located. There was the machine to be designed, and movable.
Then we had to come up with another program, after we proved that the magnets worked, then we had to prove that we could actually run a national laboratory here. So we then got together some more matching money and more people who enjoyed the way Hank ran the little machine. He let everybody come in and put the priorities in correctly.

Charnley: Was that a fight at the national level, to try to get that here, get it west of the Hudson, so to speak?

Cantlon: Oh, yes, you bet it was. Have you interviewed Hank yet?

Charnley: No, not yet.

Cantlon: You should.

Charnley: You’ve given me seven or eight already. [Laughter] That’s great.
Did you have to go to Washington to testify?

Cantlon: Oh, three or four times. Oh, yes.

Charnley: Was it the Department of Energy, or was it NSF again, or a combination?

Cantlon: Both. Department of Energy and NSF. I was at NSF early on, until we won the siting of the machine. NSF had just finished getting themselves in deep hot water with Congress because of a big overrun at Brookhaven National Laboratory on an accelerator they were building there. So the OMB, Office of Management and Budget, decreed that NSF would not have responsibility for any more construction projects.
Since the Department of Energy, the old AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], had built all of the massive national laboratory system and the nuclear weapons facilities and so on around the country, they had great contracting skills and so on, with enormous bureaucracy built in, which is typical for federal projects, which Hank Glosser could not abide. [Laughter] It was an enormous strain to try to get Hank and AEC--well, later on, Energy Department--to go away friends with one another on any given thing.

Charnley: So you again took the lead in terms of some of the administration and the paperwork.

Cantlon: Oh yes. We tried to argue with them what he had to do and what he didn’t have to do, tried to get all of the BS out of his life, or at least most of it.

Charnley: Was the cyclotron useful in any of your own research?

Cantlon: No. One little story about it which is fascinating, because it has had a modern counterpart story that just broke here this last year. When the magnets were operating, and we had gotten the assignment to build the actual heavy ion accelerator here, the thing about the heavy ion accelerator is that for the first time, you could move heavy elements like uranium with sufficient velocity that they would interpenetrate. Before then, you didn’t have enough capacity to speed those heavy ions to the penetrating speed, because as two identically charged atoms come together, they repel, but if they’re moving at such velocity, they’ll penetrate. When that happens, you get everything from fission and so on.
One of the theorists in California did some quick and dirty equations and came up with the possibility that when this heavy ion thing was fired up, it would make a mini black hole. That got people’s attention.

Charnley: We wouldn’t have to worry about Grand River anymore. [Laughter]

Cantlon: Or indeed the country, eventually. Or the planet. So a couple of the physicists came over. I was vice president for research by then. They said, “What shall we do? He has made this statement. Should we refute it, or say that his math hasn’t been reviewed and so on?”
I said, “Jeez, don’t say a word. We don’t want anybody to even know about this. If anybody’s going to know about it, let somebody else. We don’t want to let anybody know about it. Let’s get the best minds in the country busy, try to find out whether his calculations are correct.”
So they did a whole series of other calculations and said it was very unlikely that it would happen. Very unlikely. So I said, “With that kind of assurance, we’ll go ahead and fire it up.” [Laughter]

Charnley: You were provost until what year?

Cantlon: From ‘69 to ‘75. I think my stepping down as provost has a number of elements to it. One, as I told you, I was opposed to the medical schools having their own independent vice president. I wanted them in the university. I was opposed to them having a hospital on campus. So I think the two medical deans would just as soon have a different provost.

Charnley: I see. So you had some opposition there.

Cantlon: Oh, yes. They were pretty active. I wasn’t really fully aware of this at the time, although it was beginning to be a little bit into my ideas, in my head. We had been searching for Milt Molidor’s replacement, who had retired as vice president for research. I had been through all the damn student activism and so on. ‘75, it was just beginning to quiet down. I told Cliff Wharton, I said, “Jeez, we’ve now interviewed three or four people for this job and they don’t want the job. They say it doesn’t have any power, it doesn’t have any funding. It's just a damn office, very little responsibility, no money, no power to do anything, so we haven’t been able to get anybody.” I said, “I’d much rather have that job than the provost’s job,” which is the chief nay-sayer on campus, because you’re trying essentially to distribute efficiencies equitably.

Charnley: Interesting.

Cantlon: There’s never enough money to run the undergraduate program, and since my major focus was graduate programs and research, had been since I came here, it was very, very difficult to try to keep things like the cyclotron and the medical schools, and the outreach activity which I was also very interested in, and cooperative extension and so on, because I really believe in the land-grant system, always have. I’m a creature of it. I think it’s the wisest invention that U.S. has made in higher education.

Charnley: Interesting.

Cantlon: Just a lot of reasons that that’s true, and I’ve articulated them in a number of places.

Charnley: So, Dr. Molidor’s retirement.

Cantlon: Retirement had come, and so we needed to fill that position. I told Cliff Wharton I’d much rather have that, because the focus of that job is to go find the funding sources off campus. I said, “Jeez, I’m really qualified in that area because I’ve worked with many of the federal agencies. I know the Washington scene very well. I find it very comfortable to work with business and industry, so I’d much rather have that job.” I think it made Cliff’s day, because he was going to have to figure out how to tell me I probably wasn’t going to be long for the job of provost. [Laughter] But that’s just a guess. He never did tell me that.

Charnley: Who replaced you as provost?

Cantlon: The dean of Agriculture, Larry Boger. He later became the president of Oklahoma A&M.

Charnley: In doing some of the research for this interview, we discovered that you had been a candidate for University of Texas at Austin.

Cantlon: Oh, yes. [Laughter]

Charnley: Do you want to talk a little bit about that? High point, low point?

Cantlon: My wife is a Texan. I had spent a couple of years in the Navy in Texas, so I knew Texas. Had even thought at one time that we might retire down there because she had a lot of family there. Much longer golf season.

Charnley: San Antonio's nice.

Cantlon: So I let them put my name in. I had not allowed many other places to put my name in, although later I did. So they put my name in.
Actually, the fellow who had initially suggested they contact me was Johnny Mecata [phonetic]. He was vice president for research--no, not vice president for research. Anyway, he was dean, and then later got into central administration. I don’t remember his title. He’s a chemical engineer. Johnny Mecata. He and I had served on national committees together, so we knew one another, liked one another, had a lot of fun together. So he had put my name in as a possible candidate. The board of trustees asked me if I’d be willing to have my name in and would I send my vita and so on. So, after I talked with my wife, she was delighted with the idea. [Laughter] Take her back down to her home.

Charnley: Michigan climate. Escape that.

Cantlon: Right. So anyway, after they had reviewed my vita and so on, I was on the short list. Two of us were on the short list. They sent a committee of the board up here. Lemather [phonetic] was the chairman of the board, a physician, tough old bird, and four other members. So I took them out to lunch at the University Club. In that time, they had orange tablecloths, bright orange tablecloths. We came in there, and they said, “Oh, you decorated for the University of Texas!” [Laughter] No, not exactly.
Well anyway, we talked a while. They were asking my views about things on education, and I talked about research and education, the problem of funding the undergraduate program. When I talked about the outreach, they said, “Well now, you have to remember we’re talking about the University of Texas, not Texas A&M.” I said, “Yes, I understand.” But I said, “Universities really have to look to the publics they support and to make what they’re teaching relevant to what the society is in need of.”
Going along, and finally he says, “Dr. Cantlon, what do you think about intercollegiate sports?”
“Well,” I said, “I have to tell you, when I first came here, I never got to a football game until my department chairman told me one day that he had to discuss another program and he didn’t want to miss that game.” So he’d ask his wife to stay home, and I said that was my only football game I had been to until I got into central administration. I said, “I’ve never been to a baseball game. Never been to a basketball game. I have been over to the hockey.” Well, they didn’t have hockey down there. Conversation at the table just totally changed.

Charnley: Is that right.

Cantlon: Absolutely. That was the end of that. I was no longer a candidate.

Charnley: Academics versus athletics.

Cantlon: Steve Spur [phonetic], who was a friend of mine at the University of Michigan, took the job. Lasted one year. [Laughter] He got into a flap with the head of the board. He was backing the faculty.

Charnley: While you were provost, let’s go back to athletics. Some of the difficulties in the seventies happened while you were provost, or that was discovered while you were provost?

Cantlon: Yes. Well, there were several things. The recruiting violations, of course, that came in there. The one that struck me most interestingly was an attempt on the part of the people, in hockey, because they knew I liked hockey. They came over to get me to waive the academic standards for some recruits they wanted. “Absolutely not.”
He said, “Other schools do that.”
I said, “I’m sorry. When we admit a student to Michigan State University, we admit him to the university and he can go into any department he wants. At Ann Arbor, they can admit them into an athletics program, and they can major and get their degree in athletics, but they’re not able to go into arts and letters. It’s a different thing here. So we’ve got to stick by our guns here. If they can’t hack the academic things, they just don’t belong here. They belong somewhere else.” So I held very tough on that. I did that in football, too. I would not let them. They wanted a group of, say, four or five of non-conforming students, in other words, exceptions. No thank you. So I was not a sympathetic academic for waiving academic standards for athletes.
Now, I had a colleague here, Al Ballard, who, unfortunately, you can’t interview and you should, because he’s dead, Al Ballard John Hannah recruited from the Department of Management and Budget downtown, who knew the university’s budget and knew the legislative process. He and Jack Breslin were largely successful for our success with the legislature. Jack Breslin, of course, was a distinguished athlete, and Al Ballard was a political realist and not very sympathetic with the sense of academics. He used to argue with me when I was fighting on these admissions. “John,” he said, “these kids don’t need to master all of the academic programs.” He said, “They have careers in athletics whether pro or semi-pro, or in some of the support systems in athletics.” He said, “They go out and make more money than most of your academics when they get their degree.”
I said, “I understand that, Al.” But I said, “We admit them with the understanding they’re going to get a degree.” I said, “If they can’t get a degree, I’m not going to let them in.” We just agreed to disagree. We were very good friends. But he just could not understand that approach.

Charnley: Sounds like the approach to academics that you took seems like a pretty interesting, good, solid line to be able to defend.

Cantlon: Well, if you start edging on the end, where do you stop? Is it five, seven, nine, twelve, fifteen, thirty, a hundred?

Charnley: Slippery slope, for sure.

Cantlon: Exactly. Once you start down it.

Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about Dr. Wharton, in terms of your relationship with him?

Cantlon: We are good friends, still. As a matter of fact, I had lunch with him last year. I have not seen him yet this year. He’s also writing his memoirs, and Bob Parron [phonetic] has been helping him. Have you talked to Bob?

Charnley: No.

Cantlon: Anyway, Cliff came. He and I hit it off very well. As I told you, I had offered him my resignation when he came in because I was sure with Walter Adams out of here I had no commitment. I wanted to get back to my research and graduate students and my lab.

Charnley: So you had a good relationship with Walter Adams?

Cantlon: Oh, yes, we got along very well. We politically were very different. He was a strong liberal, pro-labor kind of a guy. I was a management type. [Laughter]

Charnley: Did Dr. Wharton delegate a lot of things to you in terms of management style?

Cantlon: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yes. He delegated, and every president that we’ve had here delegates all of the authority and responsibility you need to run that and then hold you accountable, which is the way you run an organization.
I have to digress a little bit and talk about my first board meeting after I was appointed by Walter Adams. I came into the board meeting. Steve Nesbit [phonetic], who was a real gentleman, he’d been involved in the Constitutional Convention, he was kind of Mr. Republican in the state, and he came up and he said, “I want to apologize to you, Dr. Cantlon. I was the only board member that voted against your appointment as provost.” He said, “The rationale for my voting against you had nothing to do with your qualifications, which I think are excellent.”

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Charnley: This is tape two and we were talking with Dr. John Cantlon about his first board meeting and Steve Nesbit, when the tape ended.

Cantlon: Yes, Steve Nesbit said that he had voted against me not because of my qualifications, but because he felt it shouldn’t be an acting president appointing vice presidents and provosts. So I assured him that I had already told Walter that he could have my resignation anytime, and I said, “I mean that. When the new president comes in, the first thing he’ll see is my resignation. I’ll put it in his hand.”
“Oh,” he said, “in that case, I have no problem.”
A little bit later, Clare White [phonetic], who was a former union organizer in the schools over in Flint, came in. Clare came up to me and shook hands, kind of got a hold of my lapel, tweaked it a little bit. He said, “I’m going to unionize your goddamned faculty.” I thought he was kidding. [Laughter] But he worked his tail off to unionize our faculty, which, I thought, for a management board that you could have an individual who was working with the union, that just doesn’t make sense to have that kind of a board. It was a shock to me that a management board would have a union organizer trying to organize our faculty. I got along well with all of the board members, actually.

Charnley: Blanche Martin was on the board?

Cantlon: Blanche Martin was on the board, yes. Ken Thompson. Later, Pat Carrigan was on it. A whole troop of them. Frank Merriman was on at that time. He was an agriculture guy.

Charnley: In talking about your continuing relationship with Dr. Wharton as president, in your role as vice president for research and graduate studies, we were talking a little about his delegation, his style. How would you assess his overall presidency here?

Cantlon: I thought he did very--for the time and the conditions, we couldn’t have had a better president. There are a number of instances in which his presence was absolutely magnificent. I’ll give you one example. This was a little bit later than the hottest part of student unrest, but the board was being importuned by about a hundred Chicanos and Chicanas. One little gal, who was being fairly profane and totally without any sense of proportion to what she was saying, got up and made a number of statements which were not based on facts, of how we were handling Chicano admissions and promotion of Chicano faculty and so on, workers, then would make asides in Mexican Spanish to her audience. She was playing to the audience, clearly.
Cliff Wharton, who was absolutely facile in Spanish--his father had been an ambassador--he then, in impeccable Spanish, tells her that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she ought to be totally ashamed of herself to put on such a performance in front of these good people, and that she was doing no service at all. But it was his style. He was so good at that. See, he had been one of the student leaders at Harvard University in the early student movement, so he understood what the real core of the students who were genuinely interested in improving student relations for a university. He had absolutely no tolerance for the people who were trying to destroy things.
When the People’s Park came in here along the river, people somehow assumed it was because we had a black president that that was happening, and he got mountains of hate mail. Well, you know, any lesser person would have just really crumbled under the fact. He had an eight-to-five vote on the board. Five-to-three, I guess it was. There were eight board members, so it was five-to-three votes. So one switch in a vote on any given day, you see, he could have lost his majority vote on the board. So in the years that he was here, he performed magnificently.
Dolores Wharton, what a charm she was. A great gal. During the worst of the student unrest, one of the little gal student activists who was, again, another foul-mouth of a gal, she came over to Cole’s house at night, about eight or nine or ten o’clock at night, and wanted to meet with the president. Here’s a guy working fifteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, trying to get some rest at night. Dolores wasn’t about to let anybody. “You make an appointment with his secretary.”
“I don’t want to make an appointment.” Then she goes into this cursing.
Little Dolores Wharton says, “If I was your mother, I’d wash your mouth out with soap.” [Laughter] That so flipped this girl, she left.

Charnley: Disarmed her.

Cantlon: Totally disarmed her. She was really a great help in getting the Wharton Center going. That’s the reason it’s called Wharton Center.

Charnley: Were you involved at all in the planning?

Cantlon: Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes. I appointed the people who were involved. I was one of the big supporters. I was a big supporter of it. Fortunately, we got other officers, but I think I was pretty central getting the Wharton Center. The interesting thing, there’s a certain amount of non-history involved in fundraising, for very good reasons. You don’t talk about unsuccessful fundraising ventures. Our first fundraising thing was in Cliff Wharton’s time, and it didn’t meet its targets.

Charnley: That was an attempt to establish an endowment?

Cantlon: Yes. Well, that, and to build the Wharton Center, to have enough money to build it, and some library, and so on. We didn’t have enough money even to build a Wharton Center. We had to borrow money and get it from elsewhere. So they talk about their recent successful first fundraising. Well, it wasn’t the first. I don’t think you want to necessarily dwell on that, but it’s just in the nature of things.
Cliff, in being president at that particular juncture, had all of these negatives on top of him being the first black president of a predominantly white U.S. college. The fact that he weathered that and did well, and we got the medical schools going, the cyclotron going, all these different things went along and the economy went into the dumpsters, you see, at that time. That’s the reason the fundraising thing didn’t succeed. So I thought he was very good. He delegated authority, held people accountable.

Charnley: Were you surprised when he left?

Cantlon: No, not really. Typically, if you do any administrative job with any kind of skill and guts, you eventually use up your social capital. He had done that. The sports programs were in the dumpster, had trouble with the basketball thing, had the incident of the blacks and the basketball thing, raising the salutes on the floor, and all sorts of things that alienated a lot of people about the university. There were many people told me they would not drive on the campus because the students were foul-mouthed and wouldn’t get out of the road. It was just that kind of a rebellious time. A lot of them weren’t students. That’s what the people didn’t understand. So, no, I thought Cliff, considering where he was and the circumstances where he was, he was absolutely the best choice we could have had at that time.
Now, many of the things that accumulated, it’s interesting, they brought in Ed [Edgar L.] Harden as his replacement, and Ed Harden had better relations downtown, because Ed had been a former Michigan State fellow in charge of outreach, continuing education, that sort of thing, and then had gone to Northern Michigan as president, and had retired there and had been a consultant and lobbyist at the legislature, and was the chief lobbyist for the D.O.s.
So when we were assigned the D.O.s, and it’s interesting how we got assigned it, the legislature mandated that the D.O.s would have to be in a university with medical programs. They wanted to go to Oakland University, over where they had built their little thing at Pontiac. Since at that time it was a branch of Michigan State University, they thought that would be their thing. They’d be on that campus and away from all this oversight. Oh, no. Has to be on the campus where there’s a medical program, because then you’re not going to have to duplicate all these basic sciences.
So the choices were Wayne, Ann Arbor, and Michigan State. Three schools had medical programs. They didn’t dare go with the M.D.s and their establishment at the U. of M. Wayne, of course, had all of the problems of Detroit at that time, which was in the social dumpster, really. So Michigan State was the one that they chose. They thought they’d be able, with their connections, to make do here, and they could keep their campus over there, we’d have an off-site campus. No way. We were not going to tolerate that. Had to be on this campus. That was a big fight, but we won it.
I have to tell of another fight that we won later. I think I was still provost, but I’m not sure. Had to do with the national sea-grant program. National sea-grant program was supposed to be the parallel of the land-grant program, in which the coastal part of the country would look to the economic development as the land-grant universities had on land, of the coast and sea. Good idea, because it was the big undeveloped resource on the planet at that time, underdeveloped, not undeveloped. So the land-grant universities around the coasts took the initiative and got in there.
Well, I was at NSF at the time this was going on and wasn’t paying much attention to what Michigan State was doing. Ann Arbor went in and essentially became the focal point for the sea-grant program. Well, they’re not a land-grant university. They didn’t have access to the cooperative extension system and the outreach and so on. So they worked out some kind of a deal with our cooperative extension. They were going to use the cooperative extension resources going into coastal issues as match, which was mandated, fifty-fifty match for federal funds.
Well, the only trouble was, Ann Arbor was using all of the money that they were getting to model the liminological characteristics of Travers City Bay, currents. It was a very good scientific program and quite a reasonable thing to do. It had some relationship to fisheries and so on, economic development, but it had little to do with economic development of coastal Michigan.
So I got back on campus. I was in the provost’s office. It got so bad that the sea-grant program said that they were going to have to, some way or another, get Michigan State more actively involved in the program. So I went down to Ann Arbor and visited with my counterparts, the provost, the academic vice president down there, and the vice president for research. Gordon Guyer was there with me. I said, “Well, we have to go in here as peers. We’re going to be joint directors of this program. We’re not going to provide you with backing and match and so on.”
“Oh, no,” they said, “we can’t do that. We are the initial sea-grant.”
I said, “Well, you’ve got your choice. You can do that or we’re going to put in a competing proposal. I know for a fact we’ll win.” A little silence around the table.
So they said, “Well, I guess you’ve got the cards.” They knew we would win, because I had already talked to them.

Charnley: At NSF?

Cantlon: No, it was sea-grant. I was in NSF when it started.

Charnley: So that forced cooperation.

Cantlon: Forced cooperation, yes. About as much as a shotgun wedding as there’s ever been. [Laughter]

Charnley: That developed into something important here on campus, didn’t it?

Cantlon: Oh, yes, and I later on became very active in it, and was until I retired.

Charnley: It was still under sea-grant program or water institute?

Cantlon: Yes. Water Institute came, and we developed that. That was our strength in it.

Charnley: One of the things I was interested in finding out, in doing some of the background research, and also this interconnectedness between the science and also human ecology and that sort of thing, obviously the PBP happened during your tenure. My personal background was that I grew up north of Grand Rapids, and one of my relatives was directly involved in McCosta [phonetic] and Reamus [phonetic]. He had just completed a major expansion of his herd and was one of the first that was affected and had to wipe out everything he had just done. So I’ve had a personal interest in that, maybe as scholarship, as a historian myself. So with you as provost during that time, I’m interested in hearing your views on some of the things that happened here. How we were involved?

Cantlon: Yes, I think this is very enlightening. In the first place, you remember that polybromonate biphenol is a fire retardant. It got mixed in because the bag marking on those bags of fire retardant were very close to the bag markings on the bags of calcium. The two compounds are white in color, so they looked more or less alike. Now, they smell totally different, but when the guys are working, sweaty and hot, all other smells are around, they obviously didn’t pick up on that.
But anyway, they got that mixed into the feed, and of course, it was fed out. They saw these chicken flocks, the dairy herds, some of the beef animals, all that were being fed this special feed that had been laced with polybromonate biphenol, were beginning to get ill. Of course, the people who were consuming this stuff, some of them were getting a little bit ill.
But every analysis of the feeds were looking for the things to be expected in feed, so none of the analyses found polybromonate biphenol, which is a very large molecule. So if you’re doing mass spectroscopy or some of the other analytical things, you just would not think to look way out there for that damn molecule. Well, Michigan State tried to look at it, couldn’t find anything. They sent it to USDA, and they couldn’t find anything. They sent it over to Wisconsin, and the guys at University of Wisconsin inadvertently left the sample in the mass spectrometer way beyond the normal time, so that you finally get down to the big molecules, and there was that damn blip way out there. What in the world was that? So when they finally figured out what it was, how in the world did polybromonate biphenol’s get into feed? Then they went back and found out.
Well, unfortunately, it was Wisconsin, not Michigan State. We had totally failed, but we had failed in a much more serious way, because we had people in the cooperative extension system who were advising dairy herd operators. One guy in particular was trying to make the case that it was excessive iodine, because of the bug eyes that these cows were getting, which is symptomatic of iodine. It was excessive iodine in the diets of these things and, therefore, not attributable to any feed that had come out of Farm Bureau. They had long since found that only people that had used Farm Bureau feed had this problem. So it had to be Farm Bureau. Well, this idiot was taking money from the Farm Bureau to do this research. He had an absolute conflict of interest. He should have kept his mouth shut. But he was out there making things around. So Michigan State, who should have the giant share of credibility in agriculture in Michigan, had no credibility with this group of people. And I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have either.
So we had to build from not only zero, we had to build from a minus number to get back into the thing. We then got our medical school, and agriculture was being stupid in this, in that they were trying to do all of the things and hadn’t involved our toxicologists and so on in it. Finally, we did submit proposal to NIH [National Institutes of Health] to look at the human families involved. Of course, our reputation as an institution was zilch at that point, because we had this overt conflict of interest and the people that were involved, like your family, would have none of it, wouldn’t have believed anything we would have done. So the upshot of it was that we had nothing really solid to contribute to the thing.
I would have to say that, in hindsight, the final resolution of the PBP problem spent millions of dollars getting rid of the last few grams that remained in the system because they did away with dairy herds. We had already eaten the lion’s share of it in the eggs, poultry, milk, and so on. That wave had gone through the population, and of course it put the export of Michigan milk in the dumpster. But nobody would say what these guys had, and had Farm Bureau feed, that came from Michigan. No thank you. So it really perturbed the animal agriculture in the state enormously.

Charnley: Were there any programs that were developed on campus as a result of reaction to that?

Cantlon: Oh absolutely. So I went down to the legislature and said, “Look. Here is an example of what happens when an institution isn’t set up to respond to emergencies. I want to get some funding in an emergency area.” As a result, I was successful at getting the funding for the tox center, the Center for Environmental Toxicology. Then we recruited a director and got that thing going. The idea was that we would keep this fund available pretty much throughout the whole year as an emergency fund, only to respond immediately to anything like that. Instead of having agriculture or anybody who’s got their hands in the problem, it would come back to this center, which was a joint thing with the medical schools, the College of Natural Science, and Agriculture, and Veterinary Medicine. So you didn’t have the conflict-of-interest problems that you get if you were involved in agriculture with their network of relationships in cooperative extension, which is really an enormous asset when it works. It’s an enormous liability when credibility gets questioned. So the tox center came out of that. It eventually became the point from which, now, the Food Safety Center later came along. So there’s big national, it’s a multimillion-dollar operation on campus that followed initially from that PBP incident.

Charnley: So something good coming out of something bad. We learned from the mistake, if nothing else,