to sue them right away.” ... Richard said, “Sandy, when the American Medical
Association sees that some broken-down trial lawyer now a university president
is filing an antitrust complaint, they’re not gonna give a damn about that. What
we need to do is – that meeting you said you’re going to have with the Board of
Trustees, we need to invite the attorney general’s antitrust people to come to that
meeting with us.”
So we announced to the world that we’re having this FSU Board of Trustees
meeting, it’s going to be available on an open telephone line, anybody in the
world who wants to listen is welcome to listen. We particularly made sure that
the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges and their lawyers
knew that there was going to be such a meeting and that they were welcome to
listen in. And the chief and deputy chief of the antitrust division of the Attorney
General’s Office show up at the meeting. I give a report about what’s happened.
I give my report, which is essentially a summary of this complaint I have drafted,
about why I thought the Liaison Committee on Medical Education was wrong.
And after I gave it, John Thrasher, the chair of the Board of Trustees, said, “I
notice that we’ve got the Attorney General’s Office represented here. I appreciate
your interest in this matter. Do you have anything you want to say?” And
Richard Doran says, “Yes. I’m going back to my office, and we’ll issue subpoenas
to these organizations right away to let them know that there’s an antitrust investigation
which will begin in Florida. And we’ll ask for certain records, some of
which you’ve now pointed us to.”
Incredible – was it the next day, or two days later? – we get a notice from the
LCME that they’d like to reopen our proceedings, and that they would expedite
our submissions. And, happily, that happened. Now, that’s not the full story, but
it’s my version of the full story.
We were really blessed with some other wonderful things that happened…. We
were really able to do a wonderful job [getting public funding] – thanks to John
Thrasher, Durell Peaden, Steve MacNamara and the other people who worked on
this – we were able to show that we had state funding. “But where is your private
funding coming from? Do you have any sources of private funding?” And the answer
is that we now have a wonderful lady, Dr. Charlotte Maguire…. She was one of the
early women physicians here in Florida. She helped set up the University of Florida
medical school when she was younger. She’d moved to Tallahassee and taken a real
interest in our studies. She sat in with us on a number of the studies. And as we began
to roll out the school, she said, “I’d like to be the first major contributor.” She gave
us a million dollars!... Some donations like that began to come in. We already had a
grant history in science, so we could show considerable research grants and research
activity associated with medical education. So we really had a complete package.
54 | Breaking the Mold