Columbia letter-writing professor flunks most important course: Common Sense 101

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 11, 2002 by Elissa Elan

It's a good bet that Frank Flynn never worked for a restaurant company.

If he had, the assistant professor at Columbia University's School of Business probably wouldn't have cooked up the half-baked idea of sending bogus letters to 240 New York foodservice operators, claiming their food had made him ill.

Now Flynn has about 100 million reasons to be really sick -- that's the amount of money he and the university are being sued for by 10 restaurants that received the phony letters.

What started as an "innocent" research project last August now is shaping up into a full-fledged court case, featuring such plaintiffs as the owners and employees of Manhattan's Chez Josephine, Restaurant 222, Caffe Bondi, Jezebel's, the Box Tree and Herban Kitchen.

The trouble began when the 29-year-old Flynn, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, only two years ago, sent out two different versions of the letter to the restaurateurs. One claimed he was an assistant manager in training for The Gap; the other stated his true profession, teacher. Both missives contained the following information: He and his wife had gone to the restaurant to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, "a very special occasion," and he had become violently ill some four hours after eating.

"It makes me furious just thinking that our special romantic evening became reduced to my wife watching me curl up in a fetal position on the tiled floor of our bathroom in between rounds of throwing up," he wrote Oceana's Rick Moonen, a recipient of one of the letters.

Flynn went on to say he was particularly angry because he might have shared his meal with his wife, thus causing her to suffer his same fate.

The letter ended by saying that although he was "furious about the entire ordeal," he would not file any reports with the Better Business Bureau or the Department of Health. "I want you ... to understand what I went through in anticipation that you will respond accordingly."

According to Thomas Moore, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, the owners, upon receiving the letters, became upset -- some were hysterical -- fearing that they would have to fire employees, close down their restaurants and possibly face business ruin. Furthermore, he said Columbia is as much at fault as Flynn since it was the one that let him conduct an experiment that could destroy people's lives.

It is particularly interesting that Columbia hired Flynn in 2000 to teach three sections in, of all things, leadership. Do those courses touch on ethics? Given Flynn's current situation, it would appear not.

At the time he joined the college's faculty, he told the business school's Bottom Line Online Web site that his youth would serve as an advantage because he would be "empathetic to their concerns and demands at this stage in life." It's too bad he didn't practice what he intended to preach and show a little sensitivity or respect toward the hard-working entrepreneurs he falsely accused in his missives.

Although Flynn intended to see how those in the restaurant business would respond in a crisis, he obviously was unaware how seriously restaurateurs take their food safety responsibilities.

Preliminary research should have indicated the foodservice industry's commitment to food safety training and technologies as well as operators' deep-seated food safety fears in the wake of such high-profile illness outbreaks and fatalities as those suffered at Jack in the Box and Sizzler.

Instead, Flynn is getting a crash course in yet another valuable discipline: defending oneself in litigation. Now he's doing a big-time back pedal, apologizing to all for his misstep. Even Meyer Feldberg, the dean of the business school, has sent his own letters of regret to those exposed to what he calls "this ill-conceived research project," noting that Flynn "failed to think through the toll this study would take on its recipients."

The irony here, of course, is that an instructor at one of the most respected Ivy League institutions in this country may have sabotaged his own career with a broad stroke of his "poison" pen. Here's a thought: Maybe Flynn should register for a continuing education class that's been around for quite while -- Common Sense 101.