The scandal over the effort by MIT to keep secret that they were getting money from Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction and being branded a sexual predator keeps getting worse. It has already seen the resignation of Joi Ito who was the head of the much-acclaimed Media Lab and now an internal investigation reveals that the president of MIT also knew of the donations and the scheme to keep it on the down-low.
The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is admitting that not only did the school hide donations from Jeffrey Epstein—he wrote the accused sex trafficker a thank-you letter.
“It is now clear that senior members of the administration were aware of gifts the Media Lab received between 2013 and 2017 from Jeffrey Epstein’s foundations,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
“Because the members of my team involved believed it was important that Epstein not use gifts to MIT for publicity or to enhance his own reputation, they asked [MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito] to agree to make clear to Epstein that he could not put his name on them publicly.”
Reif said he also was present at a meeting of his senior team where attendees discussed Epstein’s crimes and donations.
The Epstein and Sackler cases had better put college administrators everywhere on notice that they had damn well better make sure that their donors have clean hands. Of course, since many of these wealthy mega-donors do not have clean hands, the money they get will go down. But the rot of nefarious actors whitewashing their actions by giving ‘charitable’ donations has to stop.
Alfred Nobel, anyone? One of the more effective whitewashings of all time. I imagine that few donors today (or ever) have truly clean hands. I’m not sure what to do about it other than to do something about the fortunes themselves though taxation and prosecution of illegal activity.
Conspiracy theorists now have another large institution to add to the suspects-list of Who Kilt Jeffrey Epstein!
I think this relevant article is rather good: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/11/20860717/mit-media-lab-joi-ito-epstein
The paper that John Morales @#3 links to has a link to a paper in “Nature Human Behavior looking at the dynamics of anonymous donation”. I hit a paywall following that link, but the full paper is available on the lead authors website.
I note that at least one of the authors of the paper, Martin Nowak, director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University of which the lead author is a member, benefited from Epstein’s financial largesse, both directly and indirectly, all this before Epstein’s conviction. Nowak was probably also aware of Epstein’s continued donations to Harvard at the time the paper was written (2017-ish).
Quote by Nowak from an Oct 2002 NY Mag piece:
I misremembered.
All of Epstein’s donations to Harvard University were prior to his conviction in 2008.
However, Epstein did have some meetings after his conviction with Harvard professor George Church in 2014, and two of those meetings were at Nowak’s Institute, and one explicitly included Nowak.
I wonder if Nowak heard (about?) offers of anonymous donations from Epstein (presumably refused), or heard rumors about the donations that MIT was accepting, which might have prompted the paper linked @#4.
I also have to wonder at the initials of “Program for Evolutionary Dynamics”. Just an infelicitous cooincidence, or could it have been a subtle hint?
Message from Lawrence S. Bacow, Harvard President
(bolding mine)
Could “we” mean George Church and/or Martin Nowak?
One more recent posting about Epstein @ Harvard.
A point I skipped in the Bercow message linked @#8