Inside the Epstein Files

What the documents reveal about the elite world of high-profile scholarship — and about higher ed’s uneasy obsession with money and prestige.

College Matters from The Chronicle

In this episode

The Justice Department’s recent release of millions of pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019, shines a harsh light on a privileged network of scholars who had entered his orbit. Throughout the documents, professors butter up the financier to fund their pet projects, banter crudely about women, and appear to overlook the criminality of a man who had already been convicted on prostitution-related charges involving a minor. What do the documents reveal about the gilded world of high-profile scholarship — and about elite higher ed’s fraught relationship with money, power, and prestige?

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In this episode

The Justice Department’s recent release of millions of pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019, shines a harsh light on a privileged network of scholars who had entered his orbit. Throughout the documents, professors butter up the financier to fund their pet projects, banter crudely about women, and appear to overlook the criminality of a man who had already been convicted on prostitution-related charges involving a minor. What do the documents reveal about the gilded world of high-profile scholarship — and about elite higher ed’s fraught relationship with money, power, and prestige?

Listen

Related Reading

Unmasking Academe’s Gilded Boys’ Club(The Chronicle)Jeffrey Epstein’s Academic Fixer(The Chronicle)‘A Moment of Reckoning': After Epstein, Higher Ed Faces Hard Questions About Its Proximity to Power(The Chronicle)

Guests

Nell Gluckman, senior reporter atThe ChronicleEmmy Martin, reporting intern atThe Chronicle

Transcript

Jack Stripling: This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Nell Gluckman: Traditionally, universities have been places for people to launder their reputations, and with Epstein having these really personal relationships with presidents and scholars, it almost has the feeling that he was like collecting academics the way some people collect cars.

*Jack Stripling: *The Justice Department’s recent release of millions of pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019, have triggered a global fallout for a slew of academics in Epstein’s circle. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 on prostitution-related charges involving a minor. But the disgraced financier maintained seemingly close ties with a wide network of professors in the ensuing years.

Well-known faculty members joked, lobbied for money, and showed little skepticism about Epstein’s dark history or his conduct and judgment thereafter.

What will this trove of documents mean for the academics involved? And what do they reveal about the gilded world of high-profile professors?

Diving into this with me today are my colleagues, Nell Gluckman and Emmy Martin. Nell is a senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education who has written about research and fundraising ethics. Emmy is a Chronicle reporting intern and a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been all over the recent breaking news about Epstein.

Nell, Emmy, thanks for being here.

Nell Gluckman: Thanks for having us, Jack.

Emmy Martin: Great to be here.

*Jack Stripling: *Well, I want to say right at the top that we have some breaking news on this topic. Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, just announced that he will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard. Summers had close ties with Epstein, and his resignation just shows how everything is snowballing around this.

Emmy, let me start with you. What do you think this story is really about?

Emmy Martin: I would say that the headline here is scale. The Justice Department released more than 3 million additional pages of documents, and what they show is that Epstein’s ties to higher education were sustained. A lot of people knew Epstein cultivated elite academics, but what feels newly clarified is just the breadth of it. It’s Duke, it’s Yale, it’s Columbia, it’s Harvard. It’s a mix of very senior figures and mid-career scholars. It’s research funding conversations. It’s introductions to students. It’s legal advice in at least one case. That’s what makes this feel less like a scandal attached to one or two high profile names and more like a network.

What stands out is that many of these relationships began or continued well after his 2008 conviction became public. We’re talking about meetings, email correspondence, travel coordination, funding discussions into the mid 2010s.

Jack Stripling: And often very cordial exchanges is what I’ve noticed.

Emmy Martin: Exactly. To be clear, no one has been charged with a crime in the world of academia, but I think what these documents show is proximity, whether that’s social, intellectual, or financial, and, and that’s what’s raising a lot of questions.

To pull out one example, I would point to Bard College. It’s a small, private liberal arts school about 90 miles north of New York City, and its longtime president Leon Botstein. Although Botstein’s relationship with Epstein has been previously reported, the latest Justice Department document release showed correspondence that was more extensive and warmer in tone than previously understood.

In one email, Botstein referred to a quote unquote new friendship with Epstein. He ended another email by saying that he misses him. In a 2012 email sent a day after a trip Epstein hosted at his Caribbean island, Botstein said, quote, I had a great time. The place is great, unquote. A spokesperson for Botstein told me that that comment had referred to the overall environment of St. Thomas, not Epstein’s, infamous private island.

*Jack Stripling: *There’s so much public anger over this story. And I think part of it is this idea that wealthy people, and big-time academics, just play by a different set of rules. Do you think that’s driving the passionate response we’re seeing?

Emmy Martin: I think that’s very accurate to say. In the case of Bard College and Botstein, Botstein and Epstein appear, you know, to have collaborated on a lot of things, including purchasing an expensive watch in 2017, and Epstein also connected Woody Allen with Botstein as one of the couple’s daughters was considering colleges. The family thanked Epstein for getting their daughter into Bard in an email exchange that was released in the most recent tranche of documents, though The New York Times has reported that a spokesperson said that their daughter was accepted on her own merit.

Nell Gluckman: I think whether or not that’s true, what Epstein was able to do regardless was give the impression that he’s the middleman between this college and this high-profile celebrity family, and that serves to help bolster his clout in both worlds, which I think is key to his image.

Jack Stripling: I mean, Botstein is in the hottest of hot water it seems. Bard has opened an outside investigation into him. We’ll see what happens in that case.

Nell, what I’m really struck by here is that the fundraising world is literally kind of the most opaque aspect of higher education. I sort of made my bones as a reporter down in Florida, covering the University of Florida, the Sunshine State. You can’t touch anything that has to do with fundraising. I used to get calendars from the University of Florida president that were just blank because they could redact anything that might be a potential fundraising effort. So here we’re seeing all of these faculty, who I think are quite entrepreneurially courting Epstein for money and connections and all this sort of stuff. It’s not stuff we normally see. And what I find fascinating about it, and also a little disturbing, is that we’re getting a window into the academy’s upper echelon, how it operates. And it’s quite plain. It runs on money and power and connections, and it might run on transactional values that we’re seeing here. There’s a hubris to hanging out with a criminal and saying, so what? Come at me. And that seems to be what comes through in a lot of these exchanges. Were you struck by that Nell?

Nell Gluckman: Yes. I was struck by that. I think we are seeing two things. One is why institutions have to fundraise with people like Epstein — or you could make the case they don’t have to …

Jack Stripling: I think you could make a strong case they don’t have to.

Nell Gluckman: A lot of places didn’t. Colleges need big checks. They just do. They need to build buildings, they need to fund multimillion dollar research projects. They are looking for tons of money, and wealthy people have that and are often looking for places to plaster their names onto or the association with a college brings with it a lot of clout and prestige and this sense of elitism that people like Epstein, a convicted sex offender, might have been drawn to.

So we’ve seen this for decades with colleges as funding from states declined over the years, and now we’re seeing that at the federal level as well. Colleges have turned to sometimes nefarious people to raise money, and that’s just sort of a fact of their existence. And I think what a lot of academics are looking at this and hoping to see is that it sort of exposes this structural weakness within higher education and shows what it actually enables.

*Jack Stripling: *I think you’re right that there is a structural problem that this story highlights, but there is also a structural hierarchy in higher education that these documents are bringing to light. If anything, what you see in these documents is that Epstein was class conscious, for lack of a better phrase. He sought out celebrity scientists from prestigious institutions, ivy league places.

There’s an email I came across in some of my own research where a professor is actually actively discouraging him from giving money to colleges that are not, quote, top universities. So this was all sort of baked into what Epstein was doing. And with Epstein’s money and connections, he was reinforcing these hierarchies, reinforcing the haves and have nots of the academy. And he made himself an essential player in that process.

He cultivated celebrity scientists, public intellectuals, and most of these people were men. And when I’ve talked to women in the academy over the past week or so, they’re saying to me, this is the closed, hyper connected, mostly male ruling class that we’ve been talking about. These are the people who get money in the academy, who get the research centers, who get the high profile speaking slots, who are on podcast and television shows and get to be quoted in The Atlantic, and what they have in common is proximity to money and power.

Nell Gluckman: Yeah. I think another thing that you’re seeing here that’s somewhat unique to this story is not just these institutions going after money, and in a lot of cases it wasn’t these institutions going after money. You might have your Leon Botsteins, like Emmy mentioned, who’s the president courting a wealthy guy. But you’re also seeing these individual scientists or scholars of different types just kind of going out on their own to get money for different projects that they’re working on. And they might not necessarily have the backing of their universities to do this.

And we should say that universities have teams of people whose jobs it is — universities like Harvard, MIT, and Yale — whose jobs it is to vet these people and determine whether or not they should be accepting their money. But here you have some scholars going rogue and just doing this on their own, and those do tend to be like the star scholars.

I will just say though, I was reading over our coverage of MIT from back in 2019, when a lot of this stuff first came out about Epstein, and they did vet Epstein. People at a high level decided that yes, we should take this money knowing about his conviction.

*Jack Stripling: *What’s the story with MIT? I know you did a lot of reporting, but it’s been a few years and I don’t quite remember.

*Nell Gluckman: *Epstein helped MIT connect to donors who ended up giving millions of dollars to the university. He also personally donated about 850K, much of it to MIT’s Media Lab.

The Media Lab has a slightly different funding structure and research structure than other parts of the university. These are scientists and researchers who are supposed to be on the cutting edge in areas like design and technology. And they do a lot of fundraising in the private sector.

So, according to an MIT report, Epstein visited the Media Lab nine times. During one of those visits he was allowed into the building but could not go near this reception that was taking place because the university worried that it would draw bad press. And all of this resulted in a big fallout. Joi Ito, the lab’s director, ended up resigning when it all came out.

Emmy Martin: Nell, what you’re saying tracks with a lot of what the professors I’ve been talking to, you know about this most recent release of documents. One professor Brendan Cantwell, who works at Michigan State University, told me that he thinks, you know, as long as universities are going to be networking with powerful business, cultural and political elites they’re necessarily going to be engaged in activities that lead to these cultural, ethical and moral controversies.

Another professor took a little bit of a different perspective when I was speaking with her. Her name’s Jessica Calarco. She’s a sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She told me that she thinks it’s easier to punish bad actors than grapple with the deeper question of what structures and systems are in place that allow these bad actors to proliferate. She told me that she hopes this is a moment of reckoning for higher education and it just, you know, made me think, is this going to be different than it was back in 2019?

Nell Gluckman: I wonder that too, and I’m hearing some of the same stuff from different people that I’ve been talking to. Like you said, the scope is much broader than we knew back in 2019. But 2019 was a long time ago. It was seven years ago. Do we see a lot of change in how universities operate? If anything, they may have to be turning to private funding more than ever if the federal government is not a secure source of research funding anymore.

*Jack Stripling: *Nell, don’t you feel like everybody’s also getting caught up in when these exchanges happened?

Nell Gluckman: Yes.

Jack Stripling: So, the point of demarcation that the media is obsessed with, and I think rightfully so, is 2008 when Jeffrey Epstein pleads guilty to prostitution charges involving a minor, that’s the state charge. And, you know, then he ends up in a searchable sex offender database. I mean, he spent some time in jail. This wasn’t exactly like a state secret. But it was different environmentally than post late 2018 when The Miami Herald published this just sprawling investigation about Epstein and his case and all of the oddities and how that was handled, after which I don’t think any reasonable person can make a claim that they didn’t know. I mean, this story was all over the place.

And so your mileage may vary about how much people did or didn’t know in 2008 at the individual faculty level. But fundraising offices, if they are involved, do know. That’s their job to know. And that’s what’s mysterious to me. We’re anointing these individual faculty members to start their own centers. There’s a lot of incentive to do that, to sort of be freed from the yoke of the institution. But they’re operating under a different methodology. Even Harvard, when they did their own investigation of the money that Epstein had given to Harvard, which I think was somewhere in the neighborhood of, was it like $9 million?

Nell Gluckman: 9 million, yeah.

Jack Stripling: But even they have a footnote that says, you know, we weren’t looking for example, at individual donations that Jeffrey Epstein made to a center that was run by Elisa New. And I’d love to talk a little bit about her.

She is a professor of literature, was at Harvard, professor emerita. And she had this project called Poetry in America that was like an education project that turned into a PBS show about poetry. And she had connections with Epstein, in part because she’s the wife of Larry Summers. And her correspondence with Epstein is really interesting because she is out there on her own hustling for money. And it is Epstein who gives her, well, it’s actually a nonprofit she established called Verse video, he gave her $110,000 in 2016. But Epstein also brokered a gift from Leon Black, the private equity giant who has resigned over his ties to Epstein. This all just feels like a huge mess to me.

Nell Gluckman: I think that’s a really interesting point. Universities are very porous places. They’re very decentralized. And like you said, they incentivize their scholars to go out on their own and do their own research. And in some cases that means doing their own fundraising. I mean, in most cases it means doing their own fundraising, whether they’re writing grants or soliciting private donations from wealthy millionaires and billionaires. Like you said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the teams of people working in the development offices are vetting all the people that are making contributions, and even when they are vetting those people, there’s a lot of different theories on what counts as a nefarious donation and whether or not a donation from somebody who’s done bad things in the past is even such a bad thing to accept.

I did some reporting earlier this week and spoke to Stephen Trachtenberg, the former GW president who was known as a big fundraiser at that institution for decades. And he told me that there was almost nobody he wouldn’t accept money from, that his view, that he had taken from a mentor, is that you sanctify money with its use that couldn’t he do better with this money than somebody like Epstein? Like what’s he gonna do with it? This is also the view of Derek Bok, the former Harvard president who famously wrote during the calls to divest from South Africa during their anti-apartheid movement, he wrote that universities should have no qualms about taking this money and doing good with it.

Jack Stripling: This reminds me a little bit of how evangelicals talk about Donald Trump. He’s an instrument of our good works, despite his imperfect nature.

Nell Gluckman: Right. Then you may end up with having to answer questions about why you are associated with this person. And I think it’s an open question still, like, did these colleges suffer because of that association? I mean, certainly the public’s view of selective colleges hasn’t improved in the last seven years. I don’t know if that’s Epstein-related or not. But the idea that they are, as your source said, Jack, sort of, they’re these backroom dealings and cocktail parties that are exclusive and this is where the real work gets done.

Jack Stripling: This all feels very Deep State.

Nell Gluckman: Not looking so great. Yeah.

*Jack Stripling: *I think we’re also playing down the creepy here. Some of these emails are really, really cringy. When you think about what Jeffrey Epstein did and who he was. You have a professor who talks about going to lunch with Epstein and a quote, bevy of beauties. You have Dan Ariely, this is a prominent behavioral economist at Duke, who’s asking Epstein for the phone number of a redhead that he met. Larry Summers is asking Epstein for advice about women. I don’t know, Emmy is this all kind of icky.

Emmy Martin: I spent a long time going through the Epstein files released by the DOJ and I. It was a lot to read. I think it’s been interesting also to see not everyone named in the documents is denying contact or expressing regret over what they’ve said in these emails to Epstein. At Yale, for example, computer science professor David Gelernter exchanged emails with Epstein between 2009 and 2015, and some of those emails included language that’s drawn criticism,including describing a Yale undergraduate student as a small, good looking blonde in the context of a potential project. At another point, Gelernter invited Epstein to New Haven to see the campus, adding that we’d love to have you. And while he didn’t provide me a comment when I reached out, Gelernter has defended that correspondence, according to reporting by the student newspaper, The Yale Daily News. In an email he sent to the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Gelernter said he was keeping Epstein’s habits in mind when describing the undergraduate student, adding that this is how men behave.

Jack Stripling: This is how men behave. I really zeroed in on that because that reminded me so much of the conversations I’ve been having with women professors in particular over the last week, that we had a feeling in our gut that this was the locker room talk that was going on. We knew we weren’t at these parties. We knew we weren’t in this club. And here’s the guy saying the quiet part out loud, that this is my estimation of how men behave. It’s interesting to see how people are responding and defending themselves in this situation.

Emmy Martin: It is. And I just wanted to note that Gelernter is now under university review, so he is not teaching this semester while that review’s ongoing. A Yale spokesperson told me that the university does not condone the actions reflected in the emails. So, alongside apologies and institutional investigations, I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing a different posture in some cases, this acknowledgement without concession, and in some instances a total defense of the interactions, as sort of social or maybe even intellectual rather than financial.

Jack Stripling: Are you guys getting like totally trapped in the allure of conspiracy here, like me?

Emmy Martin: I think it’s really easy to.

Jack Stripling: Every time I dive into these files, I think I’m just gonna be in there for 30 minutes or 10 minutes, and all of a sudden, two hours have gone by. I’ve got red yarn and thumbtacks on the wall behind me. I’m smoking a cigarette, growing a beard. I look like Matthew McConaughey in True Detective. I mean, I’m all in. I think that that speaks to the fact that it’s unbelievable how much information is here. There’s three and a half million pages of documents. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface really of what’s in here. A lot of it’s hard to decipher. We seem to be having rolling disclosures every day just on the academic story.

Emmy Martin: And there’s so much that we probably don’t know. I’m sure there are many more documents that have yet to be released. I also think it’s interesting that this allows really anyone to get to be an investigative journalist and dig through the files, and I think that’s access that the public has been wanting for a long time. And it speaks to perhaps how this moment might be different than, you know, 2019 as you were talking about, Nell, it makes me wonder what is 2026 going to look like when it comes to accountability?

Nell Gluckman: And it makes you wonder who else is in here that hasn’t been uncovered yet. Jack, I know you were talking about, are there people who are like white knuckling it through these disclosures? And I guess that remains to be seen.

Jack Stripling: Yeah, I’m very interested in that. I think that a lot of the names we’re seeing are people that over the years have been already exposed as having had some connection to Epstein and this is just sort of more meat on the bone. But I am curious about folks who are waiting for that other shoe to drop. This is a situation that I would say — I was trying to think of an equivalent to this, and I guess this is like the Panama Papers of the academy. Certainly in my career covering this sector, this feels unprecedented to me to have this level of window into exchanges that clearly people thought were never gonna see the light of day at private universities with Jeffrey Epstein. And it got me thinking a lot about secrets and what happens to people who keep secrets, because it’s clear that there are more secrets to come and I’m curious what their experiences are.

And I started thinking about “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the Edgar Allan Poe story. So …

Nell Gluckman: Go on.

Jack Stripling: I actually, yeah, I, I’m gonna indulge you. So, I called up this guy who was a good sport, Scott Peeples. He’s actually a Poe scholar at the College of Charleston. And I said, help me out, Scott. What does Edgar Allan Poe have to tell us about the Epstein scandal? And he said, uh, wrong number. Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

But then after that he did indulge me and he said, you know “Tell-Tale Heart” is one example. That’s the famous story in which a guy has dismembered somebody that’s under the floorboards of his house, and he thinks everyone can hear the person’s heart beating. You can see an analogy there. But he actually turned me on to something called the “The Imp of the Perverse.” Are you guys hip to this story?

Emmy Martin: I fear not.

Nell Gluckman: No.

Jack Stripling: Full disclosure: I don’t think it’s one of Edgar’s bangers. I read it last night and it takes a long time for him to get to his main point. It’s really about that feeling that is sometimes described as the call of the void. This temptation that you have to jump off of a tall building. You feel like an involuntary urge to do something that might be harmful.

And Scott was telling me that story seems to speak to most of what I suspect people in the academy who are exposed are feeling. There is a desire to confess. There is a desire to come clean. Now we’re not really seeing that happening, but I wonder if there’s even, to some degree, some relief among the academics who are now exposed in an even more raw fashion that all of this is out there. Because I think a lot of people for many years have been reading these stories about Epstein’s crimes and carrying around the fact that they not only continued to communicate with him, but may have even contributed to his ability to maintain relationships in elite circles of higher education. And I wonder how those folks are feeling.

I don’t know what Poe’s final word would be on that, but Scott thought it was an interesting analogy.

Nell Gluckman: Yeah, that’s something we haven’t really talked about yet is what was in it for Epstein when he was interacting with all these academics and universities more broadly. We can only guess what his motives were, but traditionally universities have been places for people to launder their reputations, and with Epstein having these really personal relationships with presidents and scholars, it almost has the feeling that he was like collecting academics the way some people collect cars. So if he’s creating this aura about himself as this moneyed guy who’s connecting lots of people and he is very global, having wealthy people on one hand and intellectuals on the other hand surrounding him, kind of helps build that reputation.

So yeah, I do wonder if these academics feel at all responsible for helping create that image and create this kind of mysterious man who was jetting in and out of countries and a private island and that sort of thing. Do they see themselves as contributing to that reputation?

Jack Stripling: Y’all want to hear what Lisa New told me about that?

Emmy Martin: I’d love to.

Nell Gluckman: Yeah.

Jack Stripling: So, as I started reporting on this, I emailed her. This is again, the woman who was married to Larry Summers and, and had the “Poetry in America project,” which I should say did not get near as much money as some of these other projects at Harvard and elsewhere.

She did engage with me in a way that she has not with other reporters, it was albeit through a crisis management guy. She wrote in part, “I have three daughters. Two stepdaughters and two granddaughters. It is absurd to think that I condone sex trafficking in any way. It never occurred to me that I was laundering Epstein’s reputation or that my small nonprofit could validate him.” And she went on to say that knowing what I know now, I would not have taken his money.

There’s so much to that statement, but the thing that struck me the most was we are in a position where an emerita professor at Harvard, who is married to the former Secretary of Treasury, is having to deny that she condones sex trafficking. That’s where we’re at in this story right now. So what the next few months mean to me is quite mind boggling.

Nell, what’s the big question on your mind going into the next couple months?

Nell Gluckman: For me it’s, does this force any kind of change in this structural reality where universities and academics are going to wealthy individuals or foundations and groveling for checks. And this is just the nature of higher education right now in a certain sector of higher education. I don’t think this is how community colleges are operating. So far, I don’t think we’ve seen anything change as these revelations have trickled out over the years, and I’ll be interested to see if anything does.

Jack Stripling: So, will a system ripe for corruption right itself out of sheer embarrassment? We will see. Thanks so much guys. I appreciate it.

Nell Gluckman: Thanks, Jack. Thank you.

Jack Stripling: College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/college matters. If you’d like, drop us a note at [email protected]. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues, Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff but may contain errors. Please email us at *[email protected]** if you have any questions.*

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