Long Live Corrupt Universities

Monday, September 23, 2019     Good charity from a bad man The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been shaken by revelations of its longstanding, lucrative — and secretive — ties with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier and sexual predator, who was convicted and sentenced to prison in 2008 for procuring minors for prostitution. Though Epstein was an odious pedophile, he was also generous, and MIT received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from him over the years. As the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow reported in a bombshell story this month, Epstein-controlled foundations gave the university at least $2.5 million, much of it channeled to MIT’s renowned Media Lab. Epstein was designated in MIT’s official donor database as “disqualified” from donating to the university after his criminal conviction. Yet “the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds,” and used him as an intermediary to millions more from other donors, Farrow reported — all while dissembling about what it was doing. Epstein’s gifts to the Media Lab were recorded as “anonymous,” but they were hardly a secret. According to the New Yorker, “the effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or ‘he who must not be named.’” Last month Epstein hanged himself in a federal prison in Manhattan. A few weeks earlier, he had been charged with sex trafficking by the US attorney’s office. The prosecutor was looking anew at the accusations filed by women who claimed to have been molested, manipulated, or raped by Epstein — or by other men at his invitation — when they were minors.

The exposure of MIT’s eagerness to take Epstein’s money regardless of his scandalous criminal history has given the university an ugly black eye. The Media Lab’s director, Joi Ito, has resigned. The news coverage has been brutal. There have been demands for the resignation of university president L. Rafael Reif. In a letter last week , 60 female MIT faculty members condemned the school’s hush-hush courting of Epstein and its willingness to accept gifts from so tainted a donor. “How can MIT’s leadership be trusted,” the letter-writers asked, “when it appears that child prostitution and sex trafficking can be ignored in exchange for a financial contribution?” That’s a fair criticism. It is made all the weightier by MIT’s efforts to conceal its relationship with Epstein, and by its apparent willingness to run roughshod over its own ethical standards in order to keep the billionaire’s dollars flowing. But I wonder how many of the 60 faculty members who signed that letter would be willing to forgo what the Epstein dollars made possible. Would it affect their outrage if the cash Epstein directed to MIT helped fund their latest raises, for example? Or if it was used to underwrite their labs, or research budgets, or teaching assistants? What would they say if Reif offered to make amends for MIT’s duplicitous fundraising behavior by disgorging an amount equal to Epstein’s donations, with the money to come from reducing professors’ salaries and expense accounts? My point isn’t to excuse any wrongdoing on the part of MIT, nor to accuse the faculty members of hypocrisy. Epstein’s behavior was repellent. If MIT wasn’t willing to openly take money from a convicted sexual predator, its willingness to do so secretly was shameful. Yet it is also true — and worth remembering — that money from very bad donors can be used for very good purposes. You don't have to be a great person to be a great philanthropist. History is replete with examples of beautiful and ennobling ends being achieved with the gifts of moral cripples and selfish boors. Consider John D. MacArthur, the insurance and real-estate mogul whose fortune underwrites the annual MacArthur “genius” grants and hundreds of other projects intended to further “a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.” At the time of his death, MacArthur was the second-richest man in America. He was also a vulgar, unethical, money-obsessed, womanizing jerk. “Comely young ladies who worked for Bankers Life [MacArthur’s insurance company] were famously and forever warned about getting too close to the owner if they weren’t willing to put up with gropes and pinches,” writes Nancy Kriplen in The Eccentric Billionaire, her 2008 biography of MacArthur. He was unembarrassed by his sexual harassment, telling one reporter: “These days, patting an ass is just like squeezing a hand.” By the standards of the #MeToo era, MacArthur’s behavior was inexcusable. By the standards of any era, he appears to have been a highly unpleasant person. Nevertheless, thanks to his largesse the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation bestows $260 million in grants every year. I have never heard of that money being spurned because the benefactor who made them possible was so distasteful. Should it be? “Uninspiring — even deeply unlikeable — donors sometimes produce amazingly powerful results,” observed Grant Smith in the journal Philanthropy in 2017. “Some of our country’s most consequential giving was advanced by an all-star assortment of human train wrecks.” Smith supplied examples. Charles Yerkes was a 19th-century broker and railway magnate who went to prison for larceny and embezzlement, blackmailed public officials, and expanded his business by means of bribery and other illegality. Yet this corrupt, dishonest tycoon “did leave behind one massive philanthropic accomplishment,” Smith recounted: In what he admitted was an attempt to burnish his image, he pledged $300,000 in 1892 so the newly founded University of Chicago could build what was then the world’s largest telescope. The Yerkes observatory integrated observation equipment with on-site laboratories, marrying astronomy with earth sciences. It became a nonpareil research facility, and the birthplace of modern astrophysics, making Yerkes one of history’s most consequential supporters of science. The Gilded Age industrialist Henry Frick is another example of the phenomenon. He made his fortune in coke, the essential fuel in steelmaking. By his 30th birthday, Frick had become the world’s foremost coke manufacturer; at 32 he became a partner of Andrew Carnegie, and upon Carnegie’s death eight years later, Frick took over as chairman of Carnegie Steel Corp. Carnegie was widely admired, but when Frick himself died, the obituaries were scathing. “He was uncompromising,” observed the New York World, and “if at any time he took notice of the broadening tendencies of humanity . . . he gave no proof of it by word or deed.” The New York Tribune remarked that “the name of Frick was abhorrent to great numbers of his fellow citizens.” There was ample reason to describe Frick, one of the giants of the Gilded Age, in such caustic terms. He was a notorious strikebreaker, whose hired agents battled the striking employees at the Homestead steel works in Pennsylvania in 1892, a clash in which dozens of men were killed or wounded, and that ultimately required the intervention of 8,000 state militiamen before order was restored. Frick was also a co-founder of an exclusive fishing and hunting club near a mountain lake in Pennsylvania; the club’s negligent maintenance of the dam that created the lake indirectly caused the apocalyptic Johnstown Flood of 1889.   When Henry Frick died, one New York newspaper observed: "The name of Frick was abhorrent to great numbers of his fellow citizens."   So reviled was Frick in his lifetime that he was called “the most hated man in America.” Yet as Smith pointed out, Frick had for years supported charities in his native western Pennsylvania, and the vast majority of his enormous estate was bequeathed to worthy causes when he died, including universities, parks, and hospitals. “His signature gift,” wrote Smith, “was bequeathing his Manhattan home and remarkable art collection to New York City.” Those became the nucleus of The Frick Collection, justly famed as one of the nation's most wonderful repositories of art, including a superb collection of Old Masters and European sculpture. “Thus did a man excoriated in life for ugliness become remembered after death for beauty,” Smith noted. None of this is meant in any way to diminish Epstein’s crimes, nor to exculpate the MIT officials who, in their pursuit of money, were prepared to ignore the cruelty and malevolence of the man who committed them. It is to point out that through philanthropy, the dollars of even world-class degenerates and monsters can be turned to admirable ends. Is that not a good thing? Do we really want universities, museums, hospitals, and homeless shelters to spurn those dollars out of revulsion for the villainous behavior of the donors? Would society be better off if charitable organizations refused to take money from villains? We know that Jeffrey Epstein used some of his money for terrible things. The money he gave to MIT cannot repair his reputation. But at least those funds weren’t used to exploit vulnerable girls.