UNLOCKED: Epstein, the Donor Class, and the Corruption of the PMC

Unlocked from last month

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Jeffrey Epstein never fully belonged to the donor class; he merely bought its trappings, and with it, attracted a strange coterie of hyper-credentialed elites with impeccable CVs. They, like Larry Summers (former President of Harvard and Treasury Secretary) were the creme de la creme of the Professional Managerial class and they courted the convicted sex trafficker assiduously, impressed by his vast townhouse, private island, and access to unfathomable wealth. Noam Chomsky claimed to be impressed by Epstein’s intelligence, and by the quality of his conversation. I’m a writing snob: jeevacations@gmail.com could barely produce a grammatically correct, complete sentence across three million emails. Most of Epstein’s missives contain at least one egregious misspelling.

In this post, I will discuss Epstein and his court. In a follow up post, I will discuss what I observed at UC Irvine during the Epstein years. My personal experience of the institutional distortions produced by the imperative to secure external funding. That experience, while I was Director of the UC Irvine Humanities Center led directly to the writing of Virtue Hoarders.

In my quest to find evidence of Epstein’s much-vaunted intelligence, I found that Nature magazine reported his interests as including mathematical biology, the development of a horny drug for women, and, as reported by Futurism, schemes to “improve” human DNA through genetic engineering and the propagation of his own DNA.

Epstein also expressed interest in the work of University of California, San Diego professor V. S. Ramachandran on human intelligence. The email tranche reveals that Ramachandran was introduced to Epstein by New Age guru Deepak Chopra, and that Epstein later invited the UCSD researcher to a conference on “superintelligence.”

Epstein was not an engaging correspondent. His jokes and witticisms rarely rose above middle-school references to sexual activity. He did not engage in wordplay, puns, allude to historical, literary, cultural, or aesthetic questions that might have garnered the admiration of say, an alleged devotee of high culture – the classical music maven Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra who later claimed to have been the victim of Epstein’s broken promises. Botstein was nonetheless besotted with financier. The college president was moved to sign off an email on a plangent note: “I miss you.”

I admit to being incapable of producing complex spreadsheets or parsing deltas on financial instruments. The mechanics of shorting stocks still puzzle me. Crypto lies beyond my ken; I am too literal-minded about “mining.” Epstein’s reputed skill in asset management and investment is something I am not qualified to judge. He seemed to have been a math genius, or at least very good with handling large sums of money.

Elisa New, formerly Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard and the wife of Larry Summers, maintained a prolific correspondence with Epstein. He donated to her American Poetry Project and encouraged Leon Black of Apollo Global Management to do the same. New expressed extraordinary gratitude and remarked that the Harvard administration appeared to take her project more seriously following the external donations.

Perhaps the most notorious of New’s emails, dated 25 November 2018, contains the following paragraph:

Dear Jeffrey…

I’m going upstairs to hunt for my copy of Lolita, or will get on my kindle and reread on our way to Australia. I may have lent it to one of my kids. I would recommend reading My Antonia by Cather next time you’re on a long plane trip. The prose is gorgeous, and the book has – come to think of it – similar themes to Lolita in that it’s about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.

Lolita is about a uselessly erudite man, Humbert Humbert, who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, but it is also a novel narrated by a sociopathic cultural elitist – a European exile whose life is degraded by an uncontrollable erotic obsession and a hatred of the vulgarity of American popular culture. My Ántonia concerns the hard frontier life shared by the narrator and a young girl, Ántonia, whose friendship he cherishes even as he moves east to pursue an easier vocation than farming. Between thanking Epstein profusely for various favors he had meted out to Larry [Summers], New’s literary recommendation seems to fall short as flattery, since Epstein was already using Lolita as a how-to-desire-and-use-underage-girls manual and displayed not one iota of interest in Willa Cather.

How did professors at the most prestigious universities in America fall for Epstein’s unctuous seductions? Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, received $30 million for a research institute that Harvard has since shut down. Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito concealed the sources of funding he received from Epstein and was forced to step down in 2019. Ito had previously served on the boards of the New York Times, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the James L. Knight Foundation. Dan Ariely, a behavioral scientist at Duke University who studies dishonesty, reached out to Epstein to discuss his research on forgiveness, including his finding that victims of sexual crimes are the least likely to forgive their violators. What followed was a prolific correspondence that included Ariely’s request for Epstein’s financial support for one of his startups.

It is obvious that, in the drive to make academic research “relevant,” professors who were meant to enjoy the freedoms of tenure instead used their positions and capacities to attract wealthy donors, to court the billionaire class, and to derive profit from what are ostensibly disinterested professional activities.

Epstein was not a bug in the system; he was a feature of it. He understood the vulnerabilities of credentialed academia and exerted pressure and control over some of its most powerful players. It’s possible that because he lacked a college degree, he craved power and recognition. By tantalizing academics with financial support, he played a game that has rendered research – and researchers – susceptible to the whims of the donor class. With the sexual exploitation of women and minors functioning as an adjunct to his ambitions for power and sovereignty over the direction of human evolution, he made explicit what the wealthy and powerful really want: the biological and behavioral domination of the species. That, in the end, is the ultimate sign of both his intelligence and his stupidity.