Jeffrey Epstein helped fuel the campus culture wars

For almost two decades, the fiction of a widespread plague of illiberalism and woke overreach on college campuses has captured the imaginations — and, perhaps more to the point, broken the brains — of countless pundits. Commentary about it has been a staple of journalism, a reliable driver of clicks, an always-accessible conservative hobby horse. But with a growing pile of documents linking deceased predator pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to a circle of academic superstars, the disjunction between mass media’s conjuring of a college cancel-culture epidemic and the all-too-real impact of one wealthy predator’s billions in specialized funding is glaring. And as the Trump administration’s anti-diversity efforts and attacks on gender, race, and sexuality studies ramp up, the line between attacks on education and suppression of knowledge keeps blurring.

With an executive order declaring DEI efforts “unlawful,” a pledge to rescind federal funding for schools that teach gender diversity and anti-racism, and a virulently anti-trans agenda with no proportional tie to reality, the Trump administration isn’t concerned with differentiating them. The past year has seen institutions including Purdue University, the University of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Naval Academy suspended DEI initiatives, the shutdown of antiracist education, and the shuttering of gender-studies programs at Wichita State University, Towson University, the University of Iowa and, most recently, Texas A&M.

In this context, the growing evidence that Jeffrey Epstein funneled billions of dollars to academic superstars who either shared his predilections or were just happy to play along and keep the money flowing is grimly ironic. Who could have imagined that behind the ginned-up panic over college students holding their institutions accountable for shielding harassers lurked a well-oiled history of allowing male faculty to treat access to undergraduates as a perk of the job? Could anyone have guessed that the celebrated titans of social science and psychology Epstein sought out would just happen to think that #MeToo went too far or that women aren’t temperamentally suited to careers in STEM?

On second thought, don’t answer that.

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So far, very few academics, administrators and public intellectuals have seen real fallout from their associations with Epstein developed, but all of those whose relationships with the late sex criminal/financier came to light via the tranches of documents released by the Department of Justice develop crystal-clear hindsight shortly afterward. David Ross, formerly department chair of New York’s School for Visual Arts, told The New York Times that he was “ashamed” to have associated with the man with whom he had 60 friendly email exchanges. Ross’ insistence that he didn’t understand the extent of the charges against Epstein was undercut by the fact that several of the emails were exchanged while Epstein was in prison, and by Ross’ welcome-home email: “Glad the nightmare is over, Jeffrey . . . It was an undeserved punishment foisted upon you by jealous creeps.”

Likewise, George Church, a Harvard geneticist who accepted funding from Epstein, apologized in 2019, blaming “nerd tunnel vision” for a lack of due diligence. (“There should have been more conversations about, should we be doing this, should we be helping this guy?”) But when a 60 Minutes interviewer asked Church to elaborate, the light drained from his eyes as he stumbled through contradictory defenses like “You never know who’s going to have an undesirable aspect to their life,” and, moments later, “When you first hear about [charges against Epstein] it doesn’t sound like something serious.”

Nearly all the intellectuals Epstein cultivated were engaged with the work of science, technology, psychology and human behavior. His ties to academia, says Jess Calarco, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose work often centers on education, “were almost exclusively through elite, high-status, highly selective institutions that are the gatekeepers of status and opportunity in the United States.” He was drawn to maverick thinkers, like psychologists Steven Pinker and Stephen Kosslyn and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, whose work reified specifically gendered beliefs that motivated his behavior — for instance, that men are wired for competition, sexual aggression and genetically advantageous promiscuous mating.

“Accepting money from terrible people to promote ideas that justify deeply unequal, deeply exploitative models of society,” says Calarco, is an academic tradition that flourished long before Epstein cozied up to such institutions. And it’s impossible to overlook a theme that recurs across the scholars and innovators he befriended: the conception of women as either currency or roadblocks. Canadian theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss sought Epstein’s counsel on fighting credible allegations of sexual harassment. Ross, of SVA, gushed over Epstein’s idea for an art exhibit, titled “Statutory,” featuring underage models made up and dressed to appear older. “You are incredible,” he wrote in response to Epstein’s description of the project (“Some people go to prison because they can’t tell the true age. Controversial. Fun”). Other luminaries seemingly kept Epstein’s predilections in mind to curry favor, as Yale computer science professor David Gelertner did in a 2011 email to Epstein that mentioned “a v small goodlooking blonde” as a possible “editoress.”

There’s a reflexive diminishment of women that stands out in exchanges between Epstein and his big thinkers. A 2013 email from AI pioneer Ben Goertzel listing 40-plus “really smart, interesting people who I think Jeffrey would enjoy meeting,” all of them “connected closely with groundbreaking science and or futuristic tech,” included almost no women, but Goetzel’s assessment of those he does mention is telling. He calls the wife of a biotech CEO “a great example of what a woman looks like after wayyyy too much plastic surgery;” describing a robotics scientist he’s included in the list, Goertzel says “I wouldn’t call her an incredibly deep thinker, but she’s technically solid as well as extremely nice to look at.”

Then there are the emails between Epstein and former Harvard president Larry Summers in which the latter sought advice on how his sixtysomething self could best hit on the graduate student he was mentoring. Calling Epstein his “wing man,” Summers forwarded Epstein emails from the woman for his inspection; the Harvard Crimson reported that “In later messages, the two men appeared to joke about the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman.”

These exchanges don’t suggest that either man shared Epstein’s obsession with abusing underage women. What they do confirm is that Goertzel and Summers, like many of the academics Epstein cultivated, were already fluent in his  language of conquest.

This matters because science and technology are academic and research spaces notorious for hostility to women and retaliation against those who report it. One of the nine former students who filed and won a 2018 lawsuit accusing Dartmouth of ignoring the sexual harassment and assault perpetrated by a trio of well-known professors in the school’s department of psychological and brain science recalled her reaction to being grabbed by the ass and pulled onto the lap of one of them: “I just remember feeling this intense sense of embarrassment and shame, and that I would never be taken seriously as a scientist.”

The SOP of the professors (all of whom Dartmouth allowed to quietly resign) was neither accidental or incidental, but reflective of the many women in STEM who are treated as interlopers into a rightfully male realm. To Calarco, it’s simply consistent with academia’s history of exploiting women’s labor for men’s gain. ”For years it was common for male academics to marry their female students,” says Calarco, adding that institutions often had rules barring faculty wives from employment at their institution. These wives, she points out, often continued working for their husbands: doing lab research, typing up their articles, editing their books. “This was how male academics became successful,” she says. “It was seen as normal and natural; it [allowed] men to be seen as brilliant” — a longstanding precedent, she notes, that Epstein and his cadre of academics are happy to perpetuate.

Last November, New York Times columnist David Brooks penned a column titled “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out,” that was shortly followed by a tranche of photos from the Epstein files in which — you can’t make it up — Brooks himself appears. The column’s main assertion — that an outsized focus on the files is driven by a “QAnon mentality” that sees conspiracy in everything. “So of course,” he writes, “they leap to the conclusion that Epstein was a typical member of the American establishment, not an outlier.”

That line hit differently once it was reported that Brooks and Epstein were both photographed (though not together) at an elite smartypants salon called Edge that was hosted by literary agent John Brockman, financed almost entirely by Epstein, and, as BuzzFeed reported in 2019, “an intellectual boys’ club.” Brooks needs Epstein to be an outlier, because if he isn’t, well, that makes Brooks himself — a  tireless moralizer who famously divorced his wife of 28 years to marry his 23-years-younger research assistant — part of “the Epstein class,” the very concept of which Brooks decried as “inaccurate, unfair and irresponsible.”

Again: No evidence suggests that everyone Epstein hobnobbed with were party to his crimes. But he operated as he did for as long as he did because his circles were packed with individuals who were like-minded enough to minimize or laugh off his activities but not close enough to see them firsthand. Their engagement with him didn’t take the form of lowbrow “locker-room talk,” but rather high-minded library talk: Both still envision women less as people than as abstract rewards distributed among successful men.

Calarco points to Harvard’s long history of ties to the U.S. eugenics movement as a possible draw for Epstein; one document unearthed in the files, she says, is “a series of quotes lauding him for his contributions to science and microphilanthropy,” all of which, she asserts “are about evolutionary biology and the promotion of eugenics.” This certainly tracks with Epstein’s own stated interest in the tech-forward eugenics known as transhumanism, along with his dream of creating a literal breeding program at his New Mexico compound, both of which can be described as attempts to rationalize inequality and exploitation of people who don’t have the money or the clout to matter. ”

The parallels between Epstein’s efforts to fashion himself as a man of science and the Trump administration’s desire to dictate whose knowledge is legitimized and valued. What Epstein’s efforts to collect big thinkers, a longstanding panic about a crisis of campus wokeness, and current efforts to shut down study of gender, race and sexuality share is that all are expressions of backlash — a desire to contract the borders of higher education so that it moves backward instead of forward, becoming less inclusive, less accessible, and less contested as the rightful realm of white male intellectuals.