In times of massive cuts to federal research funding, perhaps it is no surprise that university professors and researchers are looking to private philanthropy to bridge the shortfall. There is a storied tradition to this practice — patronage from royalty or the rich elite has helped scientists for hundreds of years. In the modern era, this has taken the place of millionaires and billionaires funding centers and large-scale public health initiatives.
But accepting such funding comes with serious strings and risks, from interference in how the money is spent to helping whitewash nefarious reputations, including that of disgraced financier Jeffery Epstein.
In this often high-stakes world of multi-million-dollar grants, funneled through advancement offices, the vetting and oversight processes are opaque and universally, not public.
Is the institutional push to secure funding so great that no individual faculty can say no if a billionaire comes knocking? Perhaps, even a billionaire is not needed, a garden-variety millionaire will do. Is it left to the individual professor to do their due diligence before they accept the funds? What is the role of advancement offices at universities?
Here, I am not talking about the political leanings of the individual benefactors, but rather known criminal doings, such as is the case with Epstein. While those in contact with him and his money before 2008 can claim ignorance, once he pled guilty to prostitution and prostitution with minors below the age of 18 years, should the elite universities and individual faculty have continued their deep ties with him?
In the past decade, revelations have slowly trickled out of the extent of interconnection between Epstein and Ivy league institutions, especially Harvard, Yale and MIT. In the case of Harvard, Epstein forged deep ties with several faculty and even Harvard President Larry Summers. And, as the emails show, much of this occurred after Epstein was convicted and found guilty of trafficking minors. Summers recently resigned due to the fallout from the revelations about his ties to Epstein.
As a professor at a large public university, I have felt relentless pressure to secure funding for my own research. But we need better-informed and articulated ethics around funding and fund-raising. Often, the benefactors wish to remain anonymous and only a few people will know of their identity. However, the broad strokes of the process should be made public.
We cannot rely on newspapers pillorying us before we do the right thing. Again and again, as we learn about how universities build their endowments, we cannot wait to rectify the wrongs after everything has become history.
In its fact-finding after-the-fact in 2019, MIT acknowledged that they did not know how to avoid receiving funds from “controversial” benefactors. The director of MIT Media Lab, who solicited and received funding from Epstein beginning in 2013, pled ignorance even as he pursued Epstein. Again, this was five years after Epstein had pled guilty.
That center on Program for Evolutionary Dynamics can wait, even if the meagre sanctions on the faculty are lifted after a few years. That $100,000 funding needed to help support an institute can wait. Harvard with its $56.9 billion endowment, which has stood up to the federal government, could not say no to Epstein and his millions of dollars? And it may be that the individual faculty do not find anything wrong with collaborating with Epstein and using his money.
Who bears the responsibility of doing the homework when a billionaire is willing? Should a director of a center do some quick search of the news? Should the advancement office warn the director? A committee isn’t enough.
When their deep ties to Epstein became public, MIT appointed committees, reviewed and changed the way they did business. Now their Office of Resource Development states “Our shared values of ethical integrity and accountability are built upon a foundation of respect, safety, and kindness.”
What is to be done? Universities and research centers need funding. But we also need publicly available guidelines for potential donors and the general public. Much as we have developed ethics for actual research being done, we need ethical guidelines for raising the funds that support this research. And such guidelines should hold for the new stadium as they should for the new biomedical center.
As we are told not to become political, I fear we also learn not to look up from our narrow disciplines. Putting our heads down and working towards the next promotion (secured by receiving more funding) without checking the news or the crime-blotter will have disastrous consequences.
One argument I have heard from people is that at least this money is being put to good use, and not, for instance, to drop more bombs. There are no easy answers. We need to have discussions about this, not only in departments of philosophy but also in departments of biology or biomedical engineering.
At universities, we hold a sacred trust — to teach our young and lead in scholarship. It is a privilege not to be easily discarded for the next million or thousands of dollars.
We need to do better due diligence, as individual faculty and as institutions. Not only for our communities but also for the victims on whose bodies we stand to reach for the stars. The ultimate goal does not absolve us from how we got there.