Harvard’s Money Reputation Laundering
When we look at the miscreants that took Epstein money, the focus shouldn’t be on the ambitious and morally corrupt alone. People like that are everywhere. Yes, it is fun to name and shame, but in the end that is only cheap thrills.
Non-hideous people were also tempted into his maw by perversions of administration and misincentives. These institutional twists fostered corruption that allowed Epstein to remain influential by trading favors with the rich and powerful. We’ve already examined the role of corrupt reporters that allowed Epstein to thrive. Now we have to review the academic institutions that benefited from Epstein’s donations. In this case, that would be Harvard University.
Jeffrey Epstein’s association with Harvard cleansed him of seediness and gave him a carrot to dangle in front of young women without hope. He told young girls “he was on the board of directors at Harvard University. He promised that once she took her SATs and obtained the scores she needed, he would write a letter of recommendation for her, which he said would carry significant weight with regard to her admission.” He wasn’t on the board at all, but a naive search would show the entanglement of his name with theirs. This allowed him to find new prey for the appetites of him and his associates.
Harvard University got money. Millions of dollars of donations from Epstein gave him cache. The same is true for MIT Media Labs. This is how it worked, and why.
Elisa Knew
Larry Summers asked his friend Jeffrey Epstein for help securing money for a project of his wife, Dr. Elisa New. Dr. Elisa New was featured in the Wall Street Journal recently because a pet project of hers was funded by a non-profit Jeffrey Epstein controlled to the tune of $110,000 in 2016, and she also received a gift from Leon Black through Epstein’s recommendation. That’s bad enough. What’s really galling is that she knew he was problematic and took the money anyway. That’s what’s really revealed in the Epstein emails.
“… as soon as they heard about the gift, they took my project more seriously.”
In contacting Epstein to get her money, Dr. New advised a twisted path for forwarding the donation so that it wouldn’t be associated with his name. You know - reputation laundering. It belies Harvard’s claims that it didn’t take donations from Epstein after 2008 when he “plead[ed] guilty to state charges for solicitation of prostitution and one count of solicitation of prostitution from a minor in exchange for a 13-month prison sentence and registering as a sex offender.” Dr. New wrote:
[T]he best way for that money to come, I think, is as a gift to Poetry in America, an initiative at EdLabs at Harvard University. This will give me discretion over its disbursement to HarvardX and WGBH, but this will be absolutely be a Harvard gift that will count as Campaign success and from which Harvard will take some (but not as much) overhead.”
Incidentally, EdLabs at Harvard University was closed in 2019 when an investigation into Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. “concluded that he engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct toward several individuals, resulting in the creation of a hostile work environment over the course of several years.”
In 2014, a New York Magazine article about Jeffrey Epstein mentions Professor Elisa New and describes possible reasons for setting aside any feminist qualms about him:
“Larry Summers wife, Elisa New, drops by. She teaches American poetry at Harvard and is putting together a proposal for a series on poetry that WGBH in Boston may produce and Epstein is advising on where she might go for added support … Perhaps it’s just the ultimate feminist nightmare: Men (and a few opportunistic women) continue to come to Epstein’s because, no matter their public bows to modern manners, they simply don’t care that he offends every aspect of feminist sensibility”
A Lolita Reading to Please Epstein
The degradation doesn’t stop there. In a twisted power move, Epstein prods her to read “Lolita,” a book about a French literature professor who sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl. Dr. New knew of Epstein’s sex crime conviction, and to fund her project asked him to use his powers to turn on the money spigot. The price of getting funding for a project that will educate the public about poetry is having to go along with this barely-disguised teasing. Dr. New tries to pivot the focus of the conversation to another book, doubtless trying to keep some self-respect. See below:
But Why, Elisa? Because It “Changed Everything”
One imagines that being a tenured professor at Harvard University would be the pinnacle of anyone’s ambition. It seems not. There are pecking orders within pecking orders, even at the nation’s most prestigious university.
Dr. New wrote that Leon Black’s gift to her Poetry in America project gave her status at Harvard, “but first and foremost, it gave me leverage, enabling me to set down a solid Harvard base for my activities by giving the school something to point to: this public humanities project among the list of project the Dean supports.” It got her project new respect. “… as soon as they heard about the gift, they took my project more seriously.” That elevated status got her a “rewired studio space” and “woke up the Dean to Harvard’s role in producing the highest quality humanities content for the WORLD, and not just for Harvard students.” Leon Black’s gift coming from Epstein’s support and the gift from that non-profit he was affiliated with allowed Dr. New to dream about future projects, presumably for the public benefit also. See excerpt below:
Many, many people associated with Epstein after his initial arrest for sex crimes. He did them favors, like donating to charities, getting daughters modeling jobs or meetings with Harvard professors. He offered Woody Allen a chance to teach film editing at his home, since they were friends. Tempting morsel, indeed, for any aspiring filmmaker.
That is the corruption. When a fabulously wealthy university weighs its priorities based on donations, the sincere and ambitious would be tempted, or even forced, to seek support from where ever they could get it. Even a sex offender.
It is that Dean’s evaluation criteria for which projects to support - when Harvard is insanely wealthy as an institution - that has good-minded professors consorting with the sleazy with spare cash. If that is the metric of a project’s value, of course lines will be crossed.
Harvard does not need more money. It has billions. And billions more. Ranking projects by how much money they bring into an academic department is absurd. All that decision-making process does is make little poetry professors scrabble around for cash - when they don’t need it anyway.
That is the part of the system that has to change. Dr. Elisa New just got caught in the gears.
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