If you spent some time in the Justice Department’s database — or were even marginally following the news — you probably weren’t surprised that the Epstein files included the names of academics. The files contained extensive information about Epstein’s close relationships with academics at elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT – and Princeton. Last week, The Daily Princetonian published an article detailing Princeton professor Corina Tarnita’s communications with child sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein following the Justice Department’s release of millions of additional files related to federal investigations into him. In the words of Harvard professor and Tarnita’s advisor Martin Nowak, Jeffrey Epstein collected scientists “just like other people collect art.”
But to say these academics were merely “collected” would be misguided. Academics are not submissive props who lack agency when accepting research funding. The common impulse among academics who maintained contact with Epstein — using the excuse that they knew him only in his capacity as a donor to academia — is disturbing.
But this reflex seems to extend beyond faculty. Our student body’s political inaction in the face of the University’s misappropriation of its wealth — the wealth that directly funds our education at one of the most privileged institutions in the world — is all too pervasive, suggesting that the moral passivity we critique in our professors is less an aberration than a manifestation of a culture we choose to participate in.
Objecting to morally dubious sources of our educational funding is important. Yet, not much of that process is in our control. An important part of our political obligation, then, comes down to our activism within the University that is directed towards its administration, which has the power to determine what kinds of donations it or its faculty accepts and where exactly that funding is used.
Money is murky. Choosing to attend an institution like Princeton, where institutional wealth can easily be tied to histories of exploitation and violence, makes grappling with that fact all the more difficult when privilege and excess are the norm. But there’s a middle ground between the complete moral absolutism of rejecting every dollar, and the relativism that treats all funding as ethically interchangeable.
The language around the relationship between elite academia and Epstein is saturated with a pretext: that learning is apolitical and that the end of intellectual discovery justifies any means. This is the implication present when Harvard professors like Elisa New thanked Epstein in 2015 for being “such a wonderful supporter … that gift woke up the Deans to the importance of Harvard’s role in producing the highest quality humanities content in the WORLD.” It was also Tarnita’s defense, when she said she knew Epstein exclusively in his “capacity as a donor to scientific research.”
Yet both New and Tarnita maintained contact with Epstein after his 2008 conviction. Does the promise of a groundbreaking scientific discovery or a beautiful poem truly justify support from a human trafficker?
While elite academia has always been greased by the philanthropy of the wealthy, students — like our professors and our institution — are not morally exempt from critically examining the sources and use of our educational funding, especially when that funding is provided on the pretense of a certain political purpose.
Epstein’s philanthropic donations to elite institutions were not only an attempt to accrue status and credibility by association. He sought to shape what educational institutions valued through his gifts to specific researchers. In an interview with Science, Epstein explained that his philanthropic efforts were in the service of funding “the smartest of the smart.” Critical of “diversity” efforts within academia, Epstein focused his attention on what he understood as highly theoretical areas of research, and made a point to distinguish himself from other philanthropists.
Epstein was a known subscriber to transhumanist ideology, likened to eugenics by some. A New York Times article from 2019 reported that Epstein was fond of funding unconventional research efforts. Notably, the article reported that some of the recipients of his donations said the “prospect of financing blinded them to the seriousness of his sexual transgressions, and even led them to give credence to some of Mr. Epstein’s half-baked scientific musings.” Epstein had his own pseudo-eugenicist understanding of how science and academia should function to serve a specific sect of humanity. But in humoring Epstein, academics further normalize the entanglement of genuine research goals with the whims of the rich and powerful.
Our professors are not the only ones guilty of this complacency. We attend an institution whose prestige can be precisely attributed to a vast history of exploitation. Our very Firestone Library is named after a rubber plantation owner. The University continues to fund a genocide in Gaza and owns its own fossil fuel company. My colleagues have spoken about the dangers of particularizing social responsibilities to the individual. The root problem, however, is that so many of us see academia as apolitical and our academic privilege as a deserved indulgence rather than a byproduct of a political reality. This both dissuades us from political action and encourages us to get lost in the rhythm of our academic comforts.
The uber-wealthy — especially those on the far-right — have a robust history of supporting academia for the purpose of advancing their political mission. Case in point at our own institution is the James Madison Program, funded by the right-wing John M. Olin Foundation with a stated purpose, in the words of a trustee, to fund conservative academia in a way that wouldn’t “raise questions about academic integrity.” Epstein’s philanthropic efforts can be seen in a similar light: he worked to fund researchers with the money that he gave, so long as it fulfilled his particular ideological bent.
Yet the point here is not that academia should be apolitical, nor that certain programs or donors with ideological commitments are uniquely suspect. It’s that money has always been political, and so is our education. It arrives with a vision of what should be produced and which questions are worth asking, and therefore funding. Attending a place like Princeton comes with a responsibility to be critical about what enables those indulgences and who has an interest in funding them. When those interests directly contradict Princeton’s mission for free, critical inquiry and the service of humanity as a whole, it is within our responsibility to oppose it through making our dissent known to university administrators.
The end goal of a Princeton education should be to encourage students to think critically. No kind of philanthropy should be set on upending that mission, nor insulated from scrutiny at the promise of intellectual prestige. If we are willing to interrogate the ethics of Epstein’s money in hindsight, we must be willing to interrogate the ethics of the wealth that sustains our institution in the present.
Siyeon Lee is a junior Opinion writer from Seoul, South Korea majoring in History. She can be reached at siyeonlee[at]princeton.edu.
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