Earlier this month, The Daily Princetonian reported that Princeton professor Corina Tarnita communicated with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein between 2008 and 2012. When she met Epstein, Tarnita was a Ph.D. student at Harvard working in the lab of Martin Nowak, a long-time Epstein associate. Any connection to such a repugnant figure is bound to elicit strong emotion, but the scandal’s more lurid aspects can distract us from another perturbing question: What the hell was Jeffrey Epstein doing at Harvard anyway?
Epstein embedded himself into elite academic circles through his wealth and influence, forming close ties with professors at both Harvard and Yale. He donated millions of dollars to research groups at Harvard and elsewhere, including $6.5 million used to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by Nowak. Epstein even had an office on Harvard’s campus within the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics that he visited at least 40 times between 2010 and 2018, after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. This was not the only time Epstein’s cash and connections caused the rules to be bent in his favor. Epstein’s $200,000 gift to professor Stephen Kosslyn, the chair of Harvard’s psychology department at the time, even earned him — an undergrad dropout — the title of Visiting Fellow.
Epstein’s wealth gained him an inappropriate influence in the world of elite higher education. Today, in an era of federal funding cuts and University-wide belt-tightening, labs are likely to become increasingly reliant on private monies to fund their research. Princeton must learn from the Epstein scandal and carefully scrutinize the relationship between donors and researchers to prevent external exertion of coercive power. That is not to absolve Nowak of responsibility; professors have the ultimate responsibility for their labs. However, to protect the integrity of their researchers, the University must build institutional controls to donor overreach from those with vast influence, like Epstein.
Epstein’s level of access is sickening given his crimes. But any close, personal relationship between donor and recipient should have generated scrutiny from Harvard’s administration. His case represents a systemic failure of institutional oversight. Universities must implement safeguards to facilitate an orderly flow of donations to ensure that wealth is not a gateway into unwarranted coercive influence.
I’m thankful that no similar ties have yet been discovered between Epstein and any Princeton research groups, but that is no credit to the University’s oversight structures. Princeton has long tolerated ethically dubious relationships between labs and their donors, for example by allowing the Carbon Mitigation Institute (CMI) at High Meadows Environmental Institute to accept millions of dollars from BP.
It isn’t possible to know how much influence BP has exerted over the research CMI conducted, and that’s the problem. The power imbalance inherent to the donor-recipient relationship exerts coercive pressure that cannot easily be quantified. Even if a donation doesn’t create an obvious conflict of interest, Epstein’s case shows that money exerts an influence over recipients which can put labs in a compromising position.
My colleague Siyeon Lee correctly identified the threats that money from questionable sources — exemplified by Epstein — pose to academia. However, student activism alone cannot sufficiently counterbalance the coercive power that donors hold over the whole campus: Systemic safeguards are imperative. Principal investigators have an obligation not only to the integrity of their research, but to protect their researchers from being put in morally compromising positions.
As a major donor to Nowak’s lab, Epstein exercised significant power over Nowak and even greater power over junior members of the lab. The relationship between advisor and advisee is a deeply imbalanced one, and remaining in an advisor’s good graces is critical if a student hopes to pursue a career in academia. Nowak’s close relationship with Epstein would have strongly incentivized members of his lab to remain silent about any qualms they might have had regarding the ethics of taking money from Epstein. If your research funding, career prospects, and potentially even your degree are contingent on keeping a donor happy, what leverage do you have to stand up to inappropriate behavior?
These dangerous power dynamics emerge when donors are given unfettered power over their labs, which present University policies fail to prevent. Consistent with the University’s commitments to academic freedom, lab groups at Princeton have been able to operate with significant discretion over the sources and uses of their research funds. However, Princeton’s guidelines for sponsored research impose no restrictions on funding sources besides requiring that its sources and purpose be disclosed, which fails to prevent the influence of donors like Epstein and thus to protect the integrity of its researchers.
The ‘Prince,’ like other newspapers, can serve as a model. As a content-producing member of the ‘Prince,’ my interactions with the business team are very limited: This is by design. Introducing money into the newsroom risks influencing reporting, just as it poses an inherent threat to the integrity of research.
But newspapers need money to operate. I might not like ads running next to my columns, but without them I wouldn’t be able to subject the University community to my inane ramblings. The solution is not to remove money from the newsroom, but instead to establish a clear separation between the content and business side of the paper.
Labs likewise cannot operate outside of fiscal constraints, and the solution is the same: Establish a clear separation to ensure that this reliance does not compromise the integrity of the research.
One way to address these challenges while still ensuring that faculty have ultimate control over their own work would be to form an independent faculty committee charged with overseeing gifts to the University and confirming that they fall within ethical bounds. All donations over a certain size would be referred to the committee, who would also have the authority to investigate possible ethical conflicts for smaller donations, including by establishing a direct line for whistleblower complaints. These functions presently fall under the authority of the University Research Board, but the board’s scope is too broad to give sufficient consideration to the ethical implications specific to sponsored research.
An independent body would serve as a check on the pressure that donations inevitably exert on those who rely on those funds to conduct their work. While it likely could not prevent every possible abuse, it could limit the worst excesses and prevent a shadow like the one that Epstein cast over Harvard from falling over Princeton.
Thomas Buckley is a senior Opinion writer from Colchester, Vt., majoring in SPIA. He can be reached at thomas.buckley[at]princeton.edu.
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