In a university ecosystem that breeds hunger for status, Epstein made scholars feel like celebrities<\/p>\n
The Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> story is often told as the intersection of two obsessions: sexual abuse and money. The recently released emails certainly contain significant evidence of both. But after more than two decades as a professor at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge, I am most struck by the limitation of that frame \u2013 in part because it fails to explain why academics show up so consistently in these files.<\/p>\n Certainly, money played a role in Epstein\u2019s university connections. A rich man using donations and access to burnish his ego and legitimacy is a well-worn script, from Andrew Carnegie\u2019s libraries more than a century ago to Bill Gates<\/a>\u2019s more recent global health philanthropy. As a college drop-out, Epstein clearly craved \u201crespect\u201d from high-profile academics. Universities, meanwhile, are perpetually fundraising and institutions that rely on donations often avoid asking hard questions about where the money came from. As the Bard College president, Leon Botstein, put it<\/a> when defending his Epstein connections: \u201cAmong the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people.\u201d Institutions sometimes learn to stop asking hard questions about where the money came from.<\/p>\n Christopher Marquis is the <\/strong>Sinyi professor of management at the University of Cambridge and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a university ecosystem that breeds hunger for status, Epstein made scholars feel like celebrities The Jeffrey Epstein story is often told as the intersection of two obsessions: sexual abuse and money. The recently released emails certainly contain significant evidence of both. But after more than two decades as a professor at Harvard, Cornell, and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}