Letter regarding preliminary fact-finding about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein

So it looks like Ito wasn’t trying to deceive the administration about the source of Epstein’s donations by marking them as anonymous (as the New Yorker article implied), but rather he was marking them as anonymous because the administration was aware of and accepted Epstein’s post-conviction patronage, on the condition that it remained anonymous.

Do universities routinely do this (with money from Epstein, or other unsavory individuals)?

Huh... So it seems Joi did take the fall for everyone after all. There was so much being talked about this "blacklist" and Joi hiding the details from others, but doesn't seem to be what happened at all. They all knew, and they all talked about it.

Folks should remember that Rafael Reif was the provost under Susan Hockfield who orchestrated the whitewashing of research misconduct allegations that MIT Professor Ted Postol launched against MIT Lincoln Laboratory for using fabricated data to report results of a critical ballistic missile defense test to the Pentagon. MIT was found "guiltless" by Provost Reif after an "internal investigation" was conducted over the course of almost a decade. Steve Weiner (a highly respected former director of ballistic defense research at Lincoln for almost 20 years) has since accused MIT of engaging in a "kickback scheme" whereby Lincoln would tell the MDA whatever it needed to hear about the viability of a Starwars-inspired missile defense shield in order for executives at Raytheon to receive multi-billion dollar contracts to build it. The phony missile defense tests that Postol challenged intensely for almost a decade were one small but critical piece of the massive fraud that MIT has perpetrated against the United States taxpayer here. President Reif needs to be incarcerated, not just fired!

This letter is darkly hilarious, in a way I can't believe is intentional. In it, the president of MIT, who has previously disavowed knowledge of the university's acceptance of gifts from the accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, describes the progress report from a law firm contracted to determine who in the administration might have had knowledge of these gifts:

"First, the Goodwin Procter team has found a copy of a standard acknowledgment letter thanking Jeffrey Epstein for a gift to Seth Lloyd – as far as we know now, the first gift received at MIT after Epstein’s conviction. I apparently signed this letter on August 16, 2012, about six weeks into my presidency. Although I do not recall it, it does bear my signature."

Just a standard letter thanking a convicted sex offender, but now that you mention it, yes, it does seem to bear my signature. Moving on...

"Information shared with us last night also indicates that Epstein gifts were discussed at at least one of MIT’s regular senior team meetings, and I was present."

Yes, I suppose there was also a meeting (or possibly more than one) where the appropriateness of accepting gifts from that same sex offender were discussed, and now that you mention it, I suppose I was in attendance at at least one of them. But who's counting!

The tone of the letter reminds me of the recent McSweeney's article that was discussed here, in the form of a letter from management cheerfully explaining why they will be moving from an open office plan to "a towering panopticon": https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our-open-plan-office-fai...

Although I also get echoes of that wonderful Donald Barthelme story about getting together to hang an old friend: "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way that he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging."

http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/gone.too.far (linking to the copyrighted story on an MIT site, because why not)

Bring the popcorn, the MIT-Epstein story looks like it's just getting started!

So are they going to send the money back?

Will they send the money 'back' to some charity or group that works to help victims?

Or just more cheap sorries but-thanks-for-the-expensive-equipment?

quick edit: MIT's endowment is worth over $16billion, they can afford to say no. https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-endowment-financials-0914

Going by that reasoning ... all donations from Christians, Muslims need to be avoided. Both explicitly support the crucifixion of heathens while Muslims actively support human trafficking of heathens. Funnily enough, both also have a notion of charity.

What would be useful is to actually use the money for something useful.

Lol . Biggest irony nobody points out . Professor title of Ito involved key word “Ethics”. Isn’t that irony at its best ? How ethical is it to conduct business deals with some counter party like Epstein ? How ethical is it to conceal its name so that deal does get approved . Even more, how ethical is it to keep receiving side pocket cash envelopes for startup funds and personal travel and gadgets.

mit has to work on ethics a bit more.

Interesting, this doesn’t get anywhere close to the 1000 upvotes and 800 comments the Joi resignation story did.