"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!