Should colleges accept money from bad people?

0:01Sean Carroll:NPR.

0:11Carmen Reinicke:Sean Carroll's job is to ponder questions like, what is the fundamental nature of reality? That's because he's a professor of physics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

0:22Pia Gadkari:Sean has also advised on movies like Thor and Avengers Endgame. And he's not a stickler for the details. Yeah, it would be very hard to be a science consultant on Thor, the movie, if you were really a purist about getting the physics right. Yeah, so Sean has rubbed shoulders with notable scientists and Hollywood types. And back in 2010, he and his wife got invited to dinner at someone's home. That night, the host said to Sean, I'm friends with this guy who is pretty wealthy and interested in science. So why don't you chat for a few minutes and see if you hit it off?

0:55Carmen Reinicke:The host got this guy on the phone. So Sean took the call. On the other end of the line was Jeffrey Epstein. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong.

1:07Pia Gadkari:And I'm Darian Woods. The Epstein Files give a glimpse into the extent of Epstein's network across business, government, and academia. Today on the show, what happened after Sean's phone call, and what Epstein's links to scientists reveal about how universities fund research.

1:28Sean Carroll:Edward Jones. A rich life isn't a straight line to a destination on the horizon. Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn with detours, new possibilities, and even another passenger or three. And with a hundred years of navigating ups and downs, you can count on Edward Jones to help guide you through it all. Because life is a winding path made rich by the people you walk it with. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

2:00Pia Gadkari:We recently did an episode on how convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein acted as an elite power broker in government and business circles. He also cultivated a network of high-profile academics. They included economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers, a Nobel Prize-winning brain scientist at Columbia University, and the president of Bard College in New York State.

2:23Carmen Reinicke:Summers hasn't been accused of any criminal wrongdoing. Still, the Epstein files reveal that these connections with academics and professors continued well after he was convicted in 2008. For example, that dinner that led to physicist Sean Carroll's brush with Epstein, that took place in 2010.

2:41Pia Gadkari:Sean was a professor at Caltech at the time. The man who invited Sean and his wife to dinner was named Al Seckle. Sean knew Al was connected with some other Caltech scientists and that he was active in the local atheist community. Sean is also an atheist. So he invited us to dinner and we said, why not?

2:59Carmen Reinicke:What Sean didn't know about Al Seckle was that Seckle was helping clean up Epstein's online reputation so that negative articles would get buried in search results. All Sean knew back at that 2010 dinner was that Al Seckle had a wealthy friend who wanted to be a patron of science.

3:15Pia Gadkari:And scientists like to get donations to pursue their science. So this is something that's a call that most scientists will always take. It's not completely crazy that someone who has a lot of money wants to be a philanthropist and support science. And in fact, I think that's a good thing. So Sean took the call with Epstein. He didn't recognize the name. And he remembers the call was just a few minutes long. He was just like talking very rapidly, using all these buzzwords, you know, asking. He clearly had known something about quantum mechanics or cosmology or whatever. and he wanted to sound impressive and profound.

3:50Pia Gadkari:I think we've all heard that guy at the party who has read that one new scientist article.

3:54Carmen Reinicke:Yep, that's how he came across to Sean.

3:56Pia Gadkari:Yeah, and a few months later, Sean got an email from Al Sekel inviting him to a conference on Epstein's Island. And he named some other names who were also invited, all very good people. And it'll be interdisciplinary, spend a couple days on an island in the Caribbean talking about big ideas in science. Like, it all sounded great.

4:15Carmen Reinicke:Sean's wife was also invited. She's a science journalist who often participates in the same events as Sean. So he asked whether his wife would be part of this conference, too.

4:24Pia Gadkari:And we were told, well, she can go shopping with the other wives of the scientists.

4:29Carmen Reinicke:As you might imagine, this did not sit well with Sean's wife or him. And he already had a negative impression of Epstein after that brief buzzword-laden phone call.

4:39Pia Gadkari:I know that, you know, this is sort of self-serving and after the fact. I instantly disliked him. Sean and his wife declined the invite. And that was the end of his dealings with Epstein. Al Sekel died a few years later in 2015. The promise of this wealthy patron wanting to fund scientific research didn't materialize for Sean. And fortunately for him, that was something he could forego. I don't need that much money to sit back and have a chalkboard and a couple of grad students. That's what I need. And grad students are not cheap, so I do need some money. But I don't need to have a huge lab or anything like that.

5:16Pia Gadkari:No Hadron Collider for him.

5:18Carmen Reinicke:No, but other scientists do need huge labs and lots of money for their research. And Epstein was someone who expressed interest in science and seemed to enjoy collecting high-profile people for his network. He would organize these gatherings of intellectuals to talk about science and politics.

5:35Pia Gadkari:Combine a scientist's need for money with Epstein's deep pockets, and you've got the recipe for what Leslie Linkowski describes as an age-old dilemma. Leslie is an emeritus professor at Indiana University who studies philanthropy.

5:47Sean Carroll:What we see in the people seeking funds from him is a classic case of what we call tainted money. And the phrase literally goes back to the Bible. There's been a longstanding debate within philanthropy as to whether or not a person should take money from people who have committed one or another kind of misdeeds.

6:15Carmen Reinicke:MIT, for example, accepted$750 ,000 in donations from Epstein after his 2008 conviction. According to an independent report that MIT commissioned, some university officials argue that society benefits if money from bad sources is put to good uses.

6:32Pia Gadkari:Leslie says the MIT Epstein example also raises questions like, well, what if this tainted money is funding something unrelated to whatever the misdeed was? He says that could change how a recipient thinks about the reputational risk of accepting the money. For example, he says he'd advise an anti-sex trafficking organization not to take Epstein's money.

6:55Sean Carroll:On the other hand, if you run a computer lab at MIT, well, it's not as though you're doing anything that really in any way implicates Mr. Epstein. It's a much closer call for something like a computer lab.

7:12Carmen Reinicke:And cash-strapped scientists can find it difficult to turn down money from private donors. For one thing, this kind of funding typically comes with much less red tape than a government grant.

7:22Pia Gadkari:Private donors can also facilitate lucrative connections with other wealthy or influential people. The Epstein emails show how he traded introductions, favors, and advice with the powerful people in his orbit.

7:35Sean Carroll:Epstein, I'm sure, knew what he was doing. He created kind of a human Ponzi scheme. So by having the opportunity to rub shoulders with other people with money, you think, well, gee, there's going to be a multiplier effect. Maybe I'll get some of his money or maybe I can get Woody Allen to be a commencement speaker or any of these things.

7:58Carmen Reinicke:Physicist Sean Carroll says the networking aspect was what appealed to him about the invite to the science conference on Epstein's Island. And because he spent a lot of time thinking about time travel and multiverses, I had to ask him, is there like an alternate timeline? Like, is it an alternate timeline where you ended up there?

8:16Pia Gadkari:Yeah, I think there absolutely is. I mean, I was more attracted by the idea of just talking to other scientists in a nice environment. Even though I don't need a lot of money, I do need interactions with all sorts of different people. And that's valuable. Epstein knew the value of his vast network and now some of the powerful people that willingly plugged into that network are starting to pay the costs.

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