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)?
Does “deceive the integrity” have some specific legal meaning wherever you’re from? I can’t find any hits for the phrase in DDG. What are you trying to argue?
I was not vindicating Ito of anything except the narrow charge (made in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article) of attempting to hide the source of Epstein funds from MIT by marking them as anonymous. It’s clear now from Reif’s letter that this was actually done with MIT’s knowledge and at MIT’s request.
Both Ito and MIT decided to take Epstein’s money, knowing that he was a convicted sex offender.
I think “deceive the integrity” means that the administration wouldn’t have been in the position in the first place to agree to anonymize the donation if not for Ito’s actions.
Except Ito wasn’t the only faculty member taking money from Epstein, and the Media lab wasn’t the only department. The thank-you letter to Epstein that Reif signed was for money Epstein gave to support Seth Lloyd — a professor in mechanical engineering and physics — and the earliest known money from Epstein after his conviction. The ‘if not for Ito’ reading doesn’t make sense.
My engrish not very good, sorry and not related to first poster.
But any funding process has to ultimately be signed off by the administration.
This is usually President level, unless it is “personal usage”.
Ito received both cash envelopes. The one for mit had to be signed off via routine anonymous so to pass mit administration.
Whether the arrangement was explicit or implicit, if Epstein name is mentioned it can’t be signed.
But I can approve as anonymous source. Also I don’t care if you receive ur own personal envelopes for your startup and other side investments.
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.
To the MIT community, as I seriously fucked up here, but completely forgot about doing so until pointed out by external counsel, I hereby tender my resignation as president of MIT.
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."
All of us forget the details of the useless meetings we were dragged into many years ago . For you, meeting Jeffrey Epstein was the most momentous day of your life. For him, it was Tuesday.
I get these ads from LinkedIn saying “check out who is in your meeting before you meet” and think they are optimistic on the usefulness of information they would give me (eg, “Jane Doe claims to be the CTO of a revolutionary company”), but in this situation it would be helpful to check and see if a sex criminal was in an upcoming meeting.
The dystopian version of the future would give us warnings of meeting participants likely to do something cancelable in the future that is likely to create and cancel wave that could impact meeting with them now.
I read it as President Reif trying to make this process completely transparent, even when it doesn't reflect well on him. This is something we need more of in our leaders, though I agree that it reads weirdly (partly because it's so unusual).
I've actually met him personally a number of times and this letter concurs with my assessment of him as being earnest and sincere to a fault. You can generally take what he says at face value without needing to deconvolve layers of Machiavellian intrigue. He's a caring and decent person and though he clearly made a huge mistake here, I don't think he would have accepted the money if he'd known more about Epstein. This is my opinion.
Transparency would mean not making repeated sidelong denials of each facts that the investigation raised, trying to spin them down. No one cares whether he "remembers" doing what he did, since it's absolutely trivial to lie about. Better to remain quiet than to telegraph dishonesty.
It’s funny that the president thinks incompetence is better to display than sex offender affinity (or whatever the flaw is). Signing letters without understanding them is incompetent. Being mentally absent from staff meetings, or presiding over meetings with inaccurate minutes, is incompetent.
I wonder if this means he thinks his risk of firing is less from being incompetent in minor matters than from supporting sex offenders.
> This is something we need more of in our leaders, though I agree that it reads weirdly (partly because it's so unusual).
I think we need more transparency if it comes with accountability. There was much transparency in the Aaron Swartz debacle and that just frustrated me because there were no changes made by MIT and the same leadership is in place and, I think, would make the same decisions today as then.
As a big fan of transparency and it’s usefulness for collaboration, it annoys me when it’s used as some strange salve for fuckups. The annoyance is that it works.
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.
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!
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadDo universities routinely do this (with money from Epstein, or other unsavory individuals)?
For another there were at least 2 types of epstein donations made to him, one of which was for “personal usage”.
Dude, before vindicating folks u gotta read the entire story plot.
I was not vindicating Ito of anything except the narrow charge (made in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article) of attempting to hide the source of Epstein funds from MIT by marking them as anonymous. It’s clear now from Reif’s letter that this was actually done with MIT’s knowledge and at MIT’s request.
Both Ito and MIT decided to take Epstein’s money, knowing that he was a convicted sex offender.
But any funding process has to ultimately be signed off by the administration.
This is usually President level, unless it is “personal usage”.
Ito received both cash envelopes. The one for mit had to be signed off via routine anonymous so to pass mit administration.
Whether the arrangement was explicit or implicit, if Epstein name is mentioned it can’t be signed. But I can approve as anonymous source. Also I don’t care if you receive ur own personal envelopes for your startup and other side investments.
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
(1) Saying no to Epstein isn't a big deal. Saying no to everyone LIKE Epstein is a very different story. This is just the one time they got caught.
(2) Endowment is only $16 million per professor. See: Growing faculty compensation. Growing expectation that EVERYONE's a millionaire.
"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!
“Although I did seem to be present, I do not recall it!”
It’s the best dark chuckle I’ve had all year.
The dystopian version of the future would give us warnings of meeting participants likely to do something cancelable in the future that is likely to create and cancel wave that could impact meeting with them now.
I've actually met him personally a number of times and this letter concurs with my assessment of him as being earnest and sincere to a fault. You can generally take what he says at face value without needing to deconvolve layers of Machiavellian intrigue. He's a caring and decent person and though he clearly made a huge mistake here, I don't think he would have accepted the money if he'd known more about Epstein. This is my opinion.
I wonder if this means he thinks his risk of firing is less from being incompetent in minor matters than from supporting sex offenders.
It's a false integrity.
Many senior executives do that.
I think we need more transparency if it comes with accountability. There was much transparency in the Aaron Swartz debacle and that just frustrated me because there were no changes made by MIT and the same leadership is in place and, I think, would make the same decisions today as then.
As a big fan of transparency and it’s usefulness for collaboration, it annoys me when it’s used as some strange salve for fuckups. The annoyance is that it works.
What would be useful is to actually use the money for something useful.
mit has to work on ethics a bit more.