As the Department of Justice (DOJ) continues to release further details of its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, higher education institutions across the country have faced scrutiny over their ties to Epstein. On Friday, Leon Botstein, who has served as president of Bard College for 51 years, announced his retirement after an investigation revealed that he had downplayed the extent of his relationship with Epstein. In an email to the Bard community, Botstein, 79, wrote that he would remain a member of the Bard faculty as a musician and professor.
While Botstein had maintained that his interactions with Epstein were primarily related to fundraising, documents released by the DOJ in December and January revealed that the relationship went far beyond that, with Botstein remaining in touch with Epstein up until his death in 2019.
Bard hired a law firm to conduct an investigation, and released the results on Thursday. The inquiry found that Botstein visited Epstein’s townhouse approximately 25 times over the course of their friendship and spent two days at Epstein’s Little St. James Island. Epstein also visited Bard twice and attended recitals and concerts on campus, accompanied by women who have since been identified as victims of Epstein’s sex crimes.
“In his public statements and his statements to the Bard community, President Botstein minimized and was not fully accurate in describing his relationship with Epstein,” the report concluded.
Botstein invited Epstein several times to stay at a cottage on Bard’s campus and visit high schools affiliated with Bard.
Although ties to Epstein have largely been exclusive to large research institutions, Botstein’s situation reveals that Epstein’s influence has also spread to small colleges.
Students, faculty, and alums at institutions of higher education across the United States have increasingly pressured school administrations to rename or altogether remove buildings and programs related to Epstein’s associates, such as the billionaires Howard Lutnick, Steve Tisch, and Leslie Wexner.
Haverford College has faced pressure to rename a library originally dedicated to Lutnick, who gave $25 million to Haverford in 2014 and currently serves as the U.S. Commerce Secretary. Lutnick visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island in 2012, and maintained contact with him afterward.
At Ohio State, three campus buildings bear Wexner’s name. Wexner also has a building named after him at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The declassified files revealed that, in 2019, the FBI had identified Wexner as a potential “co-conspirator” and a major supporter of Epstein.
The files also revealed that Epstein often connected Tisch, who has buildings at Tufts named after him, with young women. In a February editorial, the Tufts Daily called on the university to sever ties with Tisch. So far, none of the three institutions have decided to rename their buildings.
Other higher education institutions are also reckoning with Epstein’s ties to faculty. Epstein made connections with faculty at Yale, MIT, Duke, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and Harvard, and often gave tens of thousands of dollars to individual professors for research projects.
An April New York Times investigation found that Epstein gave donations to support the research of numerous Harvard professors, while some Harvard faculty visited Epstein’s various homes and flew on his private plane.
Epstein also contributed millions of dollars to various institutions. In a May 2020 report, Harvard disclosed that Epstein had donated $9.1 million to the university before his conviction.
The Record has not found substantial evidence of tangible connections between faculty members at the College and Epstein.
