The Professor Pipeline: How Jeffrey Epstein Bought American Academia

In 2006, a Harvard professor received a phone call from a man he had met briefly at a scientific conference. The caller said he was interested in funding research into evolutionary dynamics. He was charming, intellectually curious, and unusually specific about the kind of work he wanted to support. He also happened to be extraordinarily wealthy.

The professor accepted the money. Over the next several years, he would receive hundreds of thousands of dollars for his research program. He visited the donor's Manhattan townhouse for dinner parties where scientists mingled with billionaires. He flew on the donor's private jet. He attended gatherings at a ranch in New Mexico where theoretical physicists debated the nature of consciousness.

The donor was Jeffrey Epstein. And the professor was far from alone.

Our database identifies 62 persons with the category "academic" across the Epstein files. They span disciplines from mathematics and computer science to evolutionary biology and neuroscience. They worked at institutions including Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Bard College, the University of Tennessee, Indiana University, and others. Some received direct research funding. Some attended Epstein's famous scientific salons. Some did both.

The newly released DOJ files, combined with reporting from the Boston Globe, Inside Higher Ed, and NPR, reveal that the relationship between Epstein and American academia was not a series of isolated donations. It was a systematic pipeline designed to acquire legitimacy, access, and influence.

The Funding Gap Epstein Exploited

To understand how a convicted sex offender embedded himself in the upper reaches of American science, you need to understand the financial pressures facing academic research.

Federal funding for basic scientific research has been declining in real terms for decades. The National Science Foundation's purchasing power peaked in the early 2000s. NIH funding, adjusted for inflation, has been essentially flat since 2003. Universities that once relied primarily on government grants have been forced to seek alternative funding sources, including private philanthropy.

This created a vulnerability that Epstein identified and exploited with precision.

One professor who received Epstein's funding described the calculus bluntly in interviews following the file release: as federal grants became harder to secure, private money for "riskier research" became more attractive. Epstein positioned himself as exactly that kind of funder, someone willing to back bold, unconventional scientific work that government agencies would not touch.

The pitch worked because it was partly true. Epstein did fund real research. He did support work that pushed boundaries. The money went to legitimate institutions and produced genuine scientific output. That was the point. The legitimacy of the research was the product Epstein was purchasing.

The New Names

The January 30 file release added significant new detail to the academic network that was previously only partially understood.

Yale: David Gelernter

David Gelernter, a Yale computer science professor known for his work on parallel computing and for surviving a mail bomb from the Unabomber in 1993, appeared in the files in connection with Epstein's funding network. Yale removed Gelernter from teaching duties after the files surfaced, pending an internal review. The university issued a statement saying it takes the matter seriously.

Gelernter's case illustrates a pattern visible throughout the academic connections: scientists whose public profiles were built on legitimate intellectual accomplishment, but whose private financial relationships with Epstein created compromising dependencies.

Bard College: Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College and a respected conductor, had previously acknowledged meeting Epstein. The new files revealed that his email correspondence with Epstein was substantially more extensive and longer-running than he had disclosed. EFTA documents show meetings spanning from 2012 through at least 2016.

Botstein represents a different dimension of Epstein's academic strategy: cultivating relationships not just with researchers, but with the administrators who control institutional access. A college president can arrange honorary degrees, speaking invitations, and introductions to faculty in ways that a single professor cannot.

The Broader Pattern

NPR and Inside Higher Ed reporting identified additional academic names in the files spanning institutions including the University of Texas, Indiana University, and several Mississippi colleges. The full scope of Epstein's academic network appears to be significantly larger than what was documented before the DOJ release.

The Harvard and MIT Connections

The most extensively documented academic relationships are the ones that broke into public view in 2019, after the Miami Herald's investigation and Epstein's arrest.

At Harvard, Epstein donated at least $9.1 million, including $6.5 million to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics run by Martin Nowak. Epstein visited the campus regularly, had an office in the program's building, and was listed as a "visiting fellow." After the donations became public, Harvard returned $186,000 that remained unspent and launched an internal review. Nowak was placed on leave.

At MIT, the relationship was managed through the MIT Media Lab under the direction of Joi Ito. Internal emails later obtained by the New Yorker showed that Ito and other MIT officials deliberately concealed Epstein's involvement, recording his donations as anonymous because they knew his name would trigger institutional scrutiny. Ito resigned in September 2019. MIT President L. Rafael Reif apologized for the university's failures.

The new files suggest that similar dynamics played out at other institutions. The question is no longer whether Epstein infiltrated academia. It is how many universities participated in concealing the relationship, and whether the concealment continued after his 2008 conviction.

19 Universities, Four Prep Schools, and a Dance Studio

The word "tuition" appears more than 1,600 times across the DOJ release. Our analysis of the tuition pipeline documented the extraordinary breadth of Epstein's payments to educational institutions:

• 19 universities received tuition payments
• Four preparatory schools, including one for students with disabilities
• Three language immersion schools
• A finishing school in Sweden
• Three Jewish education centers
• A film studio and a dance studio

These payments served multiple functions simultaneously. Some were genuine investments in education for people Epstein wanted to help or control. Some were mechanisms for bringing young women into his orbit under the guise of educational opportunity. And some were loyalty payments to associates, like the $106,000 in tuition for pilot Larry Visoski's daughter at Syracuse University.

The tuition payments and the research funding operated as two branches of the same strategy. The research money bought Epstein access to the institutions themselves: their prestige, their social networks, their credibility. The tuition money maintained control over the people inside his operation, from victims to employees to the children of his inner circle.

The Institutional Response, Then and Now

What makes the academic angle particularly troubling is the response from universities after each wave of revelations.

After 2019, Harvard and MIT conducted internal reviews, returned some money, and placed some faculty on leave. These responses were reactive and limited. No university conducted a comprehensive investigation into the full scope of Epstein's involvement with its faculty, students, or administration.

After the January 2026 release, the pattern is repeating. Yale removed Gelernter from teaching. Bard acknowledged the correspondence. Other institutions issued careful statements. But no university has taken the step of proactively auditing its own records to determine the full extent of Epstein's financial relationships with its faculty and programs.

The reluctance is understandable. A full audit might reveal relationships that universities would rather not acknowledge. It might implicate current faculty members. It might expose institutional decision-making that prioritized prestige over due diligence.

But the alternative, waiting for journalists and Congressional investigators to surface the connections one by one, has proven more damaging to institutional credibility than proactive disclosure ever would have been.

What the Data Shows

Our database allows you to trace the academic network through multiple entry points.

Search persons by the "academic" category and you will find 62 scientists, professors, and university administrators named in the Epstein files. Cross-reference them with our document archive and you can read the actual correspondence, financial records, and meeting logs that document the relationships.

Search the email archive for "university" or "professor" and you will find 98 references across the released correspondence, showing how deeply Epstein's academic networking was woven into his daily operations.

The flight logs tell another part of the story. When you track which academics flew on Epstein's aircraft and when, you can map the social calendar of his scientific salons and identify which researchers traveled to his properties.

These are not abstract connections. They are documented relationships, supported by financial records, correspondence, and testimony, that show how a convicted sex offender purchased a seat at the table of American intellectual life.

The Larger Question

The academic pipeline is not a sidebar to the Epstein story. It is central to understanding how the operation sustained itself for decades.

Epstein's power derived from his network. His network was built on legitimacy. And his legitimacy was, in significant part, borrowed from the institutions that accepted his money and his presence.

When a Harvard professor sat next to Epstein at a dinner party, it told other guests that Epstein was a serious person. When an MIT lab listed Epstein's foundation as a funder, it told potential victims and their families that Epstein was a philanthropist. When a Yale professor accepted a grant, it told the broader scientific community that Epstein's interest in research was genuine.

Each of these signals, individually small, collectively constructed a reputation that made the trafficking operation possible. The scientists did not intend this outcome. But the structure of American academic funding, with its declining federal support and its increasing dependence on private philanthropy, made them vulnerable to exactly this kind of exploitation.

The files are now public. The connections are documented. The question remaining is whether the institutions that participated, even unknowingly, in constructing Epstein's facade of respectability will reckon with their role, or whether they will continue to treat it as a series of unfortunate individual decisions rather than a systemic failure.