| What Money Can Buy |
 | | Fair Harvard holds sway. Jeffrey Epstein, left, speaks with Alan Dershowitz. Rick Friedman/Corbis, via Getty Images | |
| When people ask us where we get our ideas for the column and newsletter, we usually offer a long spiel about staying aware of new social science theories, reading history, and searching out common elements in news stories from around the world. |
| And then of course there's the old journalistic classic: "Surreptitiously read the news during a moment of boredom whilst on a family trip to a historic castle and be struck by the parallels between Harvard today and the British landed aristocracy 100 years ago." |
| Last weekend Amanda visited Hever Castle, once the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, but later the residence of William Waldorf Astor at the beginnig of the 20th century. Mr. Astor, the richest man in America at the time, used the direct purchase of the Hever estate from its previous owners and the indirect purchase of a title via charitable donations to obtain a place in English high society. |
| Laundering money into status works a little differently now, as our colleagues' excellent investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's social power shows. There was still a castle of sorts — Mr. Epstein's palatial townhouse and Caribbean estates — and cameo appearances from Prince Andrew and assorted other posh Brits. But the backbone of his strategy, the equivalent of Mr. Astor's charitable works, was to associate himself with Harvard University. |
| Mr. Epstein "found Harvard's doors open to him once he opened his wallet, with donations starting in the early 1990s that eventually totaled at least $7.5 million," the article says. And although he was then a convicted sex offender with a fortune of mysterious origins, Mr. Epstein was able to parlay his access to Harvard into relationships with famous academics like Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould and Alan Dershowitz. |
| Those relationships helped give him an aura of social acceptability — a benefactor rather than a predator. Far from being shunned, he was lauded as an important donor, praised on Harvard's website, and given special treatment at conferences. That reputation seems to have helped reassure others in New York society that Mr. Epstein was still a member in good standing of the see-and-be-seen set. And perhaps that reputation helped him escape, for many years, the criminal charges that he now faces for sexual abuse of young girls. |
| In Mr. Astor's era, the main objection to that kind of obvious exchange of money for status was that it allowed uncouth parvenus entrée into the hushed halls of hereditary poshness. But Mr. Epstein's example shows today's darker consequence: Laundering money into status can be the first step of laundering status into impunity. |
| In this age of extreme inequality, there are benefits to institutions like Harvard essentially auctioning off status in exchange for research funds, of course. But it's becoming increasingly clear that people who make showy donations to universities or charitable institutions are essentially buying a kind of moral scrip — and that it can be cashed in against other moral or social transgressions. |
| Large donations to art museums, for instance, gave moral cover to the Sackler family, members of which own Purdue Pharma, as they profited by encouraging a devastating opioid epidemic. And Harvey Weinstein's $5 million donation supporting women's filmmaking at the University of Southern California seems, in retrospect, like an attempt to create a very specific counternarrative around his role in young women's careers. (After The Times published an investigation revealing a multitude of sexual assault allegations against Mr. Weinstein, the university said it would reject the donation.) |
| There are signs of change: Both the Sackler family and Mr. Weinstein now find that their money's no good with the institutions they formerly patronized. Perhaps recipients, newly aware of the ways those donations can be used as moral cover, don't want their names to be sullied. |
| Or perhaps they are worried about the whole system collapsing. If giving a large named donation comes to seem more like a signal of a guilty conscience than of respectability or prestige, funds could dry up very quickly. |
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