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College fundraising faces scrutiny after latest batch of Epstein files

The latest batch of Epstein files is casting an unflattering light on the world of college fundraising, with multiple professors named in the records saying they were looking for donations.  

College fundraising, especially for individual professors, is typically done through government contracts or foundations, but multiple academics are shown to have exchanged emails or met with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to raise money for their work.  

Yale professor Nicholas Christak said he arranged a meeting and corresponded with Epstein from 2013 to 2016 to get funding for his lab.  

“Like many other scientists who crossed his path, I was appalled by the revelations about Mr. Epstein that emerged after my very limited interactions with him in 2013 in the context of fundraising for my lab at Yale,” Christakis told Yale’s student newspaper.   

Efforts to get individuals to donate to labs are uncommon because government grants or foundation philanthropy typically yields more monetary benefit for the work it takes, especially in the hard sciences.  

“I think most faculty are more used to approaching foundations and government, as I say, also to some extent, corporations will support lab work and hard science research. I think it’s rare for faculty to go to individual donors. For one thing, they’re just harder to approach, unless some of them have established reputations as supporting that kind of work,” said Alan Abramson, professor and director of the Center on Nonprofits, Philanthropy and Social Enterprise at George Mason University.  

Big individual donors are more often pursued by higher-level school officials, such as deans and presidents.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, is under a microscope after extensive interactions with Epstein were detailed in the latest batch of files, showing a relationship that continued well after Epstein’s sex crime conviction.

Botstein has defended his interactions as the typical efforts of a university president to get money for their institution.  

“The only reason President Botstein ever communicated with Jeffrey Epstein was in the work of fundraising for Bard and its programs, particularly in the arts. The college has been public and transparent about these fundraising contacts for years, and the public release of email records only illustrates how fundraising development takes shape,” the school said in a statement to The Hill. 

“The nature of President Botstein’s fundraising contact with Epstein never revealed how monstrous, cruel, and dangerous he turned out to be,” it added. 

It is hard to know how much university administrations would have known about the individual fundraising efforts of their professors. While there are policies in place at many universities that say professors need to check in with leadership for fundraising efforts, experts say they are hard to enforce.  

The “gift acceptance” rules of many universities “usually say if you are going to solicit a donor, you need the university’s approval, and there are usually some criteria around whether or not the university will accept a gift from a donor,” said Larry Ladd, an expert on university financing and governance with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. 

“It’s hard to enforce that policy, as you might imagine. If you have 1,000 faculty or 2,000 faculty, it’s hard to enforce them, and particularly if they’re at the initial stages of just building a relationship with somebody who might be a donor,” Ladd added. 

Universities do have tough decisions to make about what type of donors they will deal with, and it is doubtful many new the full interactions of their staffers with Epstein, given commitments and donations did not always materialize.  

“I doubt that the university administration knew about it. If a person actually receives a gift, the university has to approve the receipt of that gift … and I don’t know if there are any cases where a gift actually happened, but if one did, it’s the university that accepts the gift, not the individual faculty member, so at that point the university would know,” Ladd said.  

As reports on the details of the Epstein files grow, multiple faculty members have been pulled from their teaching duties.

Yale computer science professor David Gelernter is out of classroom while the university reviews his connections with Epstein. Gelernter had written that he “liked chatting with E because he was brilliant & funny in conversation” but didn’t know his history.  

The mess could lead to reforms in how universities handle professors’ garnering donations for their work.  

“We have had these cases in the past where institutions have had to engage in reputation washing as a result of accepting large donations from individuals who all of a sudden posed a reputational risk. And so, I wondered, have we learned anything from this?” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “Certainly, we need stronger donor vetting policies … and some schools are considering clear ethical guidelines stating which donors are unacceptable with respect to criminal histories or misaligned values, and more transparency around gift origins and conditions.” 

“But the Epstein case shows that the reforms aren’t just about policies, they’re about organizational cultures, and so faculty and administrators need to be willing to raise concerns about problematic donors, and so that requires ongoing cultural development about the mission, vision and values of institutions,” she added.  

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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