(2019-09-11) Why Mit Media Lab Thought It Was Doing Right By Secretly Accepting Jeffrey Epsteins Money

Why MIT Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Jeffrey Epstein’s money. What on earth were they thinking? On Sunday, we got a partial answer via an essay by Larry Lessig. (2019-09-08-LessigOnJoiAndMit)

Their justification is simple: If someone is a bad person, taking their anonymous donations is actually the best thing you can do. The money gets put to a better use, and they don’t get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn’t know about it.

This argument isn’t that eccentric. Within philanthropy, it has been seriously raised as a reasonable answer to the challenging question of how organizations should deal with donations from bad actors.

The hope was that anonymity would make it harder for bad people to benefit reputationally from their giving. What happened instead was that anonymity became a shield to dodge accountability, transparency, and common sense. The secret was corrosive to the internal culture at the Media Lab, and in the end, it was a ticking time bomb guaranteed to eventually, disastrously explode.

anonymous donations seemed like the perfect solution. If a donation is anonymous, the theory goes — that is, anonymous to the public — the giver cannot accrue any prestige or social capital from it. They can’t build connections. The gift doesn’t benefit them. And the money is now in better hands. What’s not to like?

Take Yale Law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, who proposed that political donations be required to be anonymous — so you could support preferred candidates, but not purchase influence.

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art renounced further donations from the Sackler family fortune associated with the opioid crisis, the decision spurred renewed interest in the idea that anonymity could separate the donor and the donation.

Clearly, lots of things went wrong here. The first was that while the donations were anonymous in the sense of being secret from the public, they were known to the staff at the MIT Media Lab — meaning Epstein still got much of the influence that the anonymity was supposed to cut him off from. He got a say in how the Media Lab spent the money and got special opportunities for face-to-face time with influential people. The anonymity was meant to separate the man from the money. It did not do that.

“Donations are never fully anonymous,” a paper in Nature Human Behavior looking at the dynamics of anonymous donation points out. “These donations are often revealed to the recipient, the inner circle of friends or fellow do-gooders.”

Trying to keep secrets like this is often bad for an institution’s culture, too. In general, it’s good for nonprofits to be transparent with their staff and with their other donors.

For all those reasons, I’m no longer on board with the argument that it’s fine to take money from bad actors as long as it’s anonymous

But what do we do instead?

One thing worth noting is that a genuinely, truly anonymous donation would have been fine. If Epstein had sent a series of monthly small-dollar donations to the Media Lab

makes the case for letting the donations happen openly in the light of day — and face appropriate public scrutiny and criticism. If the organization isn’t willing to weather the public criticism, that suggests that perhaps the trade-off is the wrong one.