Earlier this spring, I checked out organizations which are welcoming billionaire T. Denny Sanford again into the fold after a South Dakota court docket declined to press costs in opposition to him pertaining to a 2019 youngster pornography investigation. Sanford’s seeming rehabilitation — within the eyes of some — raises the evergreen query: Why do organizations settle for presents after the donor was ensnared in a squalid controversy or convicted of a critical crime?
Whereas many variables go into the calculus, the obvious (and cynical) cause is that organizations actually need the cash. Or, if we’re to place a finer level on it, recipients persuade themselves that the “good” the cash will accomplish outweighs the “dangerous,” which may embrace public relations complications and the chance of antagonizing different donors. Anybody attuned to the cruel realities of modern-day fundraising acknowledges this unstated Faustian cut price, however it isn’t usually that somebody brazenly admits to it.
This is the reason I discover Bard Faculty President Leon Botstein’s protection for assembly with Jeffrey Epstein — after the notorious financier’s 2008 conviction for solicitation of prostitution involving a minor — so illuminating. By articulating what leaders assume once they’re sitting throughout the desk from a (purported) billionaire, Botstein, whose relationship with Epstein has been documented within the New York Occasions and the Wall Avenue Journal, reveals how the impulse to forgive, a propensity for dispassionate judgment and realpolitik can issue into the cost-benefit evaluation that goes into big-donor fundraising. In his feedback on Epstein within the Occasions and the Journal, I discovered Botstein’s logic largely doubtful, however I begrudgingly appreciated his willingness to say what different leaders maintain to themselves. (Reached by e-mail for touch upon this piece, Botstein declined by means of Bard’s communications workplace.)
On Could 17, the story took one other stunning twist when the Journal reported that Botstein obtained $150,000 in consulting charges in 2016 from a basis created by Epstein referred to as Gratitude America. Responding to the disclosure within the Occasions, Botstein confirmed the fee whereas noting that “the contract was signed by another person” and that Epstein’s identify didn’t seem on his information. Botstein mentioned he donated the cash as a part of a $1 million present he gave to Bard that yr.
Botstein’s declare he didn’t know the cash got here from Epstein underscores the significance of participating in rigorous due diligence, particularly when funds contain entities with nondescript names like Gratitude America. The 2016 fee additionally has no direct bearing on Botstein’s multifaceted rationale for repeatedly assembly with Epstein again within the early- to mid-2010s. To get a greater understanding of Botstein’s considering at the moment, let’s set the stage by taking a look at Bard’s precarious monetary scenario within the run-up to receiving two unsolicited Epstein presents 12 years in the past.
Bard on the brink
The story begins with the 2008 monetary disaster, which hit personal liberal arts faculties notably exhausting. Endowments took a beating because the markets tanked, forcing faculties to hike tuition, lay off staff and try and plug the gaps with donations from their comparatively small alumni bases. (Bard’s undergraduate enrollment has historically hovered under 2,000.)
By 2011, Bard’s endowment stood at a meager $200 million, though the college’s prospects brightened when, in that very same yr, it obtained a $60 million problem present from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
It was additionally in 2011 that Epstein made two unsolicited donations to Bard “totaling $75,000 and 66 laptops,” in response to Mark Primoff, assistant vice chairman of Bard communications. Although Epstein had already been convicted within the 2008 prostitution case, had served a lenient sentence, and was very a lot a registered intercourse offender, that didn’t delay Bard and Botstein. “Should you seemed up Jeffrey Epstein on-line in 2012, you’ll see what all of us noticed,” Botstein instructed the New York Occasions in a 2019 interview. He appeared “like an ex-con who had carried out nicely on Wall Avenue.” Botstein adopted up on that preliminary present and met with Epstein about two-dozen instances over 4 years. Nonetheless, Epstein “gave no additional donations past these given in 2011,” Primoff mentioned.
In 2016, Moody’s downgraded Bard’s credit score. “The continuing depletion of liquidity and elevated publicity to financial institution agreements heightens the prospects for a liquidity disaster within the absence of extraordinary donor help,” learn the company’s credit score opinion.
“Folks don’t perceive what the job is”
The factors Botstein has raised in protection of his conferences with Epstein contact on a few of our theories concerning why leaders “forgive, neglect and obtain.” The primary is, nicely, forgiveness. Botstein seems to have been prepared to present Epstein the good thing about the doubt again in 2011 and 2012.
“We seemed him up, and he was a convicted felon for a intercourse crime. We imagine in rehabilitation,” Botstein mentioned in a Wall Avenue Journal piece printed in late April. (The Bard Jail Initiative runs college-in-prison applications and works with previously incarcerated college students.) That mentioned, school officers weren’t taking any probabilities. “Due to his earlier report,” Botstein added, “we had safety prepared. He didn’t have any free entry to anyone.”
If it appears odd to ponder welcoming a possible main donor with muscle prepared at hand ought to he attempt one thing, see additionally this remark by Botstein in a Could 5 New York Occasions story by Vimal Patel, which additional underscores the diploma to which a donor’s toxicity is within the eye of the beholder. “We had no thought, the general public report had no indication, that he was something greater than an bizarre — for those who might say such a factor — intercourse offender who had been convicted and went to jail,” Botstein mentioned. Figuring out what he is aware of now (presumably referring to Epstein’s later arrest for intercourse trafficking of minors, which preceded his suicide), Botstein mentioned he wouldn’t settle for Epstein’s cash, had been he alive, calling him a “monster” and “actually evil man.”
Most consequentially, Botstein appears to have concluded that Epstein’s help would advance the then-struggling college’s liberal arts mission. Wealthy folks will be an unsavory bunch, but when their cash can present scholarships, stop layoffs or replenish money reserves, then that’s the possibility you must take, or so the logic goes. “Folks don’t perceive what the job is,” Botstein instructed Patel. “You can not choose and select, as a result of among the many very wealthy is the next share of disagreeable and never very engaging folks. Capitalism is a tough system.”
Pretzel logic
The factor is, that’s probably not true in any respect. For starters, after all you’ll be able to “choose and select” who to simply accept cash from, and to recommend in any other case does a disservice to leaders who avoid poisonous donors as a result of they observe the establishment’s present acceptance coverage or one thing simply feels off. Furthermore, leaders who select poorly have recourse — many nonprofits that accepted Epstein’s cash subsequently returned it or donated it after his loss of life to teams that help victims of intercourse trafficking and assault.
I used to be additionally perplexed by Botstein’s commentary concerning capitalism within the above quote. He appears to suggest that the system encourages or obliges wealthy folks to do nasty issues, and we now have to simply accept their ill-gotten help as a result of that’s how the world works. However the subject isn’t whether or not Epstein received wealthy by working a shady cash administration agency (which he did). Neither is it about issues like spreading local weather change misinformation, waving away considerations about how a product adversely affected its clients, or participating in anticompetitive enterprise practices — all of which might doubtlessly make a donor poisonous within the minds of some. No, Epstein was notably poisonous as a result of nature of his crimes, not the supply of his wealth. It has nothing to do with capitalism.
Botstein’s characterization of Epstein as an “bizarre” intercourse offender or his musings on the “very wealthy” and the scourges of capitalism, nevertheless unconvincing or discursive, underscore how folks contort themselves into pretzels to justify cultivating poisonous donors when “I didn’t need the college I like to go bankrupt” would have sufficed.
In fact, Botstein wasn’t the one particular person who engaged in tortured logical gymnastics when it got here to Jeffrey Epstein. Different universities took post-conviction Epstein money whereas luminaries sought him out, together with former CIA Director William Burns (“the director didn’t know something about him, aside from that he was launched as an skilled within the monetary providers sector,” a spokesperson mentioned), former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, and, after all, Invoice Gates, whose dinners with Epstein “didn’t end in what he purported and I reduce them off.” The lesson? By no means underestimate the human thoughts’s capability for rationalization.
Philanthropy’s “perpetually chemical substances”
Botstein didn’t take pleasure in his fraught pursuit of Epstein. He instructed the Occasions’ Patel, “That may be a humiliating expertise to return time and again and over. We’re fully on the mercy of the very rich.” Once more, readers might roll their eyes at Botstein’s penchant for hyperbole, however his take additionally has a kernel of fact to it.
In 2021, the college lastly discovered deliverance in a $500 million problem grant from Soros to kickstart a $1 billion endowment drive. “When this endowment drive is full, Bard could have a $1 billion endowment, which can guarantee its pioneering mission and its educational excellence for the longer term,” Botstein mentioned in a press release. Two years later, Normal & Poor’s raised Bard’s bond ranking to “funding grade, with a optimistic outlook,” and particularly cited its “fundraising success, notably for its endowment,” in response to the college’s press launch.
Whereas Bard’s monetary troubles are a distant reminiscence, Botstein now finds himself defending decade-old conferences with a person who died virtually 4 years in the past. It’s one other reminder that we name a donation “poisonous” for a cause — it may possibly contaminate the encircling ambiance lengthy after it’s served its objective.
All of which brings me again to T. Denny Sanford. In late March, his attorneys appeared earlier than the South Dakota Supreme Courtroom arguing that the paperwork regarding the 2019 youngster pornography investigation ought to stay sealed. “If the court docket unseals the paperwork,” I wrote on the time, “the fallout from doubtlessly damaging revelations will pressure organizational leaders to get again on the ‘to-return-or-not-to-return’ merry-go-round.”
In late April, the information had been unsealed. I received’t go into the sordid particulars, however I can see why Sanford’s attorneys — who, in response to ProPublica’s Robert Faturechi, claimed “different folks had entry to Sanford’s digital gadgets”— fought to maintain them below wraps. I additionally suspect that nonprofit leaders who hoped to place the ordeal behind them can be disenchanted. Setting apart the contents of the paperwork, information of which I can solely think about made its option to leaders’ inboxes, Faturechi wrote that “the standing of a federal investigation into the matter stays unclear.”
Seems to be like it might certainly be time for Sanford’s recipients to fireside up that merry-go-round, and possibly to maintain Bard and Botstein’s persevering with struggles with the specter of Epstein nicely in thoughts.
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