Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Richard Stallman, the MIT computer scientist who said the alleged sex-abuse victims of an associate of Epstein were “entirely willing” resigned on Monday.

“I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT,” he wrote on his personal site in a post addressed to the MIT community.  “I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.”

In parallel, he also stepped down from his position as president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

“The board will be conducting a search for a new president, beginning immediately,” Stallman backed foundation said in a blog post.

Richard M. Stallman has resigned as FSF president and from the board of directors: https://t.co/4Z8kyrgBuv

— Free Software Fndn. (@fsf) September 17, 2019

IBL News | New York

Stanford University and The Santa Fe Institute added their names to the list of universities that accepted donations from sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who last month committed suicide in a New York jail cell.

In addition, more ties were reported about Epstein’s association with Harvard-related institutions, after he was forbidden from donation to the university.

• Stanford acknowledged that it received $50,000 from Epstein’s COUQ Foundation Inc. in 2004. This happened two years before the disgraced financier was convicted. The donation went to the institutions’ physics department.

• The Santa Fe Institute, a renowned science research and education center New Mexico, was the beneficiary of $275,000, including a $25,000 donation in 2010, Albuquerque Journal reported.

• Harvard University’s association with Jeffrey Epstein did not end in 2008, as the institution’s current president, Lawrence Bacow, mentioned last week.
  
  
  “Epstein continued to come and go freely on campus,” Axios.com wrote yesterday. “In 2012, for instance, he attended a meeting in Martin Nowak’s office with financier Leon Black and other men including Henry Rosovsky, the dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. He even put photos of the meeting on his website.”As previously reported by WBUR, Epstein gave $50,000 in 2016 to the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770, a non-profit that supports 3 Harvard clubs. He also gave $110,000 to Verse Video Education, a nonprofit run by Elisa New, who is married to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers.

Regarding the MIT Media Lab’s scandal, The Boston Globe informed this weekend that the institution asked some staffer to send thank you notes and dine with Epstein after he made donations to the institute’s Media Lab, according to architect and designer Neri Oxman.

Oxman detailed how she was asked to first present her research to Epstein in 2015, several years after he had already been convicted and served jail time in Florida for prostitution-related offenses. Former Media Lab director Joi Ito asked Oxman and others that the donations would be kept confidential because of Epstein’s criminal record, but yet they were asked to dine with Epstein and send him thank you notes. Oxman says she declined to dine with Epstein but did comply to Ito’s request to have her lab make him a thank-you gift: a grapefruit-sized, 3-D printed marble with a base that lit up.

Given this situation, The Boston Globe released a story wondering “Can the MIT Media Lab Save Itself?”

“The most important thing for the lab to survive immediately is to help current sponsors feel that funding the lab is still a good decision,” writes Eric Scheirer, who earned two degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s, and later was a corporate sponsor of the lab while employed at Framingham-based Bose Corp. “I must imagine that many of the companies are asking ‘What kind of place are we putting our money into?’ And that, in turn, feels precarious to me — I can imagine well a scenario in which lab funding basically collapses in a way that is not recoverable.”

IBL News | New York

Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV) is launching an innovative career program to develop trainees in aviation into professional pilots this August.

The program, called Destination 225°, provides pathways to become highly skilled and qualified for future opportunities at Southwest.

For this training, Southwest is joining four universities including Arizona State University, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, University of Nebraska Omaha and the University of Oklahoma, along with six industry partners: CAE, Bell Murray Aviation, U.S. Aviation, Jet Linx, XOJET Aviation and iAero Group’s Swift Air.

“This comprehensive training program is designed to make becoming a Southwest First Officer an attainable goal for passionate, highly-skilled individuals,” said Alan Kasher, Vice President of Flight Operations at Southwest.

The program comes as the aviation industry is facing a shortage of skilled employees. The International Civil Aviation Organization predicts the need for 480,000 new aircraft technicians and 350,000 new pilots worldwide by 2026.

Its competitor, Delta Air Lines, teamed up with eight institutions including Auburn University, the University of North Dakota and Western Michigan University to recruit and train future pilots last year.

More universities are tapping into new revenue streams by partnering with companies to offer employee training.

IBL News | New York

Calls for the L. Rafael Reif’s resignation bubble up one day after MIT president admitted he not only knew about the donations by Jeffrey Epstein to the university’s Media Lab but also signed a thank you letter to the convicted sex offender.

Yesterday, dozens of MIT students and alumni demanded L. Rafael Reif to step down.

On Friday afternoon, current students and alumni held a protest event called “They Knew: Speak-out against MIT-Epstein Scandal” at MIT’s Stratton Student Center.

“There was a cover-up from the top,” student Husayn Karimi said. “So we want accountability from the top, and we don’t trust that the administration can investigate themselves and hold themselves accountable, cause that’s what got us into this mess in the first place.”

In an MIT women’s alumni Facebook group, former students expressed outrage at the news.

“Accepting money linked to Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just disgusting and immoral,” the group’s organizers wrote. “It violated MIT’s own donor policies. Any senior administrators who knew about these donations MUST RESIGN IMMEDIATELY.”

“Jeffrey Epstein cultivated relationships with several MIT figures, including Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, former Media Lab director Joi Ito, deceased AI “pioneer” Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims), and Professor Seth Lloyd, who visited Epstein during his prison term and accepted grants afterwards. Joi Ito visited his properties, flew on his private jet, obtained 1.2 million from Epstein for his personal investments, and raised millions for the media lab with Epstein’s help. However, MIT had internally “disqualified” Epstein as a donor. That meant MIT officially would not take Epstein’s money. But Joi Ito wanted Epstein’s money anyway, and so Media Lab officials and other top MIT officials, such as MIT’s VP of Resource Development Julie Lucas as well as Richard MacMillan (a senior director under Lucas), worked together to cover up Epstein’s donations by anonymizing them,” says the MIT Students Against War group.

The rally against @MIT‘s Epstein ties reached into history, and out beyond Cambridge, to call out institutional misogyny and the influence of dark money in higher education.

(I got shin splints running up Mem. Drive to file, so, you know, read it.) https://t.co/mUwyB508UQ

— Max Larkin (@jmlarkin) September 14, 2019

Don’t hear a peep from #MeToo about @MIT “liberal” President Rafael Reif’s cabal & collusion w Epstein? Where are the outraged women? Where are the MIT faculty? Or, have the vulnerable elites become so DUMB they think Reif’s “investigation” will cure everything? Reif MUST resign.

— Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. Inventor of Email (@va_shiva) September 10, 2019

IBL News | New York

Harvard University acknowledged on Thursday that it received about $9 million from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein over a decade.

The largest of these was a $6.5 million gift in 2003 to support the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

“Each of these gifts from Epstein and his affiliated foundations to Harvard University predates his guilty plea in June 2008,” Lawrence S. Bacow, the president of the university, said.

Harvard explained it specifically rejected a gift from Epstein following his conviction in 2008.

Harvard University said nearly all of Epstein’s gifts were spent years ago in support of research and education.

Bacow [in the picture] said the university would redirect approximately $186,000 that has not been spent to organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.

IBL News | New York

The president of MIT acknowledged yesterday that the school hid donations from Jeffrey Epstein, and he even signed a thank-you letter submitted to the sex trafficker.

“It is now clear that senior members of the administration were aware of gifts the Media Lab received between 2013 and 2017 from Jeffrey Epstein’s foundations,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

“The Goodwin Procter team has found a copy of a standard acknowledgment letter thanking Jeffrey Epstein for a gift to Seth Lloyd – as far as we know now, the first gift received at MIT after Epstein’s conviction. I apparently signed this letter on August 16, 2012, about six weeks into my presidency. Although I do not recall it, it does bear my signature,” he added.

“Information shared with us last night also indicates that Epstein gifts were discussed at at least one of MIT’s regular senior team meetings, and I was present.”

“Members of my senior team knew in general terms about Epstein’s history.”

Separately on Thursday, the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman confirmed that he had helped raise funds from Epstein on behalf of the MIT Media Lab and its director, Joi Ito, a longtime friend.

What follows is the letter regarding some preliminary fact-finding about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein written by L. Rafael Reif to the MIT community:

To the members of the MIT community,

Last night, the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation and I received a preliminary update from Goodwin Procter, the outside law firm retained to ascertain the facts surrounding MIT and Jeffrey Epstein.

The fact-finding will continue to its conclusion, with regular updates to the Executive Committee and me. However, two basic facts have emerged that we thought were important to share with you now.

First, the Goodwin Procter team has found a copy of a standard acknowledgment letter thanking Jeffrey Epstein for a gift to Seth Lloyd – as far as we know now, the first gift received at MIT after Epstein’s conviction. I apparently signed this letter on August 16, 2012, about six weeks into my presidency. Although I do not recall it, it does bear my signature.

Second, it is now clear that senior members of the administration were aware of gifts the Media Lab received between 2013 and 2017 from Jeffrey Epstein’s foundations. Goodwin Procter has found that in 2013, when members of my senior team learned that the Media Lab had received the first of the Epstein gifts, they reached out to speak with Joi Ito. He asked for permission to retain this initial gift, and members of my senior team allowed it. They knew in general terms about Epstein’s history – that he had been convicted and had served a sentence and that Joi believed that he had stopped his criminal behavior. They accepted Joi’s assessment of the situation. Of course they did not know what we all know about Epstein now.

Joi sought the gifts for general research purposes, such as supporting lab scientists and buying equipment. Because the members of my team involved believed it was important that Epstein not use gifts to MIT for publicity or to enhance his own reputation, they asked Joi to agree to make clear to Epstein that he could not put his name on them publicly. These guidelines were provided to and apparently followed by the Media Lab.

Information shared with us last night also indicates that Epstein gifts were discussed at at least one of MIT’s regular senior team meetings, and I was present.

I am aware that we could and should have asked more questions about Jeffrey Epstein and about his interactions with Joi. We did not see through the limited facts we had, and we did not take time to understand the gravity of Epstein’s offenses or the harm to his young victims. I take responsibility for those errors.

While the fact finding will continue, we have already identified flaws in our processes that need to be addressed.

I am confident that, once Goodwin Procter submits its final fact-finding to the Executive Committee and me, and the Provost’s internal review is complete, MIT will have the tools to improve our review and approval processes and turn back to the central work of the Institute.

Sincerely,

L. Rafael Reif

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Resources:
The New York Times: M.I.T. President Says He Thanked Jeffrey Epstein for Gift in Letter
MIT Technology Review: MIT’s “disqualified” donors aren’t necessarily banned from donating, says Media Lab whistleblower