| Last week, a group of high school students at a graduation ceremony jeered and booed Leon Botstein, one of the graduation speakers and the outgoing president of Bard College. By all accounts, Botstein—who ran Bard for more than half a century—was an enormously successful college president and a world-class fundraiser who deftly steered Bard clear of the shoals that are today sinking so many small, liberal arts colleges. In fact, another speaker at the same ceremony, former New Jersey Governor Philip Murphy, praised Botstein effusively: “May I say this without any hesitation: When the history of higher education in America is written, Chapter 1 will be an homage to the incomparable Leon Botstein.” Murphy’s remarks were met with “loud jeers” from the students. | | Despite his success at Bard, Botstein was undone by his association with Jeffrey Epstein, whom he pursued as a Bard donor after Epstein had been convicted in Florida of solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor. When this association came to light, Botstein was not completely forthcoming about the nature and extent of his relationship with the disgraced financier—or so concluded the law firm of WilmerHale, which investigated the relationship between the two at the request of the Bard Board of Trustees. Botstein announced his retirement in May, the day after WilmerHale released a summary of its report, but still spoke at the high school graduation in June, where the roar of the students was so loud that Botstein had to pause in his remarks. | | To most people, this whole episode can be summed up thusly: The students were simply expressing the conventional view that all social contact with Jeffrey Epstein should be condemned, and that the rich, white men who palled around with him deserve to be canceled. That is pretty much how the New York Times treats it, describing Botstein as merely “the latest powerful person to leave a top position after their communications with Mr. Epstein were revealed.” | | But as usual, the conventional view is, at best, incomplete. The Botstein affair reveals an important complexity about our reaction to Epstein, and to all people who have committed a great wrong—a complexity that has so far escaped attention. | | *** | | In the summary of its report, WilmerHale includes the following two paragraphs, which appear back-to-back on the first page: | President Botstein relied on his view that a person convicted of crimes involving sex with a minor—’an ordinary sex offender’, in his words—could be presumed to be rehabilitated in the same way that any other convicted person should, in his view, be given that presumption.
President Botstein forcefully argues that Bard’s need for funds was paramount. His view was, 'I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God’s work.’
| | Though WilmerHale does not make the point, it should be immediately obvious that these two paragraphs communicate very different moral intuitions. The first says that we should judge a sex offender no differently than we would judge any other wrongdoer, and that we should treat them no differently than we would any other returning citizen. I agree very strongly with this view. It is explicit in my belief in redemption and change, and implicit in my opposition to demonization in all its forms. This belief is not diminished by my personal revulsion at sex offenses; as I have often insisted, there is no them, there is only us. Though castigating the sex offender as a monster supplies society with a comforting scapegoat, “many studies of social functioning have failed to find differences between sexual offenders and comparison groups, [and] the available research suggests greater similarities than differences between sexual offenders and other people.” And from a policy perspective, “people convicted of sex offenses are actually much less likely than people convicted of other offenses to be rearrested or to go back to prison.” These recidivism rates decline even further with age. | | The second paragraph, in stark contrast, expresses the moral judgment that a person can greenwash their sins. It says, in essence, “I don’t really care what Jeffrey Epstein did or whether he had changed his ways. For all I care, he could keep on soliciting young girls to engage in prostitution, so long as he was willing to shower Bard with money. All that mattered was his bank account.” So long as a person puts their wealth to good use, it doesn’t matter how they acquired it or how they publicly conduct themselves. A cretin’s money is still green. | | At the graduation ceremony, Botstein seems to have emphasized the second view instead of the first. He apparently did not speak about forgiveness, grace and rehabilitation, which are the messages implied in the first paragraph. Instead, he told the graduating seniors, “To get anything done, you’re going to have to dance with the devil.” In fairness to Botstein, I don’t have a transcript of his remarks, but media coverage of the event does not suggest that the first paragraph figured in his themes, and Bard College later released a statement explaining that Botstein was simply trying to make the anodyne point “that functional societies anywhere depend on speaking with those with whom we have differences, not giving in to Balkanization, and maintaining a commitment to dialogue, disagreement and debate always,” which is certainly closer to the second paragraph than the first. | | If the first paragraph is about redemption, the second is about expedience, and I reject the second view as strongly as I accept the first. | | But why? Why is Botstein’s second view so despicable? Would I turn away cancer-curing philanthropy because the would-be donor fudged on her taxes? Drawing sensible lines turns out to be trickier than you might think, and I’ll return to this problem in future essays, but for now, let’s start with this simple observation: Members of a group have rights, but they also have responsibilities. I tend to write about the former, and have long recoiled against the tendency in a judgmental society to cast certain people out as pariahs. A person can and should be held accountable for their wrongs, but the purpose of that punishment is not to cast out, but to bring back. I believe in redemption, and Botstein’s first paragraph expresses at least part of that philosophy. | | But though I write about it less, people also have responsibilities, which are every bit as important as their rights. One of those responsibilities is to acknowledge and respect group norms, and indifference or hostility to these norms will lead, at the very least, to some degree of social scolding. Sometimes, this is trivial; if you pick your teeth at the table, don’t expect a lot of invitations to dinner. But in the case of someone who has committed a grievous social wrong, the responsibility to respect group norms demands something more profound. While no one should be obliged to wear sackcloth and ashes to communicate their remorse, society can demand that a wrongdoer acknowledge their mistake and commit to do otherwise in the future. In short, it is not too much to demand at least some evidence of contrition. | | Yet, as far as I know, Epstein never expressed the slightest regret for his wrongs. Instead, he repeatedly leveraged his great wealth to regain access to powerful people and respected institutions. Rather than commit to the rules, he tried to buy his way back into elite society, of which his opportunistic support for Bard was surely a part. Worse, after his conviction, he appeared to be using his wealth in a way that would once again have given him access to and influence over underage women, lavishing money and favors on private boarding schools. | | Naturally, a person is free to say that a norm should change, and that the bounds of acceptable behavior should be drawn differently. A healthy, dynamic society should welcome robust debate about its norms. Likewise, a person can always say that they have no regret for violating a norm because the norm itself is unjust. Rosa Parks never apologized for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Epstein could have said that society should permit much older men to solicit underage girls for sex, that doing so is not a vice at all, and that he wasn’t sorry he did it. I venture to say that most people would disagree with him, myself included, but that doesn’t diminish his right to say it. | | He could’ve said that, but he didn’t. He never said that his behavior should be viewed as morally acceptable and he never made an argument about the normative value of sex with children. Instead, he apparently thought—like many wrongdoers—that he could get away with breaking the rules, or that the rules did not apply to someone of his wealth and stature. He was tried, convicted, and punished. At that point, society had a right to condition its full acceptance of him on some evidence of contrition. But in place of contrition, he again acted as though the rules didn’t apply to him and that he could buy his way back into contact with underage girls. | | *** | | I don’t know exactly why the graduates jeered Botstein. It’s possible they booed him because they think no one should have any contact with a convicted sex offender. If that’s what they believe, then I disagree with them strongly. But given the content of Botstein’s remarks, I suspect they booed him because they believe, contrary to Botstein, that great wealth does not relieve a person of their obligation to be a responsible member of society. After his conviction, Jeffrey Epstein had the same right to rejoin society as any returning citizen. But he squandered that right by flaunting his wealth and power and thumbing his nose at his responsibility to the group. An honorable institution would not have been complicit in Epstein’s Machiavellian greenwashing. I suspect the students grasped this foundational moral judgment better than Botstein. |
| In the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at [email protected]. |
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