Dear Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Eileen Donahoe, David Hornik, Jennifer Lerner, James Manyika, Martha Minow, Amanda Nguyen, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jamila Raqib, Maria Zuber, and other fellow Selection Committee members for the MIT Disobedience Awards:
I was stunned and dismayed by Joi's email disclosing his extensive involvement, personally and through MIT, with Jeffrey Epstein. It is even harder to understand how this relationship could have begun and burgeoned in 2013, years after Epstein pled guilty to sex charges involving minor children. And it boggles the mind that this involvement spanned Epstein-tainted donations to MIT as well as investments in Joi's personal funds.
I'm struggling to find a way to make sense of this situation that does not lead me to write the sentence "Respected tech and academic leader raised money from convicted pedophile and leveraged that institutional connection to personally profit from the relationship." I am not trying to be unkind, but I would need help to understand why this sentence isn't true.
I have been away and out of the loop of some prior messages among the committee. Today I requested that all of Joi's correspondence with Epstein and his associates be made public, and it was explained to me that this is not doable. I understand that this year's awards will be canceled, and I have just been invited by you to participate as a judge in the 2020 competition.
I thought about what I should do about this updated invitation, and at first I decided should withdraw. Absent clear information about what happened, I cannot make a decision about my participation with any real integrity.
But then I had another thought. Why am I the one withdrawing? Why is the person who has not done business with Jeffrey Epstein resigning, which only increases the fraction of Epstein-tainted selectors? And then it occurred to me that it may actually be better if I remain on the Selection Committee, and anybody who had any involvement with Epstein withdraw instead.
If the committee and the award can be cleansed of any taint, not just through resignation but also meaningful reforms and reparations at the university level that are probably required, I am happy to consider joining for 2020. But it will have to be me OR anyone associated with Epstein.
This is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure resignation letter, then. I'm happy to stand down if any Epstein-affiliated members want to remain on the committee. Or if it's preferable to have new blood that is totally Epstein-free, I'm happy to stay on in their absence, along with others.
Those who choose to stay on should know that they may be needlessly endangering the reputation of other people who don't deserve the stain. I don't wish to be responsible for this kind of enabling. I also write with an awareness that it is the secretiveness and selfpreservational aspect of these elite networks that keep power in a few, and often the wrong, hands, and so I will be transparent with the public about this message.
I hope that this letter will be understood as a fulfillment, not a betrayal, of the spirit of an award that, according to its website, "recognizes individuals and groups who engage in responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging norms, rules, or laws that sustain society's injustices."
Above all, I hope the remedy goes far beyond the return of monies that has been proposed. A plutocratic predator was welcomed into a citadel of American thinking and doing, and this welcome was personally exploited beyond the original relationship, and nothing but words have been offered. There ought to be not only introspection but also a whole lot of change coming.
And justice.