The release of the Epstein files has revealed a striking reversal: the same institutions that cast themselves as guardians of integrity now find their own leaders entangled in scandals they once felt safely distant from.
By Anne Hendershott
Crisis Magazine
February 28, 2026
For years, most universities have cast themselves as moral sentinels of American life. They were the first to police speech, enforce ideological conformity, and dismiss ideas that challenge the dominant progressive orthodoxy on campus. Institutions that championed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion frameworks have often treated conservative ideas with open suspicion, if not outright hostility, positioning themselves as arbiters of cultural virtue rather than as forums for genuine debate. Yet the release of the Epstein files has revealed a striking reversal: the same institutions that cast themselves as guardians of integrity now find their own leaders entangled in scandals they once felt safely distant from.
The consequences are now coming into public view as universities are removing faculty from expert lists, placing professors under review, shuttering research centers, canceling conferences, and launching internal investigations when the names of academics and trustees appear in Epstein's trove of emails and personal papers. UCLA's Professor Mark Tramo, for example, found himself removed from the university's list of experts for media. A petition for his removal garnered more than 6,000 signatures the first week it was posted.
Likewise, Yale's David Gelernter, a faculty member since the early 1980s, was removed from the classroom this semester after emails with Epstein surfaced. In defending the relationship as "purely business," Gelernter drew renewed scrutiny when a 2011 email surfaced showing he had described a Yale undergraduate as a "small good‑looking blonde" while recommending her to Epstein. This was hardly a scandalous email, but in the current climate, it was enough to get him removed from teaching.
Recently, the University of Arizona canceled its upcoming Science of Consciousness Conference after the name of its organizer, Professor Stuart Hameroff, surfaced in the Epstein files. In his defense, Hameroff indicated that he has only received funding from Epstein on one occasion for research.
While Catholic colleges and universities are identified in the Epstein files, none have been named in the media, nor are they part of the media scandals. There are hundreds of pages identified in the Epstein files which mention Georgetown University-but they refer to funding or the curricula vitae of specific individuals, and none are the kind of salacious emails found elsewhere.
Fordham University is also identified in the newly released trove of Epstein files. But, like Georgetown, they are innocuous. For example, there was an email from the Fordham baseball coach and another from an individual from Fordham Law School who wished to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein-claiming that he played no part in the Jeffrey Epstein defense. The University of Notre Dame is even mentioned on a few dozen pages but only because the university is listed in the curricula vitae of individuals included in the files. It should be noted however that Jeffrey Epstein was an important donor to Catholic Charities of the U. S. Virgin Islands One of the documents in the latest trove of Epstein papers indicates that "Epstein also provides support to the largest Catholic charitable organization on the Virgin Islands, the Catholic Charities of the US Virgin Islands....Another area that Catholic Charities focuses on is youth education, notes Jeffrey Epstein."
In contrast, others, like Duke University's Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, was mentioned more than 600 times in the Epstein cache of emails. One exchange between Ariely and Epstein that has garnered media attention included Ariely asking Epstein for the name and email address of a "redhead" that he met through Epstein. Ariely wrote that "she seemed very smart" and that he "would love to be able to meet her again at some point." Under ordinary circumstances, emails like this would be dismissed as harmless. But because the recipient was Jeffrey Epstein, now redefined as a "folk devil," even casual banter between men is recast in the media as suggestive, if not incriminating.
Even university trustees-individuals typically shielded from campus politics-have found their lives upended. Brad Karp, a trustee at Union College, resigned from his role after incriminating emails with Epstein emerged. And most recently, Thomas Pritzker, a longtime University of Chicago trustee and cousin of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, has stepped down from his position as Executive Chairman of Hyatt Hotels after a trove of recently released emails revealed close ties to Epstein.
Some of these emails were embarrassingly scandalous. According to The Chicago Maroon, "Virginia Giuffre [now deceased], one of Epstein's most prominent accusers, alleged in a 2016 deposition that she 'believed she was with Tom once' when asked how many times she and Pritzker had sex." A spokesperson for Pritzker told reporters that he "continues to vehemently deny" Giuffre's allegations. To be fair, the late Giuffre admitted that she made mistakes in the past about her Epstein-related sexual encounters.
Fortunately for Thomas Pritzker, the era of the campus "kangaroo courts" is largely over, so he has no concern about being caught up in the same campus tribunals that he allowed to flourish as a University of Chicago Trustee under Obama-era campus courts. These were the Title IX tribunals created by the Obama administration's April 4, 2011, "Dear Colleague" letter, which imposed the low preponderance‑of‑the‑evidence standard and effectively stripped many accused male students of meaningful due process. Those procedures have since been rolled back by regulatory changes implemented during the Trump administration.
Under the old system, even a tangential association with someone like Epstein could have triggered a presumption of guilt, with procedural safeguards treated as obstacles rather than essentials. Had those rules still governed campus adjudication, Pritzker's appearance in the Epstein files would have made him an easy target for the same machinery that once presumed male students guilty first and sorted out the details later. Pritzker's situation is serious, but he now faces it in an environment where evidence-rather than accusation alone-is supposed to carry the burden. But in a moral panic, that may not happen.
Moral panics emerge when society is already primed by fear, distrust, and a sense of institutional decay. They flourish when the public is eager for a "folk devil" who can absorb diffuse anger about inequality, corruption, and elite impunity. Jeffrey Epstein has become that figure-the ultimate "folk devil," and the result has been a discourse in which the pursuit of truth has been eclipsed by the emotional rewards of outrage.
The current moral panic surrounding Jeffrey Epstein has created an elite sector caught in its own web of reputational vulnerability, forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that moral panic does not stop at the student level or at the campus gates. What makes the current moment so destabilizing for universities is not simply that a handful of professors or trustees exchanged emails with Epstein. Rather, it is that higher education has spent the past decade cultivating a moral vocabulary that leaves little room for nuance once a name appears in the wrong context. In an environment shaped by Title IX expansions, mandatory reporting regimes, and a zero-tolerance campus culture that often treats even the hint of scandal as complicity, even incidental associations with Epstein can trigger institutional panic.
In some ways, the Epstein files operate as a kind of "reputational pathogen." Once a scholar's name appears in the documents, the contamination spreads outward, implicating departments, centers, and entire institutions. Academia is particularly susceptible to it. Universities are hierarchical, prestige-driven ecosystems where legitimacy depends on public trust and donor confidence. When a professor is removed from the classroom, when a research center is shuttered, when a trustee resigns, the institution is not merely responding to facts, it is responding to the fear of appearing indifferent to misconduct.
The result is a flurry of defensive activities including reviews, suspensions, public statements, and outside investigations that reinforce the perception that something must be wrong. In this way, the panic becomes self-perpetuating: the more aggressively universities act defensively to protect their reputations, the more they confirm the narrative that reputational danger is everywhere.
In such moments, the pursuit of truth becomes secondary to the emotional clarity that the moral panic provides. The danger is not only that innocent people are swept up into the panic but that a society caught in the grip of symbolic outrage loses the capacity to distinguish between what is real and what merely feels morally satisfying.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
Anne Hendershott is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH. She is the author of The Politics of Envy (Crisis Publications, 2020).