Culture
Man Runs College For Half A Century, Undone By Jeffrey Epstein's Contacts List
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Leon Botstein built Bard College into a genuine institution of American intellectual life over five decades, conducted major orchestras, championed modern composers most people have never heard of, and was by every public measure exactly the kind of serious, cultured figure who gets a documentary made about him after he dies.
An email put him in Jeffrey Epstein's contacts list, and the documentary is on hold.
Botstein resigned from his remaining college board positions this week following the disclosure of the correspondence. He has denied any involvement in the criminal acts associated with Epstein, which is a denial that lands slightly differently when the thing you are denying is Jeffrey Epstein rather than, say, a parking dispute.
In a statement, Botstein described the situation as deeply painful and said he had dedicated his life to education and the arts. This is accurate. It is also the kind of sentence a person writes when the other sentences available to them are worse.
Sources close to Bard described the board's response as swift and appropriate. Sources close to Botstein described him as a man who spent fifty years doing serious work and would very much like people to remember the serious work. These two groups of sources are not currently in the same room.
What is remarkable, if you step back far enough to find the architecture of the thing, is the geometry of it. Fifty years of recorded concerts, honorary degrees, commencement addresses, curriculum reform, institutional fundraising, one capital campaign after another. And then an inbox entry. Not a meeting. Not a transaction. An email, sitting in a server somewhere, connecting a name to another name the way contacts lists do when the world was briefly and catastrophically a smaller place than it should have been.
Epstein's address book has now claimed more careers than most universities produce graduates. It functions less like evidence and more like a geological layer: you find your name in it and the question stops being what you did and becomes what you were doing in the vicinity of someone doing that.
Botstein's defenders have pointed out that many serious people corresponded with Epstein before the full scale of his crimes was known, that an email is not a confession, and that a man who spent his professional life programming Bartok and Schoenberg for audiences of two hundred is an unlikely candidate for the allegations implied. These are reasonable points. They are being made, however, into a wind that has already changed direction.
Bard College has not announced a successor to Botstein's board roles, or any formal review process, or anything at all beyond a brief acknowledgment that the resignations had been accepted. The college's press office did not respond to a request for comment, which is the one institutional behavior in this story that requires no explanation.
Botstein, for his part, has not appeared publicly since the disclosure. He is eighty years old. He conducted his first orchestra in 1968. He has opinions about Sondheim that he has expressed in print at considerable length.
The email has no opinions. The email simply exists, and it is doing considerably more work than anyone intended.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/leon-botstein-resigns-bard-college-epstein-1235639586/