Post #17

Columbia’s Shifting Accountability in the Epstein Cases

By The Specter Editorial Staff

In its recent response to Columbia Spectator reporting on the long association between University Professor and Nobel Laureate Richard Axel and Jeffrey Epstein, the Columbia administration offered a master class in institutional ethics — specifically, in how to calibrate accountability to prestige, funding gravity, and accumulated distinction.

The University’s statement regarding Axel — Nobel laureate, 53-year faculty member, and until recently co-director of the Zuckerman Institute — was careful, composed, and unmistakably warm. It expressed appreciation for his “extraordinary contributions.” It affirmed that while Axel would step down as co-director and from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he would continue to lead his lab and retain his title as University Professor, Columbia’s highest academic distinction. Importantly, it noted that it had “seen no evidence” of policy violations by Axel. 

At nearly 80 years old, Axel’s departure from administrative leadership reads less like sanction than planned succession. 

Now compare that response to the University’s February 11 statement regarding the College of Dental Medicine. There, Columbia declared that communications surrounding the admission of a student — coinciding with Epstein-related fundraising solicitations  — “do not meet Columbia’s standards for integrity and independence in admissions.” Individuals were removed from administrative and volunteer leadership roles. Affiliations were terminated. The University pledged to donate funds equivalent to Epstein-related contributions to organizations supporting survivors of sexual abuse and human trafficking.

In the case at the dental school, the University did not center the absence of policy violations. It centered “standards”.

It is worth noting that the type of admissions irregularity described at the dental school — development influence, donor-adjacent intervention — is hardly alien to elite higher education. Yet here, Columbia invoked its ethical language clearly and decisively: the conduct did not meet institutional standards.

By contrast, in the Axel matter, the operative conclusion was narrower: no policy was violated; Axel broke no University-authored rule, and Columbia did not compel his departure. Instead, it graciously accepted his voluntary resignation, leaving him to step back from public life and leaving him free to manage the reputational fallout on his own timetable.

The raised eyebrows are not about diminishing Axel’s scientific achievement; his contributions to neuroscience are transformative. Rather, the question is consistency.

When students protested the war in Gaza, interim policies materialized with enviable efficiency. Enforcement mechanisms expanded. Columbia demonstrated that it can define and apply new rules quickly when it believes institutional values are at stake.

Yet when a Nobel laureate maintained an 11-year relationship (at least) with a convicted sex offender whose crimes involved the exploitation of minors — a relationship that continued well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction — the University’s language narrowed to procedural compliance. Standards receded; policy remained. 

No written policy appears to have prohibited such associations with Epstein, thus the University could only give us an institutional shrug, leaving it up to Axel to mete out his own consequences.

This asymmetry is instructive.Universities often insist that ethics extend beyond policy violations and criminal codes. They speak of judgment, responsibility, and institutional trust. Those commitments ring hollow if their invocation depends on celebrity or rank.

Faculty and students are capable of nuance. They can distinguish between illegal conduct and grievous error. What they struggle to accept is visible hierarchy in consequence — the sense that standards expand or contract depending on who stands beneath them.

If Columbia wishes to persuade its community that its principles are institutional rather than situational, it must apply them without regard to medals, proximity to donor funds, or decades of accumulated distinction.

Otherwise, the lesson is difficult to miss: prestige does not merely confer honor at Columbia. It shapes accountability.