Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung was at the Boston Public Radio library studios on Friday to discuss her series of pieces on the willingness of several high-ranking officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to accept donations from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Her first article, published in the Globe last week, called on MIT President Rafael Reif to resign. Her latest piece, published Thursday, took aim at MIT Board of Trustees Chairman Robert Millard.
Leung said of Millard on Friday: “He should also quit."
“Reif’s defense is that [he] was contemporaneously unaware of the Epstein donations. And the investigation found that three members of his senior team knew, and they went out of their way to hide the money and to make it anonymous and secret. ... But it’s a different story with Chairman Millard,” Leung said, referencing a 61-page report released last week from law firm Goodwin Procter, which details MIT's ties to Epstein.
“Up until the report was out, we didn’t know about Chairman Millard’s role in this. And it turns out that M.I.T. Media Lab’s Joi Ito was kind of the ringleader in terms of trying to cultivate Epstein as a donor, [and he] had gone to Chairman Millard and spent a significant amount of time with him trying to convince Millard to help Ito bring in Epstein as a major donor, or at least help him bring his friends in.”
Joi Ito, former director of M.I.T’s Media Lab, resigned in September after acknowledging that he accepted $1.7 million from Epstein.
“There were multiple times when Millard could’ve stopped this in its tracks, or even raised a question of ‘Should we be accepting money from Jeffery Epstein? Should I say something to President Reif?’" Leung said. "Because the chairman of the board is perhaps the most powerful man on campus. Reif reports the chairman of the board. ... But none of that happened."
