I often recall something that my daughters’ level-headed preschool director said to me when I interviewed her for a story about the pressure parents put on New York City toddlers to ace their kindergarten admissions tests. “I used to think things would get crazier but then they’d calm down,” she told in the 1990’s. “Now I realize they’re just going to get crazier and crazier.”
A quarter of a century later her melancholy prediction continues to prove true, I thought, as I read stories about the Epstein files. Particularly about his attraction to the academic community, and they to him. Scientists and scholars who now disavow him eagerly sought his money as well as invitations to his dinner parties and private island.
One might ask what the connection is between kindergarten admissions and Jeffrey Epstein. Fortunately, nothing directly, but obliquely perhaps more so. Though my name did pop up when my daughter, now a mother herself tackling the preschool admissions process, searched for it in the Justice Department’s Epstein Files data base. (One could wonder what my daughter was doing searching for my name in the first place.) Fortunately, the reference is innocuous.
For almost a decade and a half I wrote the New York Observer’s Crime Blotter. Adopting the saying among crooks of that era that “Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn takes it,” when Brooklyn was a less bougie borough than it is today, the column attempted to replicate, with a dash of humor, the sensibility of small town police blotters. In this case, the small town was the Upper East Side.
Hence a Crime Blotter item from January, 2003, that I’d long forgotten I’d written. It involved Ghislaine Maxwell, though as victim rather than perpetrator. Valuables started disappearing from her East 65th street townhouse including cash, clothing and jewelry. They were discovered in her cook and butler’s living quarters, according to the 19th precinct detective squad, as well as in the oven. The couple were arrested and charged with grand larceny and possession of stolen property. Jeffrey Epstein’s name appears nowhere in the story. At the time Ghislaine was better known than her accomplice, and as a socialite about town and the daughter of deceased British media baron Robert Maxwell.
But based on the status competition among elites to gain their progeny acceptances to top schools — starting in preschool — I can’t say I was shocked when names such as that of Bard College president Leon Botstein and other top academics appeared in the Epstein files, far more frequently than mine did. Mr. Botstein has explained his association with Epstein as limited to encouraging donations to the Annandale-on-Hudson liberal arts college.
For the last few decades the nation’s most selective colleges and universities have been engaged in an unseemly arms race to lure students as much by the splendor of their campuses as by the caliber of their education. Their leaders seem to believe that to compete with peer institutions requires that their lawns be dotted with pleasing sculpture, their athletic facilities state of the art to lure top athletes, and that their dining halls — boasting excellent views — serve meals that are as gastronomically inventive as they are locally sourced, sustainable and nutritious.
I experienced first hand the urgency to maintain standards when I returned to my college last June for my 50th reunion. The school did everything to make the weekend festive — with lectures by famous professors, cocktail parties, and dance bands — but if the event had a narrative thread it was the need for generous alumni support to keep our alma mater’s winning streak intact.
I certainly understand the impulse, especially as the Trump administration threatens the independence of academic institutions with budget cuts, but do these wealthy schools with their impressive endowments really need another art museum, science building or indoor waterfall?
I suspect that institutional muscle was applied to my classmates and me more strenuously than to younger returning reunion classes for obvious reasons. We’re older so more likely to have accumulated wealth; may be ripe to remember our beloved school in estate planning; and we’re prone to croak soon, making time of the essence.
Invariably, you’ll have alumni who did very well and make a big splash by using the reunion to announce the donation of a mouth-watering, envy-making amount of money; shaming the rest of us to do the same, if necessarily in smaller increments.
I enjoyed my college years. If I didn’t take full advantage of its academics I have only myself to blame. But it supplied the canvas where I was given the license to become who I am. Perhaps it even encouraged civilizing impulses, if mostly by osmosis.
Nonetheless, I walked away from the reunion feeling as if I’d been shaken down and wondering whether it was just me; until I remembered a friend who’d resigned from the school’s board in protest because he though the bucolic college was seriously overbuilding. I’m not mentioning the name of the institution mostly because I know that its not an outlier. If it hopes to maintain its impressive U.S. News ranking, appearance matters.
The question I have is when, if ever, the madness stops? When will my pre-school head’s prediction that things will keep getting crazier no longer apply? It’s unlikely that Jeffrey Epstein’s unseemly acquisition of star professors and university presidents will encourage much soul-searching. As wealth inequality only grows that day appears a long way off.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
