By Mathias Risse
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Institutional complicity in trafficking, and institutional failure to reckon with that complicity, are human rights concerns of the kind human rights centers exist to address.
I. Two Dimensions of One Question
Harvard's reckoning with its ties to Jeffrey Epstein has two dimensions that are rarely discussed together but that belong to the same moral and institutional question. The first is physical and symbolic: what the institution continues to honor through the names it places over its doors. The second is procedural and substantive: how the institution investigates potential misconduct by its own members and what accountability, where warranted, should look like.
These are difficult matters to deal with. What I will argue is that the Wexner name should be removed from the Harvard Kennedy School's main building — and that the university’s recent legal obligations finding, which I address below, does not resolve the underlying moral question. I am also a signatory of the Crimson Alliance for Survivors open letter published in the Harvard Crimson on July 23, 2026, which called for an independent investigation of Harvard's Epstein ties, governance reforms, survivor support, and proportionate accountability where misconduct is established. And I write in response to the characterization of that letter by five senior faculty members and co-presidents of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, who compared it to McCarthyism—a characterization that I will argue is badly misplaced in light of what we already know about how institutional power failed to protect vulnerable women in this case.
A word about why this is a commentary from someone based at a human rights center. Sex trafficking is a human rights violation—one of the most severe in contemporary practice, involving systematic exploitation of the most vulnerable. Institutional complicity in trafficking, and institutional failure to reckon with that complicity, are human rights concerns of the kind human rights centers exist to address. So is the treatment of survivors, whose interests are often absent from this debate. Harvard's own institutional voice policy, as I have argued elsewhere, should permit this kind of assessment from a center whose mandate is human rights. I write in that spirit, but I write, to be clear, in my personal capacity, since the university’s institutional voice policy only permits that way of proceeding.
These two dimensions of Harvard's Epstein reckoning are governed by the same underlying moral framework, even though their specific analyses differ. That framework is institutional integrity: the obligation of an institution to align its choices, its honors, its investigative processes, and its accountability mechanisms with its own stated values and with its obligations to those it has harmed or might have enabled the harming of. Both dimensions are resisted on grounds that do not withstand scrutiny. The recent "legal obligations" finding—a decision, as I should emphasize, made at the level of Harvard’s central administration, not at HKS—does not resolve the moral question. And several objections that have surfaced in this debate—about fundraising, about institutional neutrality, about whether integrity might actually support the status quo—deserve answers that anyone who takes a stance in this debate should be prepared to offer.
II. What We Honor: The Naming Question
The Leslie H. Wexner Building is the heart of the HKS campus. It houses the main entrance—the only after-hours general entrance—as well as the cafeteria, the main lobby, and classrooms that are heavily used. Every student, faculty member, and staff person passes through it regularly. The room numbering system means that "Wexner" is embedded in daily institutional language in a way that cannot be opted out of. And everyone who has known HKS for a decade or longer will appreciate how dramatically campus life has improved through the addition of this building. Much gratitude is due to Leslie Wexner for making this possible. But gratitude for a specific deed is one thing; the question of whether the Wexner name should remain on the building given everything we now know is another.
Harvard's framework for evaluating denaming requests asks, among other things, whether the name creates a harmful environment, whether the evidence is strong and clear, whether the behaviors at issue are a significant component of the namesake's legacy, whether those behaviors would have been considered objectionable in their own time, and whether alternatives to denaming adequately address the harm. On each of these questions, the case for removing the Wexner name is strong.
The environment.
For survivors of sexual violence—who, according to CDC data, include nearly half of all women and more than one in six men—working and studying daily under a prominent honor for Leslie Wexner is not neutral. The research literature on institutional betrayal documents the mechanism: when an institution on which an individual depends for safety actively honors someone associated with harm, it can function as a form of secondary trauma. The students and staff at a school whose mission is training public leaders who, among other things, contribute to more justice in the world, are entitled to expect that the institution's physical environment reflects its stated commitments.
We should be clear about what this means in the life of the HKS campus community. Epstein is at the center of a sex-abuse scandal of extraordinary scale—one that has come to symbolize the use of male wealth and privilege to exploit, above all, vulnerable women and girls. With numerous news stories continuing to link Wexner and Epstein, the Wexner name is now closely associated with that scandal. (See e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) For many survivors of sexual violence, walking into the Leslie H. Wexner Building at HKS will therefore not feel neutral: it can feel like crossing a threshold into a space that publicly reflects the very dynamics of power and abuse Epstein represents, and an institutional choice not even to spare victims the pain of that exposure. It is no surprise that one member of our community described entering the building as “borderline dystopian.”
The evidence.
The relevant evidence falls into three categories of varying strength: federally documented facts established by government records; findings corroborated by major investigative reporting; and allegations that are serious but unproven.
What government records establish.
The Department of Justice Epstein Files contain 1,754 references to Wexner. An August 2019 FBI document listed Wexner as a potential unindicted co-conspirator. These are government records; they are not findings of guilt, but they establish the scope of federal attention to the Wexner-Epstein relationship.
What is documented and corroborated.
Epstein served as trustee of the Wexner Foundation from 1992 to 2007. Wexner granted Epstein power of fiduciary over his private trusts and foundations—an extraordinary delegation of financial control that, as the New York Times has documented, allowed Epstein to amass hundreds of millions of dollars and provided the financial infrastructure that enabled his trafficking network. Wexner's own email to Epstein in 2008—four days before Epstein's guilty plea—establishes contact well after his stated 2007 severance date. Wexner was warned about Epstein's sexual behavior by the man who introduced them in 1986. Public reporting about Epstein's conduct existed by 2003. Epstein was charged in 2006. The conduct at issue was recognizably wrong at every stage. Taken together, these documented facts raise grave questions about the extent to which Wexner’s longstanding financial and fiduciary relationship with Epstein supplied resources, access, and legitimacy from which Epstein benefited. This is the enabling conduct Harvard's naming decision must reckon with, and it is amply documented without relying on anything beyond corroborated reporting and government records.
What remains alleged but unproven.
The late Virginia Giuffre alleged in a deposition that she was trafficked to Wexner. Giuffre was among the most vocal accusers of Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. She alleged that she was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell starting as a teenager, and famously brought a landmark civil sexual abuse lawsuit against Britain's then-Prince Andrew, which ended in an out-of-court settlement in 2022. Giuffre ended her life in April 2025. Wexner has denied her allegation, and I do treat it as unproven here.
A separate documented pattern.
A 2020 New York Times investigation described an "entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment" at Victoria's Secret and L Brands. L Brands subsequently reached a $90 million settlement in 2021. These are not isolated episodes.
The absence of an indictment.
If the evidence is so damning, why has Wexner not been indicted—and since he has not been indicted, does that not settle the matter for Harvard? Is it not a cornerstone of American legal culture that everyone is innocent until actually proven guilty in a proper court of law? The answer is that criminal prosecution and institutional judgment operate by different standards and serve different purposes. Criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt of specific criminal conduct—a standard that became harder to meet when Epstein, the central potential witness, died in custody in 2019. The question Harvard faces is not whether Wexner can be convicted of a crime in a court of law. It is whether continuing to honor him with a prominent building at a school of public leadership is consistent with Harvard's mission and values. Institutions make these judgments routinely on the basis of evidence that would not support criminal conviction. Harvard's own renaming framework does not require a criminal conviction—it requires an assessment of whether the namesake's conduct, viewed in full context, is consistent with the honor being extended. On that standard, the documented enabling conduct is more than sufficient.
The legacy.
Wexner was not widely known outside Ohio before his association with Epstein became public. His public legacy is now inseparable from his longstanding association with Epstein and from the evidence concerning the financial and institutional support Epstein received through that relationship—and thus is inseparable from the most extensively documented child sex trafficking operation in recent American history. Representative Robert Garcia stated during Wexner's congressional deposition: “There would be no Epstein Island, there would be no Epstein plane, there would be no money to traffic women and girls. Mr. Epstein would not be the wealthy man he was without the support of Les Wexner.” This is now the central fact of his public legacy—and it is the meaning many members of the HKS community inevitably experience when they pass under that name.
Alternatives.
Harvard's framework asks whether contextualization adequately addresses the harm. In most denaming debates, alternatives serve honest historical reckoning. Here they do not, for a specific reason: the harm is not that students and faculty lack information about Wexner's record. The harm is that they are required to work and study under a prominent public honor for him, at the very school that seeks to train ethical leaders. Adding critical explanatory text while leaving the honorific name over the main entrance sharpens the dissonance rather than resolves it. Every person entering the building would be confronted simultaneously with the honor and the explanation of why the honor is problematic—a combination that serves neither honesty nor dignity.
One might suggest that the name simply records a financial transaction rather than extending an ongoing honor. But this distinction is not available to Harvard: the decision about what name to place over the main entrance of its school of public leadership is Harvard's own, made and remade every day it is not changed. There is no neutral position.
The Wexner Foundation ended its financial relationship with HKS in 2023. Harvard is not asked to break an ongoing donor relationship. It is asked whether to maintain a building name after the donor relationship ended on the donor's initiative. I should add that I am myself also very grateful to Leslie Wexner and the Wexner Foundation for funding the Wexner Fellowship program at HKS, which for decades each year brought several fellows from Israel to our campus. They were a tremendous presence on campus.
What "legal obligations" resolves—and what it does not.
Harvard has determined that legal obligations prevent denaming. Publicly, the specific content of the obligation has not been disclosed. This finding resolves one thing: denaming cannot proceed under existing agreements. It does not resolve whether continuing to honor Wexner is consistent with Harvard's mission. It does not resolve whether the contextualization announced by HKS is adequate to the moral weight of the question. And it reveals a structural problem Harvard should address: if a naming agreement for a central building at a school of public leadership creates an irrevocable obligation that survives evidence of the kind documented in the DOJ Epstein Files, that is a problem with how naming agreements are drafted. Harvard should reform its naming agreement framework, building in behavioral standards with enforceable consequences—a reform that serves donors and institution alike.
The lawsuit objection.
Some will argue that denaming would trigger a major lawsuit, and that Harvard should therefore leave the name in place. Litigation risk is a real constraint, but it is not a moral resolution. Whether denaming would expose Harvard to breach-of-contract claims depends on the naming agreement—terms that have not been publicly disclosed—and it is therefore speculative to claim that a lawsuit is inevitable. In any event, institutions do not preserve honors indefinitely—and that would be the default, if nothing is done—simply because reversing them is costly. Harvard is among the world’s most influential universities. That status brings corresponding obligations of institutional integrity. If unilateral denaming would be legally unavailable, Harvard should pursue lawful off-ramps— renegotiation, mutual release, or other mechanisms — to end an honor that conflicts with institutional values. It should reform naming agreements going forward so that the university never again binds itself to honorific permanence in the face of credible evidence of severe wrongdoing or enabling conduct.
The fundraising concern.
As director of a center that depends on philanthropic support, I very much hear this concern (though, recall, I am not writing in that capacity here): if Harvard can be pressured into removing a donor's name, won't future donors worry that their naming honors are only conditionally protected? But on balance, this concern cuts in the opposite direction. An institution that communicates "we will never remove your name regardless of what you do" is not offering a durable assurance—it is offering a blank check decoupled from institutional values. Donors of genuine character who care about the enduring meaning of their gift would want to know that Harvard maintains standards protecting the integrity of naming honors. This would include ensuring those honors are not extended indefinitely to those who betray the institution's values—and who thus make up the company whom any future donor would then keep. Clear, publicly known behavioral standards provide security of a more durable kind than unconditional permanence.
The institutional integrity objection.
What about the argument that institutional integrity actually supports keeping the Wexner name: Harvard made a commitment; Wexner gave more than $42 million to HKS; institutions with integrity honor their commitments and do not bend to pressure. My response is that institutional integrity is not reducible to honoring specific contractual commitments, though it includes that. An institution has integrity when its choices across all relevant dimensions—what it honors, how it investigates itself, how it treats those who raise accountability concerns—are coherent with each other and with its stated values. When contractual commitments conflict with those values in a sufficiently serious way, integrity requires acknowledging and working through the conflict. The legal obligations finding has clarified, with unexpected precision, that Harvard's contractual obligations to its donors and its moral obligations to its mission are not identical. Acknowledging this gap is itself an act of institutional integrity. What follows from that acknowledgment is the work this commentary outlines.
III. How We Investigate: The Accountability Question
The Crimson Alliance for Survivors open letter that I cosigned calls for an independent investigation of Harvard's Epstein ties, governance reforms, survivor support, and proportionate accountability where misconduct is established. The letter builds its argument with careful attention to procedural safeguards, due process, and the complexity of what proportionate accountability requires.
Reading the letter accurately.
The CAFH response treats the letter's "legitimization" language as a free-standing category of punishable conduct: anyone who "took substantial steps to legitimize" Epstein should face consequences. But this is not what the letter says. The accountability provisions are explicitly conditional on a prior finding of misconduct through an independent process with due process protections, external legal counsel, and survivor input. The question of whether conduct served to rehabilitate a convicted sex offender later federally charged with sex trafficking of minors through Harvard's institutional channels is relevant to what proportionate accountability requires—after misconduct has been independently established. This is categorically different from punishing people for association or belief.
The philosophical argument and where it fails.
The CAFH response seems to rest on a symmetry claim: if it would violate academic freedom to punish someone for taking steps to restore Epstein’s reputation, then it must also violate academic freedom to treat those same steps as an aggravating factor when determining the appropriate consequences for an independently established rule violation. A useful analogy appears in the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476 (1993). The case did not concern university governance or academic freedom, but it affirms a limited principle that is relevant here: an institution may respond to independently established misconduct while considering aggravating features of that misconduct in determining proportionate consequences, without thereby punishing protected belief or association.
On this view, conduct that may have helped rehabilitate Epstein’s standing is relevant only after an independent process has established a governance violation. It may then bear on proportionality; it is not a free-standing basis for sanctions. That is the limited principle Mitchell illustrates, and it is the structure the original letter articulates.
The individual versus institutional distinction.
A serious omission in the CAFH response is its failure to engage the distinction between acting as an individual and acting in an institutional capacity—a distinction foundational to professional ethics. A faculty member who maintains a personal friendship with Epstein, attends his dinners, or publicly defends him is acting as an individual. These activities are protected by academic freedom and the broader principles of free association that make universities worth having. The McCarthy era demonstrated exactly what happens when institutions punish people for protected political beliefs and organizational memberships—activities that caused no direct harm to identifiable victims and violated no professional obligation. That warning is real, and I take it seriously.
But a faculty member who uses Harvard-branded platforms, administrative access, governance processes, or donor-facing roles to rehabilitate that person's institutional standing—potentially in ways that misled Harvard's own governance bodies—is acting in an institutional capacity. Institutional roles create obligations whose violation is a legitimate subject of accountability. The relevant obligations—against misleading governance bodies, against abusing institutional access, against misusing Harvard's name and resources—are not new standards invented after the fact. They are implicit in the governance role itself. The CAFH response treats all conduct by faculty members as equally protected regardless of whether it occurred in an individual or institutional capacity, whether it used Harvard's name and resources, and whether it potentially violated Harvard's governance obligations.
The McCarthyism analogy collapses once this distinction is in view.
The relevant difference between Communist Party membership and using Harvard's institutional machinery to rehabilitate Epstein is not the comparative moral status of Stalin and Epstein. It is the distinction between protected association and institutional conduct. A faculty member who maintained a personal friendship with Epstein is doing something analogous to Communist Party membership—protected by academic freedom, and explicitly not what the original letter targets. A faculty member who used Harvard's institutional machinery in the way described is doing something categorically different.
The institutional neutrality objection.
Another objection might be made to the position articulated in the letter. Harvard declared itself institutionally neutral and therefore has no basis at all for acting in what in this debate is sometimes called "the justice sphere." This argument connects to Harvard's institutional voice policy, on which I have written separately.
The institutional neutrality doctrine—whether in the University of Chicago's Kalven Report of 1967 or in Harvard's adaptation—applies to contested political and social questions on which reasonable people disagree based on different values or different readings of complex empirical evidence. The question of whether Harvard should investigate whether its own governance processes were used to rehabilitate Epstein is not that kind of question. It is a question about Harvard's internal governance integrity and its obligations regarding its own institutional records and the survivors whose harm Harvard's resources may have helped enable. Invoking institutional neutrality to deflect this extends the doctrine beyond any reasonable application.
There is also a practical rebuttal. Harvard already acts extensively in the justice sphere. It has sexual harassment policies. It has research integrity policies. It has Title IX obligations. It maintains, as the CAFH letter itself acknowledges, a ban on gifts from Epstein whose violation can result in sanctions. Each involves Harvard making moral judgments and imposing consequences. To invoke institutional neutrality against the Epstein accountability proposals while accepting all of these existing policies requires explaining why this case is categorically different.
Or perhaps someone would argue that all such policies should be rejected. But once that thought is on the table a sensible reaction would be that we now see just how much we constantly operate in the justice sphere anyway — what matters is to get things right in that sphere. Even if one distinguishes externally mandated obligations from discretionary institutional action, the ban on Epstein gifts is Harvard's own policy, not an external mandate—and the CAFH letter accepts that violating it can result in sanctions.
One further distinction is worth drawing. The accountability letter does not propose investigating individuals because of personal associations with Epstein. It proposes investigating whether Harvard's own governance processes—including the production of the 2020 Epstein report, which has been publicly identified as containing significant gaps—were used in ways that violated institutional obligations. The trigger is the institutional conduct, not the association. This is precisely the structure that distinguishes legitimate institutional accountability from the targeted investigation of protected affiliations that the McCarthy era made infamous. (On this subject, also see my previous commentary on free speech as a human and civil right.)
The significance of moral sensibility.
The student group whose letter prompted the CAFH response invested months of work in a difficult institutional question. Its letter was carefully qualified: it called for an independent process, due-process protections, survivor input, and accountability only where misconduct is established. Yet its principal signatories — three women who graduated from HKS in 2026—have now been associated with an accusation of McCarthyism made by five senior faculty members whose titles carry substantial institutional authority.
That asymmetry matters not because senior scholars are disqualified from criticizing students or recent graduates. They plainly are not. It matters because accusations of McCarthyism carry an unusually severe charge: that those making the proposal are inviting guilt by association and political persecution. When such an accusation is directed by highly placed members of an institution against people at the beginning of their professional lives, it predictably affects the conditions under which others decide whether to speak, sign, organize, or raise uncomfortable questions. The issue is therefore not merely the correctness of the analogy. It is also its foreseeable effect on campus discourse. In this case, that effect is especially troubling because the proposal at issue seeks a procedurally constrained inquiry into possible misuse of Harvard’s own institutional processes, not punishment for protected belief or association. The critics could have made their academic-freedom argument without applying an analogy so likely to stigmatize and stifle participation in the debate.
IV. The Common Framework: Institutional Integrity and Multiple Values
The naming question and the accountability question are different in their specific philosophical and institutional content. But they are connected by institutional integrity: the obligation of an institution to align its choices—what it honors, how it investigates itself, what consequences it imposes for misconduct, how it treats those who call for accountability—with its stated values.
Harvard's stated mission at the Kennedy School is to "improve public policy and leadership so people can live in societies that are safe, free, just, and sustainably prosperous.” An institution with that mission that places the name of the person whose documented financial support enabled Epstein's operationsover the door of its main building, while declining to investigate whether its own governance processes were used to rehabilitate that person's standing, while characterizing those who called for investigation as McCarthyites, has a coherence problem—not at the level of any individual decision, but at the level of what the institution, taken as a whole, communicates about what it actually values.
What I would call single-value analysis has a characteristic problem: it generates conclusions that are formally correct within its own framework but that thoughtful people recognize as obviously wrong. If academic freedom is the only value that matters, Harvard cannot have a sexual harassment policy, cannot sanction research fraud, cannot investigate whether its governance processes were corrupted. If contractual integrity is the only value that matters, Harvard can never honestly reckon with the meaning of its naming decisions. Nobody actually accepts either of these conclusions. The fact that they follow from single-value analysis is strong evidence that neither value should be treated as supreme.
We typically encounter questions about what to value and what to do embedded into messy overall realities. Genuinely practical ethics must come to terms with this fact. And this means that institutional ethical questions are resolved by attending carefully to all the relevant values and working out, in specific circumstances, what they require together. The relevant values here include academic freedom, institutional integrity, obligations to survivors, the accuracy of Harvard's own governance records, and the obligations of a school of public leadership to model the ethical conduct it claims to teach. What they jointly require is an independent investigation with robust due process protections and survivor input; proportionate accountability where misconduct is established; naming standards that reflect the institution's actual commitments; and honest contextualization—not as a substitute for denaming but as the most available response within the constraints the legal obligations finding has now established.
V. Conclusion
The "legal obligations" finding has clarified something that was previously implicit: Harvard's contractual obligations to its donors and its moral obligations to its mission are not identical, and they can conflict. That finding explains why denaming has not occurred under existing agreements. It does not resolve whether those agreements should have been structured differently, whether they should be reformed going forward, or whether the contextualization steps announced by the dean are adequate to the moral weight of the question. It does not touch the accountability question at all.
Neither the physical nor the procedural dimension of this reckoning is optional. An institution that contextualizes its building while declining to examine how its governance processes may have been used is choosing partial symbolic response over substantive accountability. An institution that investigates while leaving a monument to someone widely described as Epstein's primary financial enabler over the main entrance of its school of public leadership is choosing substantive process while failing the coherence that institutional integrity requires. The two belong together because they are expressions of the same underlying commitment: that this institution takes seriously what it says it stands for.
The gap between Harvard's contractual obligations and its moral ones is not a technicality. It is the measure of the work that remains.
