A question unanswered in the Epstein report

It was inevitable that the Harvard report (released, in classic style, on a Friday afternoon) would raise as many questions as it answered. It is lawyerly (not surprising, it was written by lawyers) and focused on Harvard rules and policies. I find it very damaging to the reputation of Harvard's faculty, and rather reassuring about the integrity of Harvard's leadership.  At one crucial juncture in 2013 (page 11), a development office staffer writes a bloodless memo to Harvard leadership describing the interest shown by the chair of the Math department and the dean for Science in raising more money from Epstein, even though he was by now a sex criminal. The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the President said no, and they deserve credit for their good judgment. The system worked, to that extent. The question would be how those advocating for accepting the money came to the conclusion that "the good his support can do for Professor Nowak’s research outweighs the reputational risk of accepting further funds from him. In addition, they emphasize both that Epstein has served his time for his crime, and that his wealth has been obtained legally, having nothing to do with the crime for which he was convicted." I have some opinions on all that, as others do as well. But I would like to point to a different question. On page 18, footnote 13 reads as follows: Now first of all, what "number"? That is a lot of travel if the number of involved faculty is small, and a lot of travel if the number of involved faculty is large. Who are these people who kept buzzing around Epstein? We probably know some of the names, but perhaps not all. The big question is "why?" Why did these distinguished Harvard faculty continue to consort with Epstein? We know that some of them wanted more money for their Harvard programs, but there seems to be something more going on. Some of them apparently thought Epstein was brilliant, or were at least willing to tell the Harvard administration they thought so. (Dan Dennett and Steve Pinker, to their credit, seem to have figured out early on that Epstein was intellectually a phony.) So what I really would like to know in this context is how to parse the phrase "primarily in their personal capacities rather than as representatives of Harvard." Plainly, under even the most generous interpretation, Harvard's reputation stood to be damaged by an aggregation of academic suitors being solicitous of a sex offender. We all have private lives that are not Harvard's business, but if three Harvard professors go out to dinner with a rich criminal, Harvard is automatically implicated. I am most interested in a specific question raised by the quoted phrase.  Joi Ito, sometime head of the Media Lab at MIT, had to resign when it was disclosed that he, like Nowak, had allowed Epstein to get uncomfortably close to the institution he headed. In some ways, the Harvard situation seems worse to me than the MIT situation, because Ito was responsible for raising enormous amounts of money just to keep the Media Lab running. It is a crazy financial model that creates terrible incentives, which is not to excuse Ito's conduct. But the Harvard Math department was in no danger of going out of business if the chair of the department failed to raise a single dollar. What happened at Harvard looks to me more like ethically obtuse expansionist greed than what happened at the Media Lab.  But Ito committed another affont to commonly accepted values. At the same time as he was raising money from Epstein for the Media Lab, he was raising money from Epstein for his own venture fund. There may have been no rule against that--do we really need such rules?--but anyone with the feeblest ethical sense would recognize it as a conflict of interest that, at a minimum, would require disclosure, and almost certainly would have been stopped had MIT known what was going on, as it did not. As it was, it seemed that Ito was using his ability to get MIT to accept Epstein's gift to the Media Lab, thereby repairing Epstein's damaged reputation,