The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a useful, confused article about Why It’s All Happening, especially to (largely male) academics. The author tosses his net in a variety of directions and catches some intriguing stuff (“gendered bullshit,” says one of his respondents), but UD thinks that a careful reading of the piece yields two dominant explanations, the first pithily summarized in my title by naughty and now dismissed from Yale Gelernter.

Call it the I’m an apeman
I’m an ape, apeman
Oh, I’m an apeman

theory, in which given freedom, privilege, privacy, money, whatever, a certain number of men will revert to Bill Belichick or Gene Lopwitz (“he had taken what he wanted.”). Aging wives with minds of their own represent, evolutionarily speaking, less stimulation than tractable teens, and if you think you can get away with it you’re maybe gonna go teenward.

That’s theory number one. Number two – I’ll call it Skank Sanctification – is associated with the man who was prez of GW when UD taught there, Stephen Trachtenberg, and also with Bard prez Leon Botstein. CHE quotes Trachtenberg:

Stephen J. Trachtenberg, who served as president of George Washington University from 1988 to 2007, is a hardened realist when it comes to [taking money and other goodies from people like Epstein].

“The people who have money are not always nice people,” he said in a recent interview.

During Trachtenberg’s tenure, the university’s endowment grew from $200 million to over $1 billion. As a fund raiser, Trachtenberg adopted the thinking of Cardinal Richard Cushing, who was the archbishop of Boston while Trachtenberg was an administrator at Boston University. Cushing told Trachtenberg: “You sanctify money with its use.”

Here the archbishop assures the university president that an alchemical cleansing of money takes place when the money is used for, say, legal payouts to victims of priests who rape children. The church has to date spent three sanctified billion on this.

A Jewish sanctification took place when Yeshiva University took Bernie Madoff’s money for its then president’s salary (one of the highest in the country) and other executive compensation. Trachtenberg has been a staunch defender of Yeshiva’s many not nice donors. Plus he made a heartfelt argument that GW shouldn’t rescind Bill Cosby’s honorary degree. He and similarly amoral Botstein model for their students a perfectly workable postmodern – and even pious – ethos: Ends, means, FUCK THAT.