“Yale University ‘relieved’ an accomplished computer scientist of his teaching load while it investigates him for an email he sent 15 years ago to Jeffrey Epstein,” reports The College Fix.
“I’ve been relieved,” David Gelernter told his class earlier this week.
“The professor’s conduct is under review,” said Yale’s associate vice president Karen Peart. “Until the review is completed, the professor will not teach his class.”
Gelernter says this may be the last class he ever teaches at Yale.
“You’ve been a marvelous class — and not only on intellectual terms,” he told students. “You’re way out of the ordinary, and I’ll always remember that. If my very last class at Yale turns out to be CPSC 450(or a piece of it),e–then a thousand thanks.”
The College Fix reports that Yale’s “investigation comes after someone found an email the professor wrote to Epstein in 2011 among the more than three million messages the federal government recently released from its files on the deceased sex offender and controversial financier.”
“I have a perfect editoress in mind: Yale [senior], worked at Vogue last summer, runs her own campus mag, art major, completely connected, [very] small [goodlooking] blonde,” he told Epstein.
Epstein “was convicted on state prostitution charges in 2008, indicted for sex trafficking of minors in 2019 and died in a jail cell that year,” notes the Yale Daily News.
The College Fix notes that
It does not appear Gelernter knew about the prostitution charges when he was emailing with Epstein. He also said the female student referenced in the email is a friend of the family.
The computer scientist, who predicted the widespread capabilities of the Internet, remained critical of the attention paid to his old emails.
“If someone handed you a stack of other people’s private correspondence, would you dive in and read them? Of course not,” he wrote in a message to his students earlier this week. “Gentlemen and ladies don’t read each other’s mail (Courtesy 101.)”
Last week a mob of students protested outside of his classroom and the university had to send administrators to ensure the class did not get disrupted.
