What does it mean to know something — documented, confirmed, and beyond reasonable dispute — and then do nothing with that knowledge? Not out of ignorance. Not for lack of access. But by the quiet, collective decision that some truths are more trouble than they are worth.
A farmworker saint whose crimes were known for decades before a newspaper published them. A financier and predator whose name had to be scrubbed from campus calendars even as universities cashed his checks. Two stories. Two worlds. One pattern so deeply embedded in how powerful institutions actually operate that we might call it the architecture of forgetting.
These two stories are not parallel failures — they are connected at the root. They are the same failure, operating through different mechanisms, in different precincts of American life. And until we see them that way, we will keep being surprised, every few years, every new scandal, when the pattern repeats.
On the surface, Cesar Chavez and Jeffrey Epstein had almost nothing in common. One was a Mexican-American labor organizer who lived simply, fasted, led marches and became a symbol of the dispossessed. The other was a financier of uncertain origin and unlimited appetite who cultivated the wealthy and powerful and accumulated influence the way others accumulate art.
But the protection each received from scrutiny was built from identical materials.
They both had supportive constituencies. Chavez had the labor movement, Latino civil rights organizations, the political left and an education system that had canonized him. Epstein had the universities that depended on his money, the financiers who depended on his connections and the academics and politicians whose careers he had touched. Different constituencies, same function: a network of people with something to lose if the protected figure falls.
They both offered something that institutions wanted and could not easily replace. Chavez offered moral authority that attached itself to every institution that claimed him. Epstein offered money and access that attached itself to every institution that accepted.
In both cases, the information that would have ended the protection existed, circulated and was suppressed by the collective reluctance of many individual actors, each making a small decision not to look, ask, print or pursue.
There was no conspiracy. What we see instead is something more mundane and more durable: a shared institutional instinct, operating without coordination, yet producing coordinated silence.
It is worth dwelling on the university for a moment, because it sits at the center of both stories in ways that I don’t think have been fully examined together.
For Chavez, universities were not perpetrators but were amplifiers. They built the curriculum. They assigned the biographies. They named the centers, the scholarships and the lecture series. They took a complicated, courageous man and transformed him into something he was not: an uncomplicated hero. Having done that, they created conditions in which anyone who wanted to complicate the picture was swimming against a powerful institutional current.
For Epstein, universities were perpetrators. MIT didn’t just passively benefit from Epstein’s money; it actively concealed his involvement, deliberately hid his name from records and physically managed his campus visits to prevent dissenting voices from encountering him. Harvard didn’t just accept donations; it conducted an internal investigation so incomplete that senior faculty member Lawrence Lessig called it “Hamlet without the prince.”
Two different roles, but in both cases, the university was the institution that stood between the public and the truth. And in both cases, the people most harmed were those the university claims to serve: its students.
James Madison did not give us the Freedom of Information Act. That came 170 years after him, in 1966. What Madison gave us was the philosophical foundation on which that act rests: the idea that self-government requires informed citizens, and that the government, and by extension the powerful institutions of civil society, does not get to decide what the public deserves to know.
Freedom of information is not merely a legal procedure for requesting documents from federal agencies. It is a statement about the relationship between power and the people over whom it is exercised. It says: you do not get to keep secrets from us. Not if those secrets protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. Not if they allow predators to operate behind the shield of institutional prestige. Not if they teach our children to admire men who did not deserve admiration.
The Freedom of Information Act worked in both of these stories. Documents were released. Court records were unsealed. Congressional investigations produced thousands of pages of evidence. Journalists filed requests, fought for access, and eventually published.
But here is the hard truth: the legal architecture of transparency is necessary but not sufficient. It can force documents into the light. It cannot force the institutions that receive that light to act on what it reveals. That requires something the law cannot mandate: will, courage and accountability that has real teeth.
In the Chavez case, what was missing was journalistic will. The information existed. The story could have been told earlier. The editorial decision, made quietly, without discussion, by the collective instinct of an industry that had built the legend and did not want to examine it, was to wait.
In the Epstein case, what was missing was institutional accountability. The files are open. The emails are public. The donor lists are available. One woman is in prison. The universities have issued reports. And yet the same dynamics, anonymous gifts, powerful donors, institutional prestige available for purchase, are operating today at universities whose names we do not yet know.
We should come back to the people, because in the institutional analysis it would be easy to lose sight of them. Ninety-five-year-old Dolores Huerta spent her life being called fearless because she fought for people who had nothing, and she won. For 60 years, she carried a secret that was not hers to carry, because she believed a movement mattered more than what had been done to her. She was wrong. But the press, which has no such excuse, waited just as long.
There are two girls who were 12 and 13 years old in the 1970s. They are in their 60s now. They waited decades for a story that the adults around them decided was too complicated, too costly, too disruptive to tell.
There are young women whose names are in sealed federal records, who were trafficked to a man whose name MIT staff typed as two initials in an email because the full name felt like too much of a risk. They were trafficked during the years when MIT was calculating how much of a convicted sex offender’s money it could accept before the public would notice.
These are not abstractions. These are the people the architecture of forgetting was built over. These are the people who paid with their safety, silence and decades of waiting for the comfort of institutions that chose not to know what they already knew.
The question — what does it mean to know something and do nothing with that knowledge? — does not have a legal answer. It has a moral one. And that answer belongs to each of us, individually, every time we encounter a truth that costs something to tell.
Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.