IN THE NEWS

IN THE NEWS

Top Donor’s Ties to Epstein

A New York Times investigation shows that former Dartmouth trustee Leon Black 73 paid sex offender Jeffrey Epstein $170 million during a six-year period for tax and estate planning services, raising questions among congressional investigators about the money’s true purpose. Black has been a major donor to the College, giving $500,000 for renovations of the President’s House through 2015, but a Dartmouth spokeswoman told The Boston Globe in March that Dartmouth now has “no financial relationship” with Black.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a leader of the congressional effort to force release of the government’s Epstein files, spoke at Dartmouth on February 28. He said students are upset that the Black family name is still on the Black Family Visual Arts Center, for which the Black Family Foundation donated $48 million in 2012. “This is what I mean by the Epstein class,” says Khanna in an Instagram video shot at the center. “It’s time to hold these men responsible.”

Black is scheduled to testify on May 13 before the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

Bumps on the Road to AI

»> Dartmouth has quickly established itself as a leader in bringing artificial intelligence (Al) to classroom, a with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services last December that made the College the first in the Ivy League to comprehensively embrace the revolutionary technology.

Just a few months into the deal, Dartmouth’s Al plan faces growing pains. The Boston Globe published a story headlined “Dartmouth College Went All-In on Al. Then Came the Tension.” It called the situation in Hanover “a singular example of the turbulence that the rapidly evolving technology can bring."

Some faculty members feel rushed to bring Al into their curricula and conflicted about partner Anthropic. The company recently agreed to one of the largest copyright infringement settlements in U.S. history, $1.5 billion, for improperly using the books of hundreds of writers—including more than 130 at Dartmouth—to train its large language model Claude. Under the College’s deal with Anthropic, students get access to Claude to help them with papers and homework problems, among other tasks.

Art history professor Mary K. Coffey says the Anthropic deal was made for “problematic reasons,” telling the Globe, “Everybody is acting like you either jump on the bandwagon or you’re left behind in the brave new world.”

Scott Allen