The moral characters of David Gelernter and Nicholas Christakis are better judged by every other aspect of their respective careers.
Professor Nicholas Christakis (left) and Professor David Gelernter (right). (Credit: Yale School of Medicine; Yale Engineering)
Ari Shtein
Opinions Editor, The Buckley Beacon
On Friday, January 29, the US Department of Justice released millions of pages of new documents related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.
According to reporting in the Yale Daily News, somewhere in those millions of pages, correspondences between Epstein and two Yale professors could be found: David Gelernter ’76 of the computer science department, and Nicholas Christakis ‘84, a Sterling professor with his primary appointment in sociology.
Gelernter exchanged emails with Epstein on and off between 2009 and 2015. They discussed topics ranging from Gelernter’s business dealings, to his art, to his memories of the smell of French women. At one point, Gelernter described a student of his as “a perfect editoress” — a distinction she’d earned, in part, because she was a “v small goodlooking blonde.”
This is pretty gross behavior. Even setting aside Epstein’s 2008 conviction for child prostitution, it’s incredibly unprofessional, rude, and even creepy for a professor to speak about a student like that. Throw in his Elon Musk–reminiscent pseudo-traditionalism — one email exalts “French girls dressed & behaving like actual females” — and his eagerness to heed Epstein’s artistic advice about making the “hebrew letters much more erotic,” and the picture painted is of a bizarre, disturbed, and strangely horny old artist-engineer.
Then again — the idea that David Gelernter might be a bizarre, disturbed, or strangely horny old artist-engineer is not especially revelatory. These days, he teaches just two classes at Yale: “Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda” in the fall, and “The User Interface” in the spring. And his course evaluations — sourced from CourseTable — say all that need be said.
One “Modern Intellectual Agenda” student from 2023 wrote, “stay away – run fast and far. Gelernter is a mess.” “There’s no hope for this class,” opined a 2022 reviewer. Another 2023 student was more positive — asked whether they recommend the course, they wrote, “Yes; everyone should be subject[ed] to this pain as a rite of passage.”
“The User Interface” is not especially well-loved either. A 2025 evaluation summarizes: “[the] professor spent every single class talking about things entirely unrelated to User Interface (mostly architecture/art history, some denial of the theory [of] evolution, some climate change denial).” Asked what “knowledge, skills, and insights” the course teaches, one 2025 student replied, “Learned about chairs, art, and churches.” Another 2025 review characterized lectures as “incoherent ramblings about … chairs, women’s fashion, churches, architecture.”
Perhaps worth noting is the fact that Gelernter got his eye and four fingers blown up by the Unabomber in 1993. A 2017 YDN profile — he was up for the role of Trump’s scientific adviser at the time — quotes a computing expert from the University of Illinois named William Gropp who says, “He built an interesting, elegant system for programming parallel computers. … But since [the bombing] he really has not been a major player.” I suppose it’s possible that the traumatic event could have played a role in turning Gelernter a bit more, let’s say, ornery, too.
But I’m no psychologist, so all I’ll say is this: in any sort of normal line of work, David Gelernter would have been fired several times by now. He appears to be a bad teacher, and not to generate much research output at all. But Gelernter was granted tenure a long time ago — apparently, he was one of the youngest to ever receive it at Yale — and so there’s not much that can be done. He’s grandfathered in.
And to return to the matter at hand: the Epstein revelations don’t do much to change that. There’s no evidence Gelernter engaged in anything approaching criminal misconduct — nor any proof that he ever met Epstein in person. It amounts to nothing more than a punchline — of all the Yale professors who’d email with a sex offender about how French women smell, of course it’d be David Gelernter.
However, the other Yale professor in this latest Epstein file batch — Nicholas Christakis — well, his appearance is a bit more surprising.
By all accounts, Christakis is a stand-up guy. He’s got degrees up the wazoo — MD, MPH, PhD — and as an academic, his research has been in “network science” — the connections between people in societies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Christakis was something of an expert-first-responder: he had a widely-lauded book out by October 2020, and wrote several thoughtful essays on the course of the pandemic and our our response.
Of course, Christakis is perhaps best known for his role in the 2015 Halloween costume controversy here at Yale. When video of a confrontation between Christakis and several dozen screamingly mad Yale students went viral, he received an outpouring of praise for his ability to stay calm and deescalate the situation.
And, apparently, Jeffrey Epstein was one of his admirers. In a 2016 email to Christakis, Epstein told him, “you were great.” Christakis’ response, according to a statement he made to the YDN, was “a stock reply.” When Epstein followed up with a question about Christakis’ ongoing research, the professor replied with links to his lab’s website. Innocuous enough, surely.
But it wasn’t the first time that Epstein and Christakis had been in touch — back in 2013, when Christakis moved from Harvard to Yale, he reached out to Epstein, seeking funding for his new lab. They attended the same conference later that year, after which Epstein told Christakis that the latter’s presentation “was the only one of substance,” and suggested a longer meeting. Christakis was happy to oblige, and in September, the two met “for approximately 90 minutes,” according to Christakis’ statement, and “discussed science.” The YDN specifies that no women were present at the meeting, which was held in Epstein’s Manhattan home.
Other than a January 2016 LinkedIn connection request, Christakis and Epstein only exchanged words again in the “you were great” post-confrontation messages. The billionaire never ended up contributing to Christakis’ research.
So what can we make of this? I think, not much! Epstein was a big name in science funding — especially at Harvard, Christakis’ former institution, where he had pledged a $30 million donation in 2003. (Around $9.1 million in Epstein’s money actually made it to Harvard before his 2008 conviction.) It would have been fairly natural for Christakis to approach him “in the interest of raising funds” during the move to New Haven.
True enough, Epstein was by 2013 a sex offender. But it’s unclear whether Christakis knew that — it’s also unclear whether, ethically speaking, it’s the kind of thing that matters. Research funding can be hard to come by, and if an immoral billionaire wants to throw your project to improve maternal healthcare in Honduras a lot of grant money — well, should you really say no?
Knowing what we know about Epstein now — the whole big sex trafficking thing — the answer becomes a bit clearer: better to say no, and wash your hands of it all. But when he was just a third-rate slimeball, with a known-but-marginalized predilection for underage girls, the question really was a fair bit murkier.
In any case — Christakis certainly didn’t get all creepy in his conversations with Epstein. There was no talk of how “actual females” smell, or any “v small goodlooking” students. A scientist sought funding from a wealthy, if sleazy, donor, and he didn’t get it. There’s not really any “there” there.
The Epstein panic, taken as a whole, has righteous motivations — sex trafficking and the billionaire coverups thereof are bad — but can sometimes go a bit too far, can end up tarring marginal figures who’ve not really done much wrong.
For David Gelernter, the Epstein association is just one more reason to think that hey, maybe in some cases, tenure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For Christakis, it risks unjustly overshadowing a career of virtuous, high-quality scholarship.
In either case — I’d rather react too little than too much. Gelernter’s a creep, and Christakis isn’t. None of that changed on Friday.