The Black Family Visual Arts Center, which honors alleged child sex offender Leon Black ’73, a close colleague of Jeffrey Epstein, must be renamed. The Dartmouth Editorial Board offers the following two-part letter addressing Leon Black, College President Sian Leah Beilock and the Board of Trustees, calling on them to rename BVAC immediately.
Leon Black,
In your lifetime of demonstrated character, you have repeatedly crossed lines that make naming a Dartmouth building after you not only inappropriate but morally reprehensible. Perhaps you crossed the line when you wrote Jeffrey Epstein provocative poetry for his birthday. Perhaps you crossed it when you secretly recorded and surveilled a woman alleging sexual assault against you, and then paid her to keep quiet about it. Perhaps the line was crossed when Epstein served as the director of your family’s foundation and advised your donations years after he was first convicted as a sex offender in 2008. Maybe the final straw was that one of the many women who alleged you raped her was a 16-year-old girl with autism and Down syndrome.
Your well-documented relationship with Epstein, coupled with the numerous allegations against you, make it absolutely necessary for the College to take up sledgehammers and bludgeon your name off the visual arts center. The First Amendment allows you to say that Epstein’s prostitution of a minor was “not the end of the world, frankly,” but academic institutions like ours simply must hold a higher standard, especially when dedicating campus buildings. Princeton’s Wilson Hall, named after former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was renamed in 2020, after the university determined the former president’s “racist thinking and policies made him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students and alumni must be firmly committed to combatting the scourge of racism in all its forms.” If the presidential honorific did not shield Wilson from another Ivy League university’s reprimand, your net worth should not insulate you from Dartmouth’s.
Just this month, here at Dartmouth, after a New York Times investigation revealed labor activist Cesar Chavez abused underage girls for years, Dartmouth’s Cesar Chavez Pre-to-Postdoctoral Fellowship in Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies was replaced by the Pre-to-Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies. The LALACS department made the name change in a matter of days. As a result, students walk campus with a little more certainty of Dartmouth’s stance against sexual and power-based violence — that is, until they walk to class, look up and see your name in bold letters.
You and Epstein had a symbiotic relationship. The money you paid Epstein for “tax services” kept Epstein’s operations in the U.S. Virgin Islands afloat — you acknowledged this in a 2023 settlement agreement. Epstein’s “problem-solving” helped you escape sexual assault prosecution. BVAC immortalizes this relationship in all capital letters and simultaneously indulges your engineered legacy.
For these reasons, we demand that you immediately release Dartmouth College from any possible contracts that require your name remain on the Black Family Visual Arts Center.
President Beilock and the Board of Trustees,
To remain quiet and hope the Epstein files blow over is utter myopia.
The Dartmouth Student Government and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault released a statement on April 8 calling for you to rename BVAC. During a Feb. 28 visit to campus, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., called the fact that Black’s name is still on the visual arts center “appalling.” Still, you have offered no direct statement to the student body regarding BVAC. Your silence rings in the ears of every student on campus, serving as a statement in and of itself. Every day that you choose to honor Black on our campus, you continue to protect the Epstein class.
On April 15, you, the Board of Trustees, decided to form a committee dedicated to discussing naming on Dartmouth’s campus “to engage the community, weigh different perspectives and arrive at a process that reflects Dartmouth’s values.” However, you don’t plan to formalize the committee’s membership until your next meeting in June. This is a lazy and inadequate response to an urgent moral issue.
Black’s name was not simply slapped onto a previously existing building. BVAC is the manifestation of an alleged child sex offender’s vision for a home for Dartmouth’s artistic community. It is a living, breathing monument to a living, breathing man who has a long history of sex abuse allegations weighing on his name. By keeping his name on our building, you are forcing students and faculty to carry that weight for him.
This issue is about far more than a name or a building. Dartmouth’s own policy states that “honorary naming is the highest form of recognition available at Dartmouth.” It is tantamount to hagiography. It means associating an individual’s identity with the most prestigious pursuits of learning and academia. It means memorializing that person for as long as Dartmouth remains an institution. In this case, it means that countless students will learn to appreciate and create art in a facility named for an accused child sex offender — a facility covered in Epstein’s fingerprints. Mr. Black knows the honor and weight that this designation carries. As Dartmouth’s President and Board of Trustees, you have the imperative to uphold the values of our institution.
Sincerely,
The Dartmouth Editorial Board
The Editorial Board consists of opinion staff columnists and the opinion editors. It is separate from The Dartmouth’s newsroom. Views expressed represent those of the Editorial Board members, not The Dartmouth.
