MAP Forum

A former UT Classics professor requested over $10,000 from Jeffrey Epstein’s charitable organization while teaching at the University, according to recently released documents from the Department of Justice.

Professor Thomas K. Hubbard requested the money for a conference held in April 2016 named “Theorizing Consent: Educational and Legal Perspectives on Campus Rape.” Hubbard said he received no money from the J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundation. Attendance at the conference was required for students in Hubbard’s Mythology of Rape class, according to its syllabus.

Hubbard said the money from the foundation, requested in 2015, would fund the conference, allowing students to “interrogate the concept of sexual consent” in the wake of new Title IX policies from the U.S. Department of Education that Hubbard claimed were too damaging, according to the proposal. Hubbard said the point of the conference was “to demonstrate that any topic, no matter how sensitive, should be open to balanced scholarly inquiry.”

“(The enforcement of the policies have) prematurely terminated the careers of too many promising students who, because of the disciplinary expulsion, are unable to continue their education at any university,” Hubbard wrote to the foundation.

Hubbard taught at UT for nearly 33 years. His classes included Latin and Greek courses alongside classes about “Child and Adolescent Sexuality” and the “Mythology of Rape.” Hubbard was tenured in 1993 and left the University in 2021 after UT agreed to a $700,000 settlement with him. The agreement required that Hubbard drop lawsuits he had filed against UT students and retire immediately, according to the settlement document.

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“The Epstein Foundation had a long record of supporting various academic interests,” Hubbard told the Texan in an email statement. “I was not then and am not now aware of any evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a ‘pedophile’ in the technical sense; his sexual preference appears to have been for young women aged 16-22, which would at most reflect partial ephebophilia. Although most of the women who were involved with him at that age retrospectively regret it, I am unaware of any evidence that the contacts were non-consensual at the time. Some were self-conscious sex workers who recruited others into his orbit and are now making cynical claims of victimization to cash in on his estate and business partners, as reported by Michael Tracey and other credible journalists.”