When you’re getting a tour of the MIT Media Lab, a common reaction is, “Wow, I’m at the high-tech Hogwarts.” It’s easy to feel this way, with something akin to the Marauder’s map following you around the building and the robots and the whimsical, interactive, half-living prototypes scattered around.

But it’s not Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that the director of the Lab aspires to be. Instead, Joi Ito tells graduating classes at the Media Lab that they are more like the X-Men. This framing suggests we’re all a bit weird, we have never quite fit into mainstream society, but we wield great powers that the Media Lab can help us hone, and responsibly channel. That the Lab can be our home for that, the place where we finally belong.

But when Joi welcomed the then-already-convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein to invest in the Lab, its students, and his investment funds, it was as if Professor Xavier had courted the same military contractors who violently infused an adamantium skeleton onto Logan.

How does something like this happen? In all my time at the Lab, Joi was clearly a good person, fighting good fights that others had avoided. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, it comes down to two forces: inertia, and fundraising. Evgeny Morozov has unearthed documents showing that Joi’s acceptance of Epstein’s money in 2013 may be predated by Epstein’s donations to MIT in the 2000s. It’s entirely possible that Nicholas Negroponte (and yes, Marvin Minsky) initiated this relationship before Joi even came to MIT.

And then there’s money. I learned a lot early in my career when I was working on campaign finance reform in Washington, DC. The sheer amount of money people need to raise practically predicts, over a long enough time horizon, an eventual bad decision, even from otherwise good people. Joi raises a lot of money.

One discussion trying to emerge from the messy, painful fall-out of these revelations is the sickening embrace between elite academia and Epstein’s coordinated rebranding as a science philanthropist. Why did this happen? “Money corrupts” is too pat an answer. What about the harder questions? How do MIT, Harvard, and other universities get away with taking a 60% administrative cut of funding (including philanthropic grants)? Why does the MIT Media Lab need an $80 million annual budget, when its researchers are paid roughly $30,000 a year? Why do star researchers have to perform for private philanthropists to begin with?

MIT is a corporation. It is also one of the foremost research universities in the world. It has become only more relevant as information technology itself becomes more central to our lives. The unfortunate relationship between Epstein and MIT begs a conversation about the values driving our research universities. How much annual budget would be enough to meaningfully achieve the mission? Which ideals and values tend to be jettisoned in pursuit of additional fundraising that collects well past that point?

Along with Nathan J. Matias, I was one of Ethan Zuckerman’s first two students at the Media Lab after he came over from the Berkman Center to take over the MIT Center for Civic Media (along with two students in the Comparative Media Studies program). I woke up this morning to news, leaked to the Boston Globe, that Ethan has decided to leave the Lab as soon as responsibly possible. Nate has also decided to disaffiliate his CivilServant project from the Lab as soon as responsibly possible.

Reading about Ethan’s decision, I’m thankful, as I’ve always been, to have the fortune (and it was primarily luck, on my end) that my research adviser was one of the most ethical, and maybe more important, caring, of everyone I met while working at the Lab (and in life).

Ethan’s resignation is a major loss for the Lab. Practically, it will lose his stewardship and active research projects interrogating vital topics like the ethical use of technology, and how power and influence flow on the internet. These areas of research have only become more central to our lives in the years since Ethan took the helm at the Center for Civic Media.

Ethan’s departure also feeds the brewing media story around this scandal, turning up the intensity of the shame spotlight on MIT (while Harvard remains deafeningly silent). Most importantly, Ethan leaving is a loss for the Media Lab internally. The earnest students who get to the Lab and discover their research group has an ugly underbelly may not have someone who will take them under their wing instead. Well-meaning but still-learning undergraduates may not have an esteemed thoughtleader who routinely bends the realities of time itself to take one-on-one meetings and provide meaningful email feedback. Everyone at the Lab will miss one of the key voices willing to irritate the established crust layer of the Institute in asking that we all try to be better.

It’s strange to watch what you thought was a mainstream news story evolve and permeate over the course of days, until it’s at your front step and shaking up your own little world. I believe there’s important strategic value in fighting to create change within imperfect institutions, although everyone has their own ethical line at which that’s no longer an acceptable strategy.

From the outside, I’m committed, as are many of my Lab alum, to pushing the Media Lab to do better, to be better. But in the meantime, I’m mostly focused on doing what I can to support those who have put their own futures aside to ensure their are consequences for this, and those who will suffer the follow-on consequences.

Most importantly, we must help the countless women and girls Epstein abused, and make the changes we need to make in our cultures, be they social, corporate, or academic, to prevent the ascent, continued indemnity, and celebration of abusers, no matter who they fund.