What does it mean to know something, documented, confirmed, and beyond reasonable dispute, and then do nothing with that knowledge? Not out of ignorance. Not for lack of access. But by choice. By institutional instinct. By the quiet, collective decision that some truths are more trouble than they are worth, the trend is toward greater institutional secrecy.

A farmworker saint whose crimes were known for decades before a newspaper published them. A financier and predator whose name had to be scrubbed from campus calendars even as universities cashed his checks. Two stories. Two worlds. One pattern so consistent, so structural, so deeply embedded in how powerful institutions actually operate that we might call it the architecture of forgetting.

These two stories are not parallel failures; they are connected at the root. They are the same failure, operating through different mechanisms, in different precincts of American life. And until we see them that way, we will keep being surprised, every few years, every new scandal, when the pattern repeats.

Let’s start with what Cesar Chavez and Jeffrey Epstein had in common. On the surface, almost nothing. One was a Mexican-American labor organizer who lived simply, who fasted, who led marches, who became a symbol of the dispossessed. The other was a financier of uncertain origin and unlimited appetite who cultivated the wealthy and powerful and accumulated influence the way others accumulate art.

But the protection each received from scrutiny was built from identical materials.

They both had supportive constituencies. Chavez had the labor movement, Latino civil rights organizations, the political Left, and an education system that had canonized him. Epstein had the universities that depended on his money, the financiers who depended on his connections, and the academics and politicians whose careers he had touched. Different constituencies, same function: a network of people with something to lose if the protected figure falls.

They both offered something that institutions wanted and could not easily replace. Chavez offered moral authority, the kind that comes from genuine sacrifice and genuine achievement, and that attached itself to every institution that claimed him. Epstein offered money and access, the kind that comes from extreme wealth, and that attached itself to every institution that accepted.

In both cases, the information that would have ended the protection existed, circulated, and was suppressed, not by a single powerful actor, but by the collective reluctance of many individual actors, each making a small decision not to look, not to ask, not to print, not to pursue.

There was no conspiracy. Conspiracies can be exposed and prosecuted. What we see instead is something more mundane and more durable: a shared institutional instinct, operating without coordination, yet producing coordinated silence.

It is worth dwelling on the university for a moment, because it sits at the center of both stories in ways that I don’t think have been fully examined together.

In the Chavez story, universities were not perpetrators; they were amplifiers. They built the curriculum. They assigned the biographies. They named the centers, the scholarships, and the lecture series. They took a complicated, flawed, genuinely courageous man and transformed him, through the apparatus of academic glorification, into something he was not: an uncomplicated hero. Having done that, they created conditions in which any journalist, researcher, or student who wanted to complicate the picture was swimming against a powerful institutional current.

In the Epstein story, universities were perpetrators. MIT didn’t just passively benefit from Epstein’s money; it actively concealed his involvement, deliberately hid his name from records, and physically managed his campus visits to prevent dissenting voices from encountering him. Harvard didn’t just accept donations; it conducted an internal investigation so incomplete that senior faculty member Lawrence Lessig called it “Hamlet without the prince.”

Two different roles, but in both cases the university was the institution that stood between the public and the truth, in one case by constructing a false image, and in the other by hiding a true one. And in both cases, the people most harmed were those the university claims to serve: young people, students, the next generation. The ones who were taught an incomplete history in one case, and in the other, the ones who were trafficked to a man whose name MIT staff typed as two initials in an email because writing it out in full felt like too much of a risk.

James Madison did not give us the Freedom of Information Act. That came 170 years after him, in 1966. What Madison gave us was the philosophical foundation on which that act rests: the idea that self-government requires informed citizens, and that the government, and by extension the powerful institutions of civil society, does not get to decide what the public deserves to know.

Freedom of information is not merely a legal procedure for requesting documents from federal agencies, though it is that too. It is a statement about the relationship between power and the people over whom it is exercised. It says: you do not get to keep secrets from us. Not if those secrets protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. Not if they allow predators to operate behind the shield of institutional prestige. Not if they teach our children to admire men who did not deserve admiration.

The Freedom of Information Act worked in both of these stories. Documents were released. Court records were unsealed. Congressional investigations produced thousands of pages of evidence. Journalists filed requests, fought for access, and eventually, years later, published.

But here is the hard truth: the legal architecture of transparency is necessary but not sufficient. It can force documents into the light. It cannot force the institutions that receive that light to act on what it reveals. That requires something the law cannot mandate, : will, courage, and accountability that has real teeth.

In the Chavez case, what was missing was journalistic will. The information existed. The story could have been told earlier. The editorial decision, made quietly, without discussion, by the collective instinct of an industry that had built the legend and did not want to examine it, was to wait.

In the Epstein case, what was missing was institutional accountability. The files are open. The emails are public. The donor lists are available. One woman is in prison. The universities have issued reports. And yet the same dynamics, anonymous gifts, powerful donors, institutional prestige available for purchase, are operating today at universities whose names we do not yet know.

We should come back to the people, because in the institutional analysis it would be easy to lose sight of them. There is a woman, Dolores Huerta, who is ninety-five years old. She spent her life being called fearless because she fought for people who had nothing, and she won. For sixty years, she carried a secret that was not hers to carry, because she believed a movement mattered more than what had been done to her. She was wrong. But the press, which has no such excuse, waited just as long.

There are two girls who were twelve and thirteen years old in the 1970s. They are in their sixties now. They waited decades for a story that the adults around them, including the adults in newsrooms, decided was too complicated, too costly, too disruptive to tell.

There are young women whose names are in sealed federal records, who were trafficked to a man whose name MIT staff typed as two initials in an email because the full name felt like too much of a risk. They were trafficked during the years when MIT was calculating how much of a convicted sex offender’s money it could accept before the public would notice.

These are not abstractions. These are the people the architecture of forgetting was built over. These are the people who paid, with their safety, with their silence, with decades of waiting, for the comfort of institutions that chose not to know what they already knew.

What Comes After Knowing

The architecture of forgetting is not dismantled by releasing more documents. It is not dismantled by better FOIA procedures or more aggressive congressional oversight, though those things matter. It is dismantled by the accumulation of individual decisions to refuse to participate in it.

The journalist who decides that the protected narrative is precisely the one that needs examining. The editor who overrules the institutional instinct and assigns the story. The university administrator who looks at the donor’s name and says no. The researcher who discloses the funding source in a footnote, even when that source is embarrassing. The citizen who refuses to accept hollow accountability.

We are living through a moment when two major American stories are making the same argument simultaneously. The information was there. The access existed. The documents were available. And the downstream accountability, the part that is supposed to follow from transparency, the part Madison assumed would follow, fell short. It fell short in the political system that was supposed to be the ultimate guardian of the public interest.

Eventually, both stories broke through. That matters. The press did the work, finally. The courts released the documents, eventually. The survivors spoke when they were ready, when they felt the world was finally willing to hear them. But “”eventually”” is not good enough. Not for the people who waited.

Madison gave us the tools. The Freedom of Information Act gives us the mechanism. What neither Madison nor any law can give us is the collective will to use them, not selectively, not comfortably, not only when the protected figure belongs to the other side, but consistently, honestly, and without the quiet exemptions we build into the architecture when the truth is inconvenient to people we admire.

The question — what does it mean to know something and do nothing with that knowledge? — does not have a legal answer. It has a moral one. And that answer belongs to each of us, individually, every time we encounter a truth that costs something to tell.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in Hartford.