The University Of Pennsylvania's Dirty Little Secret: Donald Trump's Wharton Degree

Graduation Day (May 20) 1968: Donald J Trump poses with his father shortly before or after receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Fiannce and Commerce. He has said that day was "the beginning" of his transformation from just another rich kid to the bold-faced real estate mogul and Lothario he would become:
a.k.a.
The Donald J Trump

-by Charles Krause

HIS TWEETS TELL THE TALE

The University's silence is "a disgrace"

As my 50th college reunion approaches, this weekend, I will return to Philadelphia ashamed, saddened and angry that my Alma mater has chosen to remain silent in the face of what's become painfully obvious: the University of Pennsylvania failed to educate its most famous alumnus, Donald J Trump, Wharton '68.

Simply put, what the world has seen since the day he became President is a Penn grad with a 6th grade vocabulary; less than a passing acquaintance with proper English grammar and spelling; no apparent interest in, or knowledge of, history, literature, the arts, science or, most dangerously, Constitutional law. (Had he taken Dr. Henry Abraham's Constitutional Law course, things might have been different. But he probably wouldn't have passed.)

Without any doubt, Donald Trump's degree from the Wharton School is a disgrace to the University; an insult to Penn alumni, especially those of us who graduated in the 60's and early 70s; and one of the alternative facts Candidate Trump used, shamelessly, to persuade those who voted for him that he was qualified to be President.

One explanation for Our Leader's having both the educational level of a high school drop-out and an undergraduate degree from what is supposed to be one of the world's great universities, is that, 50 years ago, the University of Pennsylvania was a diploma mill, willing to admit, and grant degrees to, anyone who could pay tuition.

It just so happens I was the editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's student newspaper, in 1968, the year young Donnie Trump, as he was known then, received his under-graduate degree from Penn's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Believe me when I tell you, the explanation that Penn was a diploma mill with the standards of a second-rate community college, is simply not true.

There is another explanation, however, that I asked the University's current president, Amy Gutmann, to investigate in a letter I sent her this past January. That she never acknowledged receipt of my letter, much less ordered the investigation I suggested, coupled with Michael Cohen's testimony about the threatening letters he was ordered to send to Fordham and Penn, strongly suggests to me that what I asked Gutmann to investigate, is true.

And if it is true, then the University's official silence about The Donald's relationship to the University-- a policy Gutmann adopted soon after he announced he was running for President in 2015-- suggests she is engaged in covering up a scandal that Trump himself was worried might derail his candidacy had it become known during the primaries, when he used his Wharton degree as a prop to prove he was the brilliant genius he claimed to be.

by Nancy Ohanian

His fixer, Michael Cohen, knew better. He thought the way he used his "academic credentials" proved something else. "When I say con man, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores," Cohen said when he testified before Congress.

Fordham, where The Donald spent his freshman and sophomore years, before transferring to Wharton in 1966 for his junior and senior years, at least confirmed receipt of Cohen's letter.

Penn would not.

"Sorry, but we do not comment on students' records," the University's spokesman told The Daily Pennsylvanian, when its editor tried to confirm that Penn had also received Cohen's threatening letter. What the DP got, instead, was a near-perfect nonresponse response (used most often in Washington when an agency spokesperson is forced to respond to questions about a front page story in The Timesor The Post that he/she knows is so explosive that even a "no comment" could resultin getting his or her principal not only fired, but indicted).

Cohen obviously thought-- or knew-- his bosses' grades and test scores would not support Candidate Trump's claim that he is brilliant and a genius-- the reason Cohen seemed to think he had been ordered to write the letters.

But what if it was something much worse, something that would reveal the way Donald Trump had used money all his life to buy what he wanted-- or, to get rid of what stood in his way?

What if his grades at Fordham were so bad-- and his test scores so low-- that if they, like his tax returns, were made public, eyebrows would be raised and questions would be asked: "How did The Donald ever get accepted to Wharton with grades and board scores like that?"

And what if, omg, what if it turned out that somebody had to bribe somebody to get him in? Even Jeb Bush might have roused himself long enough to make something out of that, especially if the University correctly decided it would have to withdraw his precious degree because it wouldn't be fair to Penn's thousands of other undergrad alums if bribing admis-sions officers were recognized as one perfectly acceptable and customary way students were admitted to Penn during the years Donnie Trump was there.

THE BAD: Pillage Practice by Jim Boden

What I asked Gutmann to do was quite simple: compare Trump's grades from his freshman and sophomore years at Fordham, and his board scores, with those of the other applicants who wished to transfer to Wharton as juniors in 1966. If his measured up, case closed. If they didn't, then what I had been told 40 years ago, would bear further investigation.

And what that was, was this: that Donald Trump's older brother, Freddy, who graduated from Lehigh, paid someone he knew in the admissions office at Penn to admit his young Donnie Trump into Wharton, despite his failing grades at Fordham and low board scores-- the very same grades ands board scores he was worried about 50 years later.

The other half of the rumor has been, for years, that The Donald spent very little time in class and paid other students to take his exams, which would account for the degree he received in 1968 without his having learned much of anything during his two years at Penn.

After the tough guy role he played firing people week after week on NBC, which we now know was a con job because he apparently hates to fire the crooks he's hired to run the government, it should come as no surprise that he managed to con the University into giving him a degree he didn't earn honestly. It should also come as no surprise he's not very good in his current role as President, playing on the world stage to sophisticated audiences who can tell the difference between a pro and an amateur.

What is surprising, and deeply troubling, is President Gutmann's disinterest in defending the rest of the University's alumni, whose degrees are degraded as long as the world assumes that the educational achievement of hte University's most famous alumnus is no different than ours.

Or, put another way, that ours is as poor as his.

The letter I wrote to her is below.

I'll leave it to those who care to read it to decide if Penn's dirty little secret should be exposed.

by Tim Atseff from the series, Seven Deadly Sins: Trump's Dystopian Hepatology

Dear President Gutmann,

I write to you now as a member of the Class of 1969, former University Trustee, former editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian and former member of the Benjamin Franklin Society. Over the past two years, I have waited in vain for the University to defend the integrity of the degree which I, and my classmates, earned just a year after Donald Trump (W ’68) graduated from Wharton without the basic language skills and knowledge of science, history, literature and the arts one would expect of a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Sadly, the degree my classmates and I were once so proud of, and that we are being urged to return to campus to celebrate in May, 50 years after receiving it, has, for me, at least, become an embarrassment. Every day, it is further degraded by the President’s tweets and interviews; poor grammar; inability to spell; sixth grade vocabulary; lack of intellectual curiosity; disrespect for fact-based research and information; and policy choices which reflect obvious ignorance of our Constitution and American history.

While it would be unfair to hold the current academic leaders and Trustees of the University responsible for the failures of past administrations, the University’s silence, in response to the President’s repeated use of his Wharton degree as proof of his intelligence and educational achievement, has done nothing to dispel the impression that, in the 1960s, the University’s standards were so low it was possible to graduate from the Wharton School with no apparent knowledge of business law or ethics and from the University of Pennsylvania having learned nothing at all.

I believe it was my dear friend, the late Claudia Cohen, who first told me the rumors about Mr. Trump’s older brother having “arranged” Donald Trump’s transfer into the Wharton School’s undergraduate program---after flunking out of Fordham. Our conversation would have taken place in the spring of 1979, when Claudia’s training at the Daily Pennsylvanian had taken her to Page Six at the New York Post and mine had brought me to New York to collect an Overseas Press Club award for my reporting from Jonestown, where I was shot and wounded the previous November while on assignment for the Washington Post.

Donald Trump graduated the year I was editor-in-chief of the DP. Yet, I never knew, or knew of, him. Nor did many other undergraduates I’ve talked to since, apparently because he didn’t spend much time in Philadelphia. By 1979, however, he was a bold-faced name in New York, someone Claudia would have known. I remember, we laughed; it seemed so inconsequential. I mean, who could have imagined Donald Trump would become President of the United States?

If the rumors are true, however, they’re no longer inconsequential or a laughing matter.

His admission to an Ivy League school, one he may have been unqualified to attend, might well have contributed to his apparent belief that the norms and laws of the country don’t apply to him. The circumstances of his admission might also help explain how he managed to get into and out of Penn without anything to show for it except his degree and perhaps some of the finance and accounting tricks he would later use to make money when his companies went bankrupt.

I believe it is incumbent upon the University to undertake a thorough forensic investigation of Donald Trump’s admission to the University, with special reference to the transcript of his two years at Fordham and his SAT scores, to determine whether he was academically qualified to transfer into the Wharton undergraduate program; and his undergraduate record to determine whether any evidence exists of another rumor, that he paid other students to write his papers and take his exams.

Even if the latter cannot be conclusively proven half a century later, his Fordham transcript and SAT scores should be enough to determine if he was eligible for admission to the University in the first place-- and whether his degree should be invalidated, if he was not.

When the University revoked Steve Wynn’s honorary degree, you issued a statement which said, in part, “As a university, we have always been, and will always continue to be, looked to by our alumni and neighbors, our faculty, and most of all by our students, for moral leadership. We must not-- we cannot-- fail to provide it,” you said.

by Jim Boden

I think many alumni applauded your no-nonsense approach to the allegations made against Mr. Wynn, then a University Trustee, but wonder why similar behavior by Mr. Trump hasn’t resulted in a similar response by the University. Yes, we know Mr. Trump is President of the United States. And would argue, all the more reason for the University to demonstrate its moral leadership.

And finally, I wish to register my disappointment at the 50th Reunion program recently sent to members of the Class of ’69. It is devoid of relevant intellectual content.

Quite frankly, if the University does nothing else, I believe it should offer the Class of ’69 morally and intellectually defensible and relevant seminars that would include Constitutional scholars, historians and others from the University capable of continuing our education about the rights and duties of U.S. citizenship and the crisis of governance we face as a result of our fellow alum’s presidency.

If the University is unable to provide a Reunion program relevant to our lives today, it would be unfortunate-- but I think entirely appropriate-- if some of us were to organize a parallel set of Reunion seminars and social activities-- or boycott the Reunion altogether. If nothing else, our response would demonstrate that at least some of us learned something as a result of the excellent education most of us received while we were at Penn.

I look forward to your response. I should add that I shall consider this letter a private correspondence for a month. At that time, absent a substantive reply, I shall feel free to release the letter publicly, hoping to initiate a discussion I feel is necessary and long overdue. Most sincerely,


Charles A Krause
Founder and board chair
The Center For Contemporary Political Art, Washington DC

Silence is not the answer

for the Trustees and President of
the University of Pennsylvania
or for its alumni.

The Trustees and President can't pretend
Donald Trump doesn't exist,
airbrushing him out of the University's history
the way Walter Annenberg at one time
airbrushed Gaylord Harnwell out of
the Philadelphia Inquirer.

There may have been reasons
to remain silent and neutral during the primaries
and general election campaign in 2016.
But our whole system of government
is now at risk
and the University cannot,
and should not,
forsake its lineage by remaining
silent as his prejudice, narcicism and ignorance
(for which the University is at least partly responsible)
destroy the fabric that made this
country vibrant and strong.

I actually thought the letter I sent
Amy Gutmann
offered an honorable
way out for the University.
If Donald Trump should
never have been admitted, then the
University can legitimately
take back is degree
and cut its ties to him,
and his ties to the University.

Not even those of us who were
at Penn when Donald Trump was a student,
can be held accountable
for the mistakes that were made
50 years ago.

But we can and will be
held accountable
for what we do now.
If the University that begat Donald Trump
doesn't disassociate itself from Donald Trump,
then we, the alumni,
need to register our disapproval
and take action.

For the Class of '69,
our 50th reunion
may be a good time and place to start.

THE UGLY: Sin #1 by Tim Atseff