Did Trump Perfect His Skill At Deceit While At Wharton?

The Ugly: Sin #1 by Tim Atseff

In May, we ran an explosive guest post by Charles Krause, 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. Krause is genuinely offended that Penn's most famous grad has 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.

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.

Yesterday, Michael Kranish, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that "Trump has referred to his Wharton degree as ‘super genius stuff.’ An admissions officer recalls it differently. James Nolan was working in the University of Pennsylvania’s admissions office in 1966 when he got a phone call from one of his closest friends, Fred Trump Jr. It was a plea to help Fred’s younger brother Donald Trump get into Penn’s Wharton School."

“He called me and said, ‘You remember my brother Donald?’ Which I didn’t,” Nolan, 81, said in an interview with the Washington Post. “He said: ‘He’s at Fordham and he would like to transfer to Wharton. Will you interview him?’ I was happy to do that.”

Soon, Donald Trump arrived at Penn for the interview, accompanied by his father, Fred Trump Sr., who sought to “ingratiate” himself, Nolan said.

Nolan, who said he was the only admissions official to talk to Donald Trump, was required to give Trump a rating, and he recalled, “It must have been decent enough to support his candidacy.”

For decades, Trump has cited his attendance at what was then called the Wharton School of Finance as evidence of his intellect. He has said he went to “the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world,” calling it “super genius stuff.” Last month, President Trump pointed to his studies there as he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to conservative economist Arthur Laffer.

But Trump, who questioned the academic standing of then-President Barack Obama, has never released records showing how he got into the school-- or how he performed once he was there. And, until now, Nolan’s detailed account of Trump’s admission process has not been publicly disclosed.

Nolan, who spoke to The Post recently at his apartment here, said that “I’m sure” the family hoped he could help get Trump into Wharton. The final decision rested with Nolan’s boss, who approved the application and is no longer living, according to Nolan.

...At the time, Nolan said, more than half of applicants to Penn were accepted, and transfer students such as Donald Trump had an even higher acceptance based on their college experience. A Penn official said the acceptance rate for 1966 was not available but noted that the school says on its website that the 1980 rate was “slightly greater than 40%.” Today, by comparison, the admissions rate for the incoming Penn class is 7.4 percent, the school recently announced.

“It was not very difficult,” Nolan said of the time Trump applied in 1966, adding: “I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius. Certainly not a super genius.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump, as a young man looking ahead to a career in real estate, viewed entry into a top college as his ticket out of the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, where his father had built housing largely aimed at the working class. But the idea of going to Penn, as his father wished, was daunting.

Indeed, Trump needed to look no further than his older brother’s experience to realize the potential difficulty. Fred Trump Jr. had hoped to go to Penn with his friend Nolan. Fred Trump Jr. and Nolan were best friends, having gone to high school together and spent many hours in the Trump family home in Queens... Nolan recalled that Trump’s father never talked to him during this period, preferring the boys stay in the basement. But the plan for the boys to be roommates at Penn failed: Nolan got in, but Fred Trump Jr. was rejected. The two nonetheless remained close.

Ten years later, in 1966, it was Donald Trump who applied to Penn’s Wharton School, having already attended two years at Fordham University in the Bronx, leading to the interview with Nolan. Nolan, who later became director of undergraduate admissions at Penn and now is an educational consultant, said he has not previously been quoted on the record about his role. A 2000 biography, The Trumps, by Gwenda Blair, cited a “friendly” admissions officer who was friends with Fred Trump Jr., without identifying or quoting him. Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981.

It was common during this period for the children of wealthy and influential people to be accepted ahead of other applicants, especially if the parent made a substantial donation to the school. There is no evidence, however, of such donations in Donald Trump’s case.

Records in the University of Pennsylvania archives provided to The Post do not show any donation from Fred Trump Sr. or other family members to the school during the period that Donald Trump applied for admission or was a student. However, some of the donations from that period were made anonymously, so it is not possible to say conclusively whether any Trump family donation was made. The records show donations of $1,000 or more.

The university declined to release records that would explain the decision to accept Trump, or to provide his grade transcripts, citing confidentiality restrictions.

Trump graduated from Penn in 1968. Before long, a legend was born. A 1973 article in the New York Times said Trump graduated “first in his class” from the Wharton School and then quoted his father as saying, “Donald is the smartest person I know.”

The claim that Trump was the top student was repeated in a more widely noticed 1976 profile in The Times, again including his father’s quote about being the “smartest person.” The Times later published stories that questioned whether Trump was a top student at Penn, noting that transcripts are private.

In fact, Trump’s name was not among top honorees at his commencement. Nor was he on the dean’s list his senior year, meaning he was not among the top 56 students in his graduating class of 366. All that is known for certain is that Trump received at least a 2.0 average, or C, enabling him to graduate. A 4.0 is equivalent to an A.

Penn officials said they are prohibited from releasing Trump’s grades unless he allows it.

Trump has said that it is crucial to evaluate a candidates’ educational background to determine whether they are qualified to be president.

For example, in addition to questioning whether Obama was born in the United States, Trump said in a 2011 interview with the Associated Press that he “heard” Obama was “a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

Then he challenged Obama to release his college transcripts: “I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”

Trump has not applied his standard to himself. He has declined to release his college transcripts, and during his 2016 presidential campaign his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, threatened colleges with lawsuits if his academic records were released.

The idea that Trump was the top performer has persisted partly because the president has continued to let it stand, despite the many times it has been debunked. Trump acknowledged as much last year, saying that he “heard I was first in my class at the Wharton School of Finance. And sometimes when you hear it, you don’t say anything. You just let it go.”

The common thread in the early stories about Trump was that he had performed so well at Wharton that he was ready to take the family business to a higher level.

Yet Trump is remembered by some classmates as a middling student.

Louis Calomaris, who spent considerable time with Trump during real estate classes, said in an interview that he headed a weekly study group. Trump had attended two or three of the study sessions when, one day in class, the professor announced that the most important thing was to attend his lectures.

“Out of the corner of my eye, I see Trump close his book. And he never came to another study group, but he never missed class,” Calomaris said.

He recalled Trump standing in his three-piece suit and announcing that he planned to be one of the greatest real estate developers in New York City.

Calomaris, who has worked as a business consultant and restaurateur and taught marketing at the University of Maryland, said that he thought Trump was “a bright guy” but that “he was always lazy-- he wouldn’t read a book. I never considered him stupid; I considered him opportunistic. . . He cared about making money, and he knew that the most prestigious school was Wharton, and that worked with his opportunistic nature.”

In a 1985 biography of Trump, Jerome Tuccille wrote that Trump hardly viewed his attendance as a priority.

“Donald agreed to attend Wharton for his father’s sake,” Tuccille wrote. “He showed up for classes and did what was required of him but he was clearly bored and spent a lot of time on outside business activities.”

By the time Trump released his autobiography, The Art of the Deal, in 1987, he had embraced the idea of what he called “truthful hyperbole.” The key to promotion, he explained, “is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

Without addressing his class rank or the circumstances of his acceptance, Trump was blunt in his autobiography about the value he found in promoting his time at Wharton.

“Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials,” Trump wrote. “In my credentials,” Trump wrote. “In my opinion, that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously, and it’s considered very prestigious. So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton.”

Trump continues to cite his Wharton background, sometimes in misleading ways. Awarding the Medal of Freedom to Laffer on June 19, Trump claimed that “I’ve heard and studied the Laffer curve for many years in the Wharton School of Finance.”

Trump graduated from Wharton in 1968, and Laffer did not outline his tax-cutting theory on the back of a napkin until 1974, according to Laffer’s account in a book he co-wrote called The End of Prosperity. Thus, studying the Laffer curve during Trump’s time at the school would have been impossible.

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