PHILADELPHIA—Like its rivals in the top tier of American colleges, The University of Pennsylvania boasts a colonial-era founding, a student body of overachievers and a leafy Gothic revival campus. Yet Penn lags behind its rivals in one department: Its legacy in the White House. Harvard has the Adamses, Roosevelts and Kennedys; Yale has the Bushes. Princeton has Woodrow Wilson, while Columbia claims President Barack Obama. Penn, for all its Ivy League luster, musters only a half-claim to William Henry Harrison, who never earned a diploma and died after a month in office.
Now, on the brink of this week’s election, Penn is just a few swing states away from finally earning its spot on that wall of fame. The problem for the campus right now: The candidate who could put it there is Donald J. Trump.
Trump graduated in 1968 from Wharton, Penn’s school of business, and isn’t shy about reminding the world. “I went to an Ivy League school,” Trump told a crowd recently in St. Augustine, Florida. “I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words,” he said at a rally last December; Wharton, he said on Meet the Press, “is probably the hardest there is to get into,” adding, “Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton.”
While Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley College prepares for an election night jubilee, the mood at Donald Trump’s alma mater in West Philadelphia is closer to terrified. At Wharton, one of the world’s most respected (and demanding) business schools, students have recoiled at being linked to a wheeler-dealer whose business record suggests more skill at financial chicanery than genuine company-building. Thousands of alumni have signed an anti-Trump open letter. (There has been no pro-Trump open letter.) And on Penn’s main campus, “Trump” has become a lightning rod for a year’s worth of student protests on issues like Islamophobia and sexual assault. Perhaps the most galling moments for Penn arrived when Trump tried to play the Wharton card to excuse his pantomimed mocking of a disabled reporter. “Who would mock a disability?” Trump told Jake Tapper. “I would never. I’m a smart person. I went to the Wharton School of Finance.”
“It may be the first time I’ve seen someone in the public eye so blatantly use the Penn credential as kind of an excuse for behavior,” says Arielle Brousse, a 2007 graduate who is development director for the Kelly Writers House, an arts and culture hub at Penn. “Suddenly, we’re in this situation where the most public usage of 'I went to Penn ...' is so bombastic and not rooted in Penn values.” Anxious students are plenty worried themselves. “I think a Donald Trump presidency would devalue my degree. One hundred percent,” one senior, Rhea Singh, told me recently.
The irony of Penn’s situation wasn’t lost on Jon Huntsman, a 1987 Penn graduate who made his own presidential run in 2012. Recently, Huntsman attended a Board of Trustees meeting, where he ventured a joke: “I remember sitting in this meeting twenty years ago, and the great lament was: We don’t have enough Penn people running for politics at the highest level!” Huntsman deadpanned. The meeting rippled with nervous laughter.
On campus, Trump’s rise has caused more than anxiety: It has increasingly set students against Penn’s leaders, whom they accuse of taking Trump’s donations and remaining quiet while he gleefully violates the school’s basic principles of tolerance. Inside College Hall, school officials are paralyzed: Legally unable to make political statements, they responded early on by putting a gag order on administrators with regard to Trump, which has left them unable to publicly grapple with the biggest question on campus: Will the rise of Trump—suddenly the most famous Penn alumnus on the planet—actually bring the school down?
***
Trump spent only two years at Penn, having transferred to Wharton as a junior from Fordham in New York City. He was hardly a stellar student (never making the dean’s list, despite repeatedly telling the New York Times he graduated first in his class). He lived off-campus and didn’t take part in much campus life, spending his weekends in New York working in his dad’s real estate business. But Trump’s association with Penn grew steadily after 1968. His son Donald Jr. graduated from Wharton in 2000, followed by his daughter Ivanka, who entered Wharton in 2002 after spending two years at Georgetown, and graduated in 2004. Tiffany Trump, the mogul’s daughter with second wife Marla Maples, graduated from Penn earlier this year. The Trumps became the archetypal Ivy League legacy family—well-known, well-heeled, “brand loyal.”
And generous. An investigation published last week by the campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, found that Donald Trump may have given over a million dollars to Penn over the course of the past three decades. The university responded in kind, and bestowed plenty of rewards on Trump himself. The Wharton Club of Washington, D.C., named him one of the “leading alumni” at the group’s 2014 Joseph Wharton Awards Dinner. In 2007, he was included in Wharton Alumni Magazine’s list of the school’s 125 most influential people. (In a blurb accompanying his name, the magazine called Trump “The Best Known Brand Name in Real Estate.”)
As Trump’s divisive campaign unspooled, his unpopularity at Penn planted deeper roots than the typical campus antipathy toward conservative candidates. Wharton sophomore Owen O’Hare, a College Republican here, said students feel “disgust” and “bewilderment” at Trump’s rise. “Just the fact that he graduated from Penn without any greater respect or understanding for other people, other cultures and other viewpoints is somewhat shocking,” he said. O’Hare plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. Other campus Republicans have voiced support for Trump but have stayed mostly in the shadows, refraining from any public demonstration of the sort that has affected other schools: A short-lived “Penn for Trump” group folded after a few months last year.
Wharton alums have cooled to Trump as well. This reflects, in part, reputational anxiety at Wharton, a school that was already trying to change its image as a boys club for would-be financiers. After the 2008 crash, Wharton began to rebrand itself, turning to entrepreneurship, analytics and innovation as its educational themes. “Wharton is so much more than a ‘finance school,’” Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett has said. But to Trump, his degree is always from “The Wharton School of Finance,” which has not been the school’s official name since 1972. Over 4,000 members of the Wharton community penned an open letter that denounced the candidate this past summer, insisting that Trump “does not represent us” and that the school has been used “to legitimize prejudice and intolerance.” The letter included the names of at least 30 professors. “There are a lot of Wharton students who have the right idea about how they fit into the world, but who are feeling a little diminished by this,” said Brousse, the development officer.
Outside the walls of Wharton, Penn’s undergraduates on the greater campus have reached a stage of almost daily revulsion at Trump’s latest comment. Last month, after the leak of Trump’s sexually aggressive Access Hollywood tape, anti-sexual-assault activists staged a protest outside College Hall, the seat of the administration. They protested not only Trump’s behavior but also the echoes they saw in student controversies on campus—linking Trump’s tape to a sexist party invitation sent by one of Penn’s elite, off-campus clubs, which encouraged freshman women to “wear something tight” and “f--k off to a tease” (whatever that means). Flyers posted on campus called Trump “an active advocate of rape culture.” Penn’s Muslim community has been no less distraught: In December 2015, Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States enraged Muslim students, who spoke at the time to the Philadelphia Inquirer about feeling unsafe on campus. “How am I supposed to feel comfortable if this nation is telling us that we should leave the country?" Engineering School sophomore Lamin Elsawah told the Inquirer.
Some students have begun to call on the administration, in various ways, to renounce Trump. “I do think that Penn and the Board of Trustees should come out with a statement denouncing his political views, assuring the students that they don’t agree with one of our alumni,” said Singh, the Penn senior, who also serves as vice president of the Class Board. An increasingly common question here, overheard in Van Pelt Library or the dining hall at 1920 Commons, is whether the administration should be doing more to assure students it doesn’t tolerate Trump’s views. It’s not the first time the administration has been accused of slow walking student demands: In September, a senior set the campus astir when an op-ed in the Daily Pennsylvanian demanded that Penn speak up about racial injustices nationwide, prompting Penn President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price—after years of pressure and protest—to finally put in writing that “Black lives matter.”
The person for whom Trump’s rise may be the most significant problem is Gutmann, now in her 12th year. From the beginning of Trump’s incendiary candidacy, she’s faced intense pressure to comment on Trump, from students, alumni, petitions, in-person requests, meeting arrangements and the media. Her own academic background suggests she has given the matter serious thought: As a professor, she fashioned a distinguished legacy as a political theorist, writing on the centrality of deliberation in building democratic civil society. But since Trump announced his candidacy, deliberation is the last thing Penn will do: Gutmann has consistently declined to comment on Trump for the Daily Pennsylvanian, and her silence has also stirred the ire of some alumni. In September, Nathaniel Popkin, a 1991 graduate, circulated a petition that criticized Gutmann for remaining silent on Trump. “Penn’s soaring reputation is based on its intellectual rigor alongside its embrace of multiculturalism,” the petition reads. “The close association of Donald J. Trump with the University undermines this distinguished identity.”
It’s not Trump’s politics that would require rebuke from Penn, in this line of thinking: It’s the way his rhetoric and behavior conflict with the school’s basic tenets of tolerance. The third sentence of Penn’s Code of Conduct highlights the university’s core values of “intellectual growth,” “learning from others” and “mutual tolerance”—which Trump’s critics see directly contradicted by the candidate’s proud anti-intellectualism and racially loaded politics.
The closest Gutmann has come to publicly weighing in on Trump happened last January, when she was pressed to comment during a once-a-semester editorial meeting with the Daily Pennsylvanian. Expressing visible discomfort, she told the group, “Discrimination against Muslims in our society is absolutely unacceptable. It is a form of invidious discrimination. It is, I believe, a disgrace for our society to engage in discrimination on the basis of religion or race.” She did not mention Trump by name. This semester, after Trump’s season of political meltdown, Gutmann effectively canceled the regular meeting, cutting down the hourlong gathering of 30 student staffers and granting half the usual time to just three student staffers. No one considered asking her about Trump.
Beyond just keeping quiet, administrators under her purview have taken an unusual step to enforce silence: In the summer of 2015, shortly after Trump announced his candidacy, administrators sent an email to Wharton faculty, urging them not to speak to the media, and direct queries about Trump to the school’s communication staff—which would then, in all likelihood, decline comment. (The details of the email, first reported in the Daily Pennsylvanian, were described independently to POLITICO by two Wharton professors, who believed their Wharton email system had deleted it automatically after six months.) Numerous Wharton faculty cited the policy in declining interviews for this story, even while some had joined the 4,000 Whartonites who signed the anti-Trump letter. One faculty member, who signed the letter, wrote in an email: “It’s Wharton’s policy that faculty are not to comment to members of the media about Trump.” No such directive is reported to exist for non-Wharton faculty. But the same edict of silence does apply to university administrators and staff, according to communication officers who spoke to me for this story.
Internally, the directive has surprised Penn public relations staffers. “You can’t infringe on the academic freedom of faculty,” said one senior communications administrator, who spoke on background due to his senior position. (Others speculated that the email may simply have been a convenient cover for faculty to duck the deluge of media requests about Trump.) Asked whether the directive threatened academic freedom at Penn, Wharton Director of Media Relations Peter Winicov demurred. “Unfortunately, we have no information about this,” Winicov wrote in an email. (Asked to clarify numerous times—including on a follow-up call and personal office visit—Winicov declined to respond.) Vice President for University Communications Stephen MacCarthy said he couldn’t even discuss the Trump email with me off the record. “The topic is just off limits,” he said.
As a nonprofit, the university is blocked from taking an official stance on political figures, says Ron Ozio, director of media relations. And the administration had another concern as well: For much of the time of Gutmann’s silence—including when she gave her statement to the Daily Pennsylvanian—Trump’s daughter Tiffany attended the college. She graduated last spring, just weeks before the national party conventions. Criticizing Trump would go beyond just bashing an alum: It would be blasting a tuition-paying parent. “It would be a disaster,” said one former Penn administrator, explaining the ramifications of a Gutmann statement on Trump. (This former administrator stood behind the administration on this: He said he hoped Gutmann wouldn’t give in to the “moralistic assholes” demanding she speak out.)
The university’s directive for silence has led to significant pretzel-twisting among organizations in the Penn community. The Penn Women’s Center, for instance, has tweeted about Trump from its official account (“Millions of women share sexual assault stories on Twitter after Donald Trump comments #notokay”), yet staffers there are barred from commenting on Trump even tangentially to the media, a spokesperson told me.
Would it be possible for Penn to take a stronger stance without impugning Gutmann’s neutrality? Possibly. “Look at Temple just across the way. When Bill Cosby’s rape accusations came out, they were very quick to remove him from their Board of Trustees,” Singh, the college senior, pointed out. Unlike Cosby, though, Penn doesn’t have a tangible relationship to sever with Trump. Its position is trickier, as it faces pressure to weigh in on a candidate who might contravene the school’s values, yet is still supported by about 40 percent of Americans (and, to be sure, an unknown percentage of Penn).
For the next few days, Penn students will take up their beef with Trump the old-fashioned way: Getting out the vote. Pennsylvania is a swing state, one of a few that could determine the election, and on Locust Walk, the campus thoroughfare that Trump once trekked to Wharton, Clinton campaign volunteers are busying themselves at manned foldout tables. Student volunteers from Penn Leads the Vote, a nonpartisan outfit, sit nearby. The College Republicans have largely shifted their resources to a razor-close Senate race here. With just days until Election Day, finding any measurable support for the school’s most world-famous alum is about as likely as the Penn Quakers winning the Final Four.
They’ve spent years dreaming of a Penn president. Now, the students, parents and alumni of Penn find themselves in a position they would not have expected: looking directly at the prospect of an alum in the White House, and working hard to make sure that it never happens.