As a Penn Graduate, former Faculty Member, and lifelong Philadelphian, [View all]

[PCIntern]

please allow me to make a couple statements concerning the so-called Republican nominee for President of the United States:

I was at Penn for a total of eleven years, four as a doctoral candidate and seven as a clinical assistant professor. During that time occurred the rise of one Donald Trump in New York and then of course, the rest of the "civilized" planet.

Of course he was mentioned as a Penn student in his biographies... pardon me, his WHARTON "pedigree" was mentioned. It was often stated in the media that he graduated at the top of his class. The story circulating throughout the University was that that was untrue. I will tell you exactly where I heard these things: since Wharton had no Friday classes, something the Dental School had without question, there was a big party every Thursday night during the semester on the huge terrace between Graduate Towers A (Nichols House) and Graduate Towers B (no donor at the time, thus no naming). There, graduate students could meet, mingle, and often get "lucky" since people were so pent-up with academic fear and frustration, the only way they could get it out was to have indiscriminate sex with the first reasonable person they'd meet. What an era...but I digress.

I knew some Wharton people because a few had followed with me from my undergraduate institution, and they knew people who knew Trump personally. Everything you think you perceive about him is true. No one who knew him then had one good thing to say about him and believe me, it was not jealousy. No, the Whartonites respected economic and business success no matter what the avenue or the participation in the "lucky sperm club brigade". Suffice it to say that he was apparently an insufferable prig (not quite the word but you get it) and he was admitted because of his connections to various members of the staff of the school via his father. His work ethic was that of an academic minimalist and he was not a little hedonistic even by the standards back then. He would constantly do what we used to call the "Babe Ruth" pickup routine: one takes big swings and strikes out a lot but occasionally he hits a home run and that's what everyone remembers him for.

Unlike Bill Clinton who was talked about favorably at Georgetown for years after he left his undergradaute program, Trump was talked about in the exact opposite fashion.

And that's what I know from the olden days at Penn.