Reason # 16: Undergraduate Education
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
Donald Trump and Joseph Biden matriculated at good, but not prestigious universities, Biden at a state school, the University of Delaware and Trump at Fordham University a private Jesuit institution in New York City, where he attended as a day hop, while living at home with mommy and daddy. Neither garnered high academic rankings or played college baseball or football. While Biden graduated from Delaware, with reportedly undistinguished grades, his record was strong enough to gain admission to Syracuse University law school, where he earned a law degree in 1968. Trump did not graduate from Fordham; he transferred to the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, a prestigious Ivy League bastion, in his junior year. Here the plot thickens.
Trump’s niece, Mary, alleges in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”, that her uncle’s grades at Fordham were not high enough for him to gain admission to Wharton, but that he had “pull”. The family had a friend in the administration who could grease the skids. Even that was not enough; she states that Donald cheated and paid a friend, Joe Shapiro, who was highly intelligent, to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for him. This was possible during that era as the SAT did not then require photo identification, as it does today. She cites telephone conversations with Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry as the source of the Shapiro information. Because Shapiro died of cancer more than twenty years ago, there is no possibility of verification. Trump of course denies the allegation.
If this were true, it would be a very serious matter. Similar accusations of cheating to obtain admission to good schools resulted in a major scandal in recent years, with trials and jail sentences for prominent individuals. A group of U. Penn ethics professors demanded that the school investigate, without success. Is there a way this dispute might be resolved? Yes, Trump could release his SAT scores to the public. If, for example, they showed a sharp rise in the SAT score between the initial and final tests, this might support an accusation of cheating. Did he release the scores? No, but let’s leave that for a moment while we consider his academic record at Wharton.
Donald Trump has bragged on many occasions that Wharton was a very difficult school to gain admission to and that he graduated number one in his class. Multiple classmates have told reporters that this assertion is false, that Donald was an indifferent student. One source has stated that his personal friend, Professor William T. Kelly, told him on a hundred occasions that Donald Trump was “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had”.
This is a much easier dispute to resolve. A student cannot be the highest ranking without, at a bare minimum, making the dean’s list or being honored at graduation. Trump never made the dean’s list and was not honored at graduation for academic distinction. What about a grade point average? Simple; just release your transcript.
Here we have much stronger documentation. Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer attorney, testified before congress in 2019 that he was instructed by his boss to write letters threatening the full consequences of the law, if any school or any individual at a school should release (or leak) Trumps transcript to the public eye. Cohen provided copies of these letters, that are in the public record.
Donald Trump did not pursue a post-graduate degree.
One issue remains – privilege in university admissions. Legacy admissions are a sordid reality in academia. Prestigious universities have long favored the offspring of prominent alumni and those who have made large donations. This is yet another form of cheating, that steals from and harms deserving students, who had earned these positions but were denied. Was his father, Fred Trump, the kind of person who would go behind the scenes to pull strings to get his son admitted to Wharton? That requires a deeper dive into Fred Trump’s character. His biography is a subject for tomorrow’s post.
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
July 31, 2024