Donald Trump, businessman and presumptive Republican nominee for president, likes to remind people that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance, one of the top-twenty undergraduate business programs in the country.
“I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” Trump said during a July 11 speech in Arizona. “I’m, like, a really smart person.”
Later, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that Wharton is “probably the hardest there is to get into,” and that “some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton.”
Current Wharton students, however, do not appear to feel the same universal bond with the candidate that Trump feels with the school. In an open letter published Friday on Medium, Wharton students expressed their disappointment and “outrage” at Trump’s candidacy and rhetoric.
“We, proud students, alumni, and faculty of Wharton, are outraged that an affiliation with our school is being used to legitimize prejudice and intolerance,” the letter reads. “Although we do not aim to make any political endorsements with this letter, we do express our unequivocal stance against the xenophobia, sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry that you have actively and implicitly endorsed in your campaign.”
As of Saturday morning, the letter had garnered over 600 signatures from current and former Wharton undergraduate and graduate students.
Trump’s Plan To Separate Himself From His Businesses Is Essentially WorthlessPolitics by CREDIT: AP Photo/Julio Cortez Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump owns a lot of…thinkprogress.org“It was important for us to speak out against Trump because, as we have seen in many moments throughout history, silence is an act of complicity,” the letter’s co-authors told NBC News. “This open letter speaks on behalf of Wharton students, alumni and faculty who wish to speak out against hate and stand in solidarity with all members of our diverse community — both at Wharton and across America.”
According to NBC News, this is not the first time that Wharton students have expressed dismay at Trump’s political campaign. During a mock caucus held on the campus in February, Trump garnered only vote. A USA Today piece on Trump’s political presence on campus also noted that only a “small minority” of members of Penn’s College Republicans club are “sympathetic to his bid.”