Many years ago, long before Covid and when Donald Trump was still a property magnate-cum-reality TV star, I crossed the pond to study for my PhD at Penn. Not Penn State, which everyone seems to have heard of because of some obscure sex scandal; not Princeton, basking in its Michelle Obama afterglow; but Penn. It’s in the Ivy League, before you crinkle your nose: it has Gothic Revival buildings, frat houses, jocks, and Americans talk endlessly about how old it is. Some call it the Jewish Ivy, thanks to its high proportion of JAPs – Jewish American Princesses – who went there after a Gossip Girl existence at private school in New York. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but I was young, impressionable and ready to wear the Penn merch and Nikes at the drop of a baseball cap. My family, appalled, thought I might never return.
These days, though, Penn is unofficially known as the Trump Ivy. Like most Ivy League colleges, the left-leaning university might not like the appellation – its values loudly rooted in founder Benjamin Franklin’s credo of tolerance and inclusion – but that’s partly what it’s famous for.
Trump graduated from Penn’s business school, the Wharton School of Business, in 1968, having transferred there from Fordham University in New York. In a legacy move, both his daughters Ivanka and Tiffany also attended the Philadelphia-based college. Trump made repeated references to his Ivy League education during his first presidential campaign in 2016: ‘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 in Florida, before ramping up during subsequent press rounds to full brag: ‘Some of the best business minds in the world have gone to Wharton […] it’s probably the hardest there is to get into.’ As a fellow alumna, I listened to his words with a mixture of pride and incredulity: could Penn finally produce a president?
Elon Musk is also a Penn graduate. If Yale had the Bushes, Harvard could lay claim to the Kennedys and Columbia boasted the biggest liberal gong of all – Obama – poor old Penn could only point to William Henry Harrison, who died after only a month in office in 1841. Not anymore. Penn has produced a president twice over – just not one the university publicly wants to be associated with.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, silence prevailed at faculty level. Then-president of Penn, Amy Gutmann, refused to comment – presumably because Trump, as a prodigious donor to Wharton and fee-paying parent of Tiffany Trump at the time, put her in a tight spot. Officially, as a non-profit, the university is barred from discussing political figures, even if 4,000 members of the Wharton student body signed an anti-Trump letter denouncing his first presidential candidacy. Why, then, in 2015, were Wharton faculty reportedly sent an email asking them not to speak to the media and to direct all enquiries to the communications department?
A decade later and Penn finds, once again, that its silence has not produced the desired effect. Trump is president once more and this time, he has the woke campuses of the Ivy League in his sights, as his very public spat with Harvard over federal funding rumbles on. I wanted to know if the student body at my alma mater really did rebuke the president. Finance bro and then-Wharton student Patrick Lobo started the movement Penn for Trump in 2016, but folded it soon after on the grounds that Trump’s comments on Muslims were ‘hard to swallow’. Now a financier in San Francisco, Lobo declined to comment.
‘I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words’
Were there other, Gen Z, Lobo figures who would dare to come out and support Trump this time around? A friend within the university tells me that they exist – but they’re certainly not vocal. Some 12 per cent of the student body reportedly voted for Trump in 2024 – a number insiders find ‘awfully high’ – but that ‘visible support for him had dried up since the funding freeze’. Earlier this year, Trump announced a pause of $175 million in federal funding over the university’s inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s college sports, cementing his antagonistic stance towards the institution he was once so proud to name; soon after, the office for DEI was renamed.
But Trump isn’t the only figure Penn wants to keep schtum about. Joe Biden’s links to the university, where his granddaughters attended, were once flaunted. Biden, a proud Pennsylvania native and former Professor of Presidential Practice at the eponymous Biden Center, is now persona non grata. ‘Since news of his hiding his extreme infirmity have circulated,’ one source tells me, ‘no one expects him to be doing anything anymore […] the Biden Center is out of the way in DC.’ Penn, once a lightning rod for politicians on both sides of the aisle, now finds itself in a curious PR riddle: what do you get if you cross Ben Franklin, Donald Trump and Joe Biden? A whole lot of confusion is what.
I found my Penn college sweatshirt the other day, emblazoned with the words ‘Penn Pride’. Turns out, I’m still Penn Proud – even if others aren’t.
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