8/28/20
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania has renewed a request to investigate how President Trump was admitted to the school in 1966, citing what he called “new evidence” on secretly recorded tapes in which Trump’s sister says a friend took his entrance exam. The professor, Eric W. Orts, is one of six faculty members who asked Penn’s provost earlier this summer to launch an investigation into how Trump transferred into the school. He noted that the president’s niece, Mary Trump, wrote in her book published in July that the president paid someone to take his SATs. Orts, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School, said he contacted Pritchett after The Washington Post on Saturday published a story that included audio of conversations Mary Trump recorded in 2018 and 2019 with Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s sister. In one tape, Barry said she did her brother’s homework for him and that “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.” She said Donald Trump “went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.” Starting in 1964, Trump went to Fordham in New York City for his freshman and sophomore years and then transferred in 1966 to Penn’s undergraduate Wharton School of Finance. Trump has said that he was admitted to the “the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world,” calling it “super genius stuff.”
Trump has not released his own records. His former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress last year that Trump “directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Cohen cited a letter he wrote to Fordham in May 2015, shortly before Trump launched his presidential campaign, that threatened legal action if the school released any of Trump’s records. An investigation by The Post last year found that Trump’s claim that Wharton was the hardest school to enter was not substantiated. The Post reported last year that the Penn admissions official who interviewed Trump was a close friend of Fred Trump Jr., the brother of Donald Trump and father of Mary Trump. That former official, James Nolan, said that it wasn’t difficult to get into Penn at that time, with more than half of applicants granted admission and an even higher percentage of transfer students. By comparison, the admission rate last year to Penn was 7.7 percent. “It was not very difficult,” Nolan said last year about Trump’s admission in 1966, adding: “I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius.” Nolan, while stressing that he had no knowledge if someone else took Trump’s test, said it would have been easier decades ago for someone to take a test for another person.