And drawn from UD’s own university.

It all started back in the ‘eighties, with Donald Trump’s alma mater producing so many financial criminals that newspapers started keeping track of the ever-growing Wharton “Hall of Shame.” (Type WHARTON in my search engine for all the gory details.) The tradition persists today, with Wharton featuring prominently in articles with titles like Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? and The Wharton Mafia. It’s positively embarrassing.

The Wharton School of Business has deified Donald Trump, boasting in its alumni magazine of his greatness and influence. It can’t get enough of him. It’s pleased as punch and bursting with pride to have spawned him…. or at least it was until around 2007. In a recent article about him in the U Penn paper, people are beginning to sound less enthusiastic.

A Wharton spokesperson said that the leadership of the alumni office and magazine have turned over since the publication of the article, and declined to comment further on Trump.

Hm. A bit snippy there… But, you know, it’s one thing to go the silence route (Trump? Trump who…?); it’s another thing – especially given Wharton’s cultural role as National Fraternal Order of America’s Great Insider Traders – actually to come out and repudiate “the worst human being who has ever won a Republican primary.”

UD doesn’t mean revoke his degree or anything. She means that given Wharton’s already filthy reputation, and given Trump’s incessant dropping of the Wharton name alongside his name, the school might consider issuing a statement distancing itself from its most famous graduate.

The Republican party will do it all for her.

In response to Trump’s many promises that he will commit war crimes and force American military personnel to commit them too, one of the Washington Post’s most conservative columnists today writes:

[H]is most important and devastating utterance [in the debate] has left little doubt about his contempt for democracy and the moral necessity to defeat him either before or after he gets the GOP presidential nomination… For all of his professed concern and respect for the military Trump considers them to be errand boys, like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A commander in chief who truly respects the troops and looks out for them does not order them to commit war crimes, setting off a constitutional crisis and subjecting American service personnel to court marshal and criminal prosecution. His attitude — I say it, so they will follow — is the thinking of a thug, a proto-fascist and a narcissistic personality.

Jennifer Rubin has just updated her column with Trump’s latest effort to clear his mind.

Trump, apparently told that what he was saying was outrageous and illegal, now tells the Wall Street Journal that what he said at the debate is not his position. And this man wants to be commander and chief of our armed forces?! It’s hard to know if he is evil, ignorant or both.

… VP.

But before we hear from UD, let’s hear from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

SOS notes that Romney found a fine speechwriter. Here’s some of the good stuff.

[Trump is a] twisted example of evil trumping good.

Nice use of the last name. “Twisted” is a strong word, and gives the sentence a gently tripping alliteration. Twisted also helps make one of Romney’s larger points: Trump is nuts.

There is a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War while at the same time John McCain, who he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured.

Dark irony is pretty effing sophisticated for a political speech, in SOS‘s humble opinion. SOS expects to find dark irony in essays about Franz Kafka. Color SOS also pretty astonished that Romney’s willing to say Trump humped his way through the war. This is a point best made by Bill Maher (now that Robin Williams is no longer with us), but even without going for the easy laugh, Romney does more than respectably with it.

His imagination must not be married to real power.

The he’s nuts point again, made pithily and well. SOS thinks that Romney’s decision to stress Trump’s disordered grandiose mind was a wise one. If the point is to needle Trump in order to get him to act even more insanely than he’s been acting, nothing will work better than heading for the complex private terrain of his mind. It’s like that cruel game in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf when George finally has Martha madly shrieking that she’s NOT nuts, she’s NOT nuts! “You’re all flops,” screams Martha (losers, in Trumpspeech), and I’m the only sane one around here…

A later phrase along these lines – Trump’s “absurd third-grade theatrics” – adds infantile to grandiose and disordered. And look at the poetry of the phrase: absurd rhymes with third; grade is a nearish-rhyme with third, and theatrics wakes the phrase up by putting a long-voweled, tri-syllabic word at the end.

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Ok, and as for UD‘s response: She has two points to make.

1. As a university maven, UD was pleased to see Trump University rear its head.

His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.

2. For UD, who will vote for Hillary, the speech is also a winner because Romney’s intemperate remarks about Hillary will, UD thinks, inspire more people to vote for her:

Even as Romney condemned Trump as a fundamental threat to the nation, he gave credence to Republicans’ wide-ranging hysteria about Hillary Clinton. “A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president,” he declared, reflecting a variety of negative GOP tendencies — accepting distortions as plain truth, making it seem as though the fate of the Republic constantly hangs on Republicans winning the next election, arguing that their opponents are not just wrong but illegitimate.

The New York Times editorializes:

There were opportunities to stop [Trump], early on. Possessed of a crack team of researchers, the Republican Party did not turn its resources on investigating this man’s record of falsehoods and business failures. When struggling families worry that their children’s American dream will be obscured behind a mountain of college debt, even a passing reference to the scam that is Trump University would surely have resonated many months ago.

Yes, now that people are truly desperate, they can’t say enough about Trump University. (Here at University Diaries, we’ve been writing about that peculiar institution since 2010. ) People want that school to be the key to the scummy scammy Trump gestalt and therefore – once this resonates – a significant part of his downfall. Here’s why this is false reasoning.

For more than a decade a firestorm of fraud involving hundreds of taxpayer-supported for-profit universities has raged freely throughout this country. Since very few Americans seem to care, and since there’s huge money for politicians from the for-profit school industry (an industry in which Goldman Sachs has a huge investment), almost nothing of significance has been done to regulate or shut down the scam. Even the fact that accreditors for these schools are almost all former executives at the same schools gets a rise out of exactly no one.

This is an incomparably more destructive scandal than Trump’s little academic foray into sucker-scamming, but no one cares. If Americans are content to let the rigged, filthy, for-profit schools continue to bankrupt them and make Goldman rich, what makes you think they’re any less content to ignore Trump University? In a vast landscape of corruption, Americans maybe have time to notice, say, massive athletics organizations like the NFL (America’s FIFA); but even there they don’t care. They’re spectators, not social activists. There are games to be watched.

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All institutions, starting with all government institutions, are corrupt as far as many of Trump’s supporters are concerned (this is an attitude now known to all as Tea Party Nihilism), and at least Trump is defiantly, amusingly, attractively, even flamboyantly, corrupt. At least he is, in the words of Florida’s current governor, “fun to watch.”

We can say of Trump what John Ashbery said of avant-garde art:

Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing… [Take Pollock, and Rothko:] Does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t although I believe in it and want it to exist.

Trump gestures recklessly toward nihilism (“founded on nothing”) or toward a New Wave, or toward both. Millions of Americans find this beautiful.

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Like Chauncy Gardner, Americans like to watch. In particular, we like to watch us being us. You don’t get any more us than Donald Trump. Americans instinctively recognize that he is radically of their moment, radically of their time, and they feel comfortable with him as a candidate. Little Trump U will have no effect on that.

… who has inspired a lawsuit from Renee Rabinowitz.

***********************

WALK AWAY, RENEE

And when I see the breasts that point my way
The sluts I’m forced to pass by every day

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself near your filth
The empty seating over there will do for you
Apostate Jew

From deep inside the vomit I’m forced to spew
From deep inside the vomit triggered by you

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself next to you
Now as my lust beats down upon my weary eyes
Crush her, it cries

Your breasts and hips inside a plane upon a seat
Still find a way to haunt me with their heat

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself by your side
The empty seating over there will do for you
Apostate Jew

… getting brutal.

… new app alerts Iranian women to the proximity of the morality police. Know hope.

Could Republican voters be the next awakened fleecees?

***************

In other Trump/university news: A foreign university has already revoked a Trump honorary degree. Now an American university – Lehigh – has begun talking about the whole honoring Trump thing.

The professor initiating discussion about the Trump degree at Lehigh University specializes in draining away gunk in order to stabilize environments.

Fascinating ongoing performance art installation at Dortmund University, where a non-denominational “silent” room has been transformed by a group of students into a Muslim prayer room, with extensive directives mandating the segregation and veiling of women.

Note, in this image, how students have turned on its side a mural depicting trees in sunlight, and re-purposed it into a woman-hiding partition.

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SILENCE = HADITH (UD‘s title) isn’t really installation art. It began as an “experiment,” in the words of a university spokeswoman, in providing a neutral quiet space for students who might want to sit in peace a bit amid the “stresses of university life.”

The experiment has gone poorly. Since the room’s inauguration in 2012 there’s been a running battle between the university and a group of Muslim students who persistently dress it up as their own. Then when female students go there for a little down time and are ordered to put on a veil and hide behind a wall – and this is just UD talking but those sound more like stressors than de-stressors – the students complain to the administration and things get more stressful still.

So Tranquillity Base has been abandoned.

Pussy-free zone.

… you get a lot of milling.

About half of Republicans favor higher taxes on the rich…

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Many pithy sentences, such as this one:

Running for office as an exercise in ego gratification may not be as good a thing as running as a serious candidate with good ideas, but it’s much better than running as a serious candidate with bad ideas.

And plenty of low-key humor (read the whole thing). Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves writing like this.

These speeches, I bet, are largely just a string of anecdotes by Clinton.

Figure around fifteen minutes at the beginning for greetings, jokes, thank yous. That leaves forty-five minutes worth of speech. Which (if my math is correct, which it never is) means Hillary Clinton told four to five anecdotes at roughly $55,000 apiece.