Monday, July 11, 2016

Thousands of Wharton Students, Alumni, and Faculty Sign Open Letter Opposing Donald Trump

Wharton is a business school, yet there were no complaints in the open letter about Donald Trump's horrific mercantilist trade perspective, his support for a low interest rate Fed policy, his call for a national industrial policy and his suggestion that higher taxes on the rich might be needed. Nothing.

Instead, the letter features complaints about Trump's prejudice and intolerance:
The Wharton community is a diverse community. We are immigrants and children of immigrants, people of color, Muslims, Jews, women, people living with or caring for those with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community. In other words, we represent the groups that you have repeatedly denigrated, as well as their steadfast friends, family, and allies.
We recognize that we are fortunate to be educated at Wharton, and we are committed to using our opportunity to make America and the world a better place — for everyone. We are dedicated to promoting inclusion not only because diversity and tolerance have been repeatedly proven to be valuable assets to any organization’s performance, but also because we believe in mutual respect and human dignity as deeply held values. Your insistence on exclusion and scapegoating would be bad for business and bad for the American economy. An intolerant America is a less productive, less innovative, and less competitive America.
We, the undersigned Wharton students, alumni, and faculty, unequivocally reject the use of your education at Wharton as a platform for promoting prejudice and intolerance. Your discriminatory statements are incompatible with the values that we are taught and we teach at Wharton, and we express our unwavering commitment to an open and inclusive American society.

To be sure, Trump does take some peculiar positions with regard to some ethnic groups. but for the record, I do not believe Trump has said anything negative about Jews or the  LGBTQ community. In fact, Trump's mentor when it came to toughness and dealing with the public was a gay Jew, Roy Cohn,

The Wharton letter is more a reflection on the said state of focus in schools today then it is about the weaknesses in Trump's campaign. What business school students should know about, business and economics, they don't mention in the letter, what they do mention, politically correct diversity, suggests superficial understanding of Trump's views with some glaring errors of fact.

-RW

2 comments:

  1. "...diversity and tolerance have been repeatedly proven to be valuable assets to any organization’s performance..."

    Proving the unprovable...

    My view is in line with Walter Williams:

    "The bottom line is there no evidence anywhere that but for discrimination, people would be divided according to their percentages in the population in any activity. Diversity is an elitist term used to give respectability to acts and policy that would otherwise be deemed as racism."

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2011/04/walter-e-williams/diversity-perversity/

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  2. Perhaps Trump supports low interest rates because he sees a risk in the FED raising interest rates to spark an economic crisis to hurt Trump.

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