Letting A Lie Fester

I assumed that Trump's college transcript had been released at some point.  I assumed wrongly.  What I did find was a number of articles mentioning that when Trump was first starting out, he allowed the media to print that he graduated top in his class in Wharton without correcting them.  For some reason, he was not as interested in perceived media lies then as he is now.

It did make me wonder, if not Trump, then who did graduate at the top of the class at Wharton in 1968?  That program had to exist somewhere, right?  Of course it does!  We have the internet!

The program is really a rather interesting document in how far American education has come since the 1960s, when the Liberal Arts Colleges were segregated by gender, and it took longer than I thought to find a woman graduating from the engineering school.  But, starting on page 19, the graduates of Wharton are enumerated, and somewhere between Cecil Jay Olmstead III and William Frederick Uhlhorn Jr, you'll find Donald John Trump in the program receiving a BS in economics.  Prize recipients for Wharton begin on page 60, where you will not find his name listed.  You will also not find his name listed on page 66, where the academic honors are listed (including Cecil - seriously, I only picked it because it sounded SO Waspy, but he graduated cum laude).  What you will find are the two who graduated magna cum laude: Joel Martin Martel and Judith Ann Mike.

So, Trump lost to a girl.  Makes sense, right?  If you are that obsessed with being the best, this has to rub you the wrong way.

More than anything, I wonder what it must have been like for her.  One of a handful of women in the college, studying accounting. And not just keeping up with the men, but excelling beyond them.  I wonder what life had in store for her, and I'd be interested in knowing more about what I perceive to have been a struggle, without knowing for certain that it was.

And, what it was like to have someone co-opt the designation that you had worked for, without any respect for the struggle, hard work, and dedication it took to achieve it.