Aside from his wealth, his very good genes , his vast feeling for economic issues, his many tall buildings and his golf courses that ring the Earth, one of the most important things about Donald Trump , according to Trump himself, is that he graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the countrys top business schools. Trump got his degree in 1968, and almost 50 years later, he still cant stop talking about it.

I went to the Wharton School of Business, hell have you know. Im, like, a really smart person .

He has called Wharton the best school in the world and super genius stuff , and argues that his Wharton degree qualifies him to be president because we need business genius in this country . After Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a congenital joint condition , he later denied having done it, saying : I would never Im a smart person. I went to the Wharton School of Finance.

But while Trump praises Wharton to the skies, Wharton is straining to say nothing at all.

School officials have refused to comment on Trump since he declared his candidacy, even declining to address basic facts about his history there. Penns student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, has always enjoyed good access to Wharton leaders, but when reporter and Wharton student Corey Stern saw in some old records that Trump had once served on a Wharton board of overseers, the school wouldnt confirm it one way or the other. If it was Donald Trumps name, no, no comment on anything, Stern says.

Last fall, Whartons administrators sent an email to professors asking them not to say anything about Trump to the press. Of the 14 Wharton professors I asked to talk about the candidate, only two agreed. One, J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing, pointed me to an evidence-based election forecast hed designed. As of Tuesday evening, that site was predicting that Trump would receive 46.9 percent of the two-party popular vote. Beyond that, Armstrong didnt want to comment.

When it comes to the Trump campaign, the school thought we should be kind of conservative, Armstrong told me. If were not really experts, why should we be talking about it?