Inside Wharton's Woke-to-Wall Street Pipeline
Inside Wharton's Woke-to-Wall Street Pipeline
My report on the institutionalization of ESG and DIE at the storied business school -- and its skeptics
Wharton's Majoring in Woke Capitalism. Some Are Taking an Elective in Dissent.
One of America’s storied Ivy League executive training grounds is elevating a view of capitalism that shuns the very enterprises from which its namesake made his fortune: In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School will offer a new major called Environmental, Social and Governance Factors for Business.
The nation’s first business school was founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, an industrialist who made a killing in mining and manufacturing, the sorts of “dirty” industries that ESG proponents disfavor. Now, the school that bears his name will have the distinction of becoming the first prominent institution to offer such a degree.
At RealClearInvestigations, I report on Wharton’s institutionalization of ESG, as well as Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE)—also set become a major this year—the broader significance for our economy and culture, and the criticisms raised by skeptical alums and professors, many of whom refused to speak by name for fear of recriminations.
Here’s a revealing excerpt:
One recent Wharton graduate told RCI that “indoctrination” in ESG/DEI-related subjects is baked into business schools before students ever enter them. “It starts right in the applications,” he says, which, in his experience applying to top business schools, is embodied in essay prompts like “How are you going to change the world?” He believes such leading questions naturally lend themselves to emphasizing ESG. “Never do they ask, how are you going to preserve the status quo? Or, how are you going to protect the American system, capitalist system?”
Wharton, at least when he applied, avoided asking such questions. This graduate added that when major investment banks came to campus to recruit students, “the whole Wall Street recruiting process was chock full of DEI stuff,” as well as “blatant discrimination in my opinion.” Recruiting emails obtained by RCI show financial services firms offering prospective Wharton applicants individual break-out sessions broken by affinity groups including women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, LGBTQ candidates, and other “underrepresented” peoples. Many banks also advertised diversity fellowships for graduate students.
“Other than Asian and white men, everyone else had extra sessions made available to them with the banks,” said the alumnus. He claims one could draw a line from this incremental facetime, and inherent identity politics, to “who got the internships.”
Read the whole thing here.
What is such a weird thing for me is that I am a white, Anglo-American woman whose grandmother's name was Wharton. I really dislike this witch hunt against whites, and of course that is what it is. The witch hunts were a spill over of the intellectual monastic class reading Latin literature on witch craft from the pagan era. Since it was in books, surely it must be there in reality. So eventually people, convinced that there were witches went hunting for them, and they found them. The trials were made of such statements as, "Did you, or did you not shape shift your neighbor into a pig?" And the "witches" who were basically crazy said they had done it, they admitted to it. Now we have people who have steeped themselves in Nazi literature to the point that they have to find real, deal Nazis and so they figure that "whites must be holding them," But no defends the witch hunts and history won't be kind to these modern day witch hunts. Looking where none exist.