A University of Pennsylvania professor, who once called on the school to revoke former President Donald Trump’s undergraduate degree, is running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Wharton School of Business professor Eric Orts is running for Republican Sen. Pat Toomey’s seat in the 2022 midterm elections. He is running on a climate change platform and has called on President Joe Biden to declare a state of national emergency for climate change.
“We’re in a climate emergency. We have a second season of wildfires in the Northwest,” Orts told the Inquirer. “In Pennsylvania, we set [heat] records in June. A lot of people have known scientifically this is a problem, and a lot of people are just ignoring it. The politicians are saying they’ll do something, but they never do something.”
Orts announced his candidacy on July 22. He joins another 13 Democrats vying for Sen. Toomey’s seat, including Democratic U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb and Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman.
Today I’m officially launching my campaign for U.S. Senate. It’s time to elect leaders who will address the most critical challenge of our era: the climate emergency. https://t.co/IVjNTCCNdH
— Eric Orts (@EricOrts) July 22, 2021
Orts has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 30 years and is among the six professors who asked the university’s administration to investigate unsubstantiated claims that Trump — a Wharton graduate — cheated on his SAT exam.
According to Campus Reform, the letter penned by Orts and others cited a claim that Trump paid someone to take his standardized tests. The claim was written in “Too Much and Never Enough,” the book published by the former President’s niece Mary Trump.
“Failing to investigate an allegation of fraud at such a level broadcasts to prospective students and the world at large that the playing field is not equal,” the professors’ letter reads. The professors proceeded to cite the university’s policy on revoking degrees, which states that degrees can be revoked for fraud.
The letter called for an investigation despite admitting that “it is true that the truth of an event that occurred more than fifty years ago may be difficult to establish.” The professors claimed that “President Trump has provided substantial evidence that he is not above lying and cheating in other contexts.”
University Provost Wendell Pritchett denied the request for an investigation, though he claimed that the administration is worried “about these allegations and the integrity of our admissions process.” However, the school “determined that this situation occurred too far in the past to make a useful or probative factual inquiry possible.”
Orts told The Daily Pennsylvanian that he thought admitting Trump into the Wharton School of Business was the “worst admissions mistake” the school had ever made.
“In my personal opinion, Donald Trump is the worst admissions mistake that the Wharton School has ever made,” Orts told The Daily Pennsylvanian. “Now it turns out that we may not have made a mistake after all: we may well have been just another victim among many who have had their reputations besmirched by his lifelong pattern of deception and fraud.”