Wharton Student Calls Out Peers Over Racism

At Wharton, U.S. students of color make up 30% of the class of 2016, according to school figures. Twenty-eight Asian Wharton students signed on to Lee’s article as a “pledge of solidarity.”

Lee has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale and came to Wharton from sports management and media company IMG, where she managed sponsorship and PR for pro golfer Michelle Wie. She had spent five years as a pro golfer on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, competing in 24 countries. After leaving pro golf she had a brief blaze of notoriety in 2013 when the Professional Golfers’ Association ran an online article revealing that for Lee’s bachelorette party, she and Wie and two other LPGA golfers blasted away with a variety of guns at a Texas shooting range.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHARTON AND VEGAS?

As Lee points out in her article, what goes on at Wharton doesn’t stay at Wharton. “As future business leaders, we will be face to face with diversity in all forms,” Lee writes. “We will shape the culture of our future companies and communities. But what kind of future will we create? The answer begins with the norms we allow here at Wharton.” Attempts to contact Lee were unsuccessful.

Poets&Quants asked Wharton’s administration whether the school had a role in protecting students from racially based humor, and whether Wharton intended to take any action on Lee’s complaints. Wharton, on the grounds that diversity was a university-wide matter, deferred to the university administration.

“The University of Pennsyvlania has long been a champion of equal, respectful treatment for all of its students,” university spokesman Ron Ozio says. “We want the campus to be an open, inviting, and welcoming community. The overwhelming majority of people at Penn feel the same way.”

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