Wharton Ends Forté Membership In Summer Of DEI Rollbacks

Wharton Dean Erika James welcomes MBAs to campus in fall 2024. Wharton photo

The Wharton School has ended its membership with the Forté Foundation, a school spokesperson has confirmed to Poets&Quants.

Wharton is the second top business school to cut ties with Forte in as many weeks. While Caroline Pennartz, director of reputation management and dean’s communication at Wharton, did not comment on the reasons for the split, the move follows a pattern of elite schools ending DEI-related partnerships this summer.

• On July 1, University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business ended its 40-year partnership with the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, citing recent changes in state and federal DEI policies. (McCombs is still listed on Forté’s member school page as of August 1.)
• On July 17, University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business suspended its partnerships with both The Consortium and Forté. The suspensions are “part of a broader review of programs and partnerships across the University,” McGregor McCance, a Darden spokesperson, wrote to P&Q.

The Forté Foundation is a non-profit network of businesses and business schools that works to increase women’s representation in business education and leadership. It has not responded to P&Q’s questions about the split.

Forté counts more than 60 business schools around the world as members. The Consortium—a separate network of business schools and companies working to help Black, Hispanic, and Native American students earn elite MBA degrees and enter corporate leadership pipelines—now includes 23 member business schools in the U.S., following the recent departures of McCombs and Darden. (Wharton has never been a Consortium member.)

In 2021, Wharton became the first elite business school to enroll a majority of women in its MBA program. It repeated the streak for the next two years.

A FAMILIAR SUMMER PATTERN

Seven months into his second term, Trump has upended higher education nationwide. He has threatened to cut federal funding to universities that do not dismantle DEI programs, slashed billions in scientific research funding, and filed lawsuits against elite schools like Harvard and Columbia (Columbia last month agreed to pay $221 million to the federal government in order to settle a lawsuit over alleged antisemitism on campus).

In June, UVA President James Ryan stepped down amid pressure from a Department of Justice investigation into the university’s DEI policies. The Darden School’s membership in the Consortium was cited in that investigation.

This spring, the Trump administration also took aim at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton’s home institution. In February, it opened a Title IX investigation into the university’s policy allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports. A month later, it paused $175 million in federal funding over the issue. On June 30, Penn settled by agreeing to disavow transgender athletes in female sports, apologize for allowing them to compete, and revoke any titles they had won.

There is no direct evidence linking Wharton’s Forte departure to the Trump administration’s widening assault on DEI. But the timing places it squarely within a broader pattern unfolding across U.S. business schools this summer.

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