Rankings illustration from the new graphic novel on MBA admissions by Menlo Coaching
Few business school deans have had as great an impact on their institutions as Moshe Porat at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. When he was named dean in 1996, Temple was largely a good commuter school and little more than that.
Over a nearly unprecedented 22-year run, however, the Polish-born Porat turned Fox into one of the top public urban business schools in the country. He more than doubled student enrollment to over 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students, substantially increasing the faculty to more than 200 profs so that Fox boasted the fourth-largest full-time faculty at Temple University.
It was Porat, too, who created a school of tourism and hospitality management at Temple in 1998, brought in the school’s naming gift from alum Richard J. Fox in 1999 and raised tens of millions to fund in 2009 a new state-of-the-art, $80 million home that became the envy of the 384-acre campus in Philadelphia.
CREATING AN INCLUSIVE CULTURE OF LEARNING: THE FACE OF THE NEW AMERICA
He spoke with genuine pride about the diversity of the young people he was educating, many of them first-generation students with parents who migrated to the U.S. from all over the world. Porat would point to the bustling crowds of multi-cultural learners in the school’s expansive lobby in Alter Hall and proclaim that this was the face of the new America, a generation of young people that Fox was preparing for success.
Porat also boosted the school’s prominence in carefully watched U.S. News rankings, getting Fox’s online MBA ranking to first for four consecutive years, moving the school’s part-time MBA program to seventh in the U.S. last year, a jump of 46 places in four years, and achieving a full-time MBA ranking of 32nd last year, up nine spots from the previous year.
Unfortunately, those ranking gains were part of an ongoing fraud. Dean Porat, a strong willed man who made more than half a million dollars a year as dean, was fired from his job yesterday (July 9) after an independent investigation found that Fox had knowingly reported falsified data to U.S. News over several years to achieve its rankings success (see Temple Dean Sacked For Falsifying Rankings Data).
Fox School of Business Dean Moshe Porat was fired from his job on July 9th
IS TEMPLE AN ISOLATED CASE? OR DO OTHER BUSINESS SCHOOLS CHEAT?
It is a devastating end for the 71-year-old Porat, who joined Temple as a teaching and research assistant in 1979, earned his Ph.D. from the school, served as a professor of risk management for many years, until working his way up to the deanship in 1996. Like many of his own students, he made his way to a successful career from humble circumstances. Born in Poland, he received his undergraduate and MBA degrees from Tel Aviv University before arriving at Temple University to complete his doctoral studies.
Why would such a highly accomplished dean who had made such a positive mark on his institution resort to cheating? Do rankings create so much pressure on school administrators that the temptation to inflate ranking metrics is impossible to resist? Can a business school dean be successful if his or her school fails to rise in highly prominent rankings? Do other schools cheat?
Those are the important questions that go unanswered in the seven-page report released yesterday by Jones Day, the law firm brought in to investigate the rankings scandal last January when U.S. News tossed Fox out of its online MBA ranking for misreporting key facts about the program that resulted in its No. 1 ranking. What seems certain is that Porat became nearly obsessed with gaining outside recognition for the school’s real progress through such rankings.
DEAN PORAT LED A ‘CONCERTED, RANKINGS-FOCUSED STRATEGY’ AT THE SCHOOL
Jones Day investigators discovered that Dean Porat and other Fox personnel made clear that improving or maintaining Fox’s position in rankings was a key priority. “Fox had in place a concerted, rankings-focused strategy including detailed analyses of U.S. News’s rankings methodology and strategies tied to specific U.S. News data metrics, which strategy was promoted internally by the Dean and other Fox personnel,” the investigation found. “The environment fostered by the school’s emphasis on rankings contributed to the reporting of inaccurate information to U.S. News. Moreover, the Dean’s focus on rankings, coupled with his personal management style, caused Fox personnel who interacted with the Dean on ranking-related matters to feel pressure to perform in this regard.”
The explosive details in the report portray a dean and the people who reported to him—none of whom have been publicly named—conducting a fraud that was several years in the making, that provided U.S. News inaccurate data across multiple metrics on several degree programs, and that consciously worked to cover up the unethical behavior. Dean Porat, of course, wasn’t the only person involved in the fraud.
Though unnamed in the report, all eyes are now on Darin Kapanjie, who has been credited with both creating and implementing the online offering. He has been academic director of Fox’s online MBA program from the start, having joined the school in 2003, ironically in Fox’s statistics department. Kimberly Chenwinski has been senior associate director of the online MBA since 2011 and had previously been in charge of insuring that the school’s programs were in compliance with university and graduate school policies and guidelines. A spokesperson for Temple declined to comment on whether other employees have either been reprimanded or fired outright for the fraud.
Temple University’s Fos School of Business
UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION SHOULD BE COMMENDED FOR ITS HANDLING OF THE SCANDAL
Darin Kapanjie, managing director of online and digital learning at Fox
In any case, it was not Porat who actually reported the false data to U.S. News. Beginning with Fox’s submission for U.S. News’s 2015 online MBA rankings, the report found, that the employee principally responsible for rankings surveys knowingly misreported that all new program entrants had provided GMAT scores to Fox when only a small percentage actually did and allegedly did so at the dean’s direction in the presence of another employee. The Dean and the other employee deny that such direction was given. In addition to misreporting the number of students who took the GMAT from 2015 to 2018, the average undergraduate GPA was overstated, and there were inaccuracies in the number of offers of admission as well as in the degree of student indebtedness.
If anything, the university administration should be commended for calling in Jones Day to conduct an independent investigation, for releasing the full content of the report by the law firm, and for then immediately asking for the resignation of Dean Porat once the findings clearly implicated him in the scandal. Porat apparently refused to resign yesterday and was fired by Temple President Richard M. Englert and Provost JoAnne A. Epps.
Englert stepped up to the challenge. “It was the dean’s initiative to disband a longstanding committee charged with ensuring the accuracy of rankings data,” said Englert in a statement. “This absence of checks and balances, together with an undue focus on rankings, enabled such misreporting. While we are committed to determining the nature and extent of possible incorrect data reporting regarding other academic programs at Fox, one thing is clear: This is contrary to the fundamental value of integrity that is at the heart of our academic mission.”
WHAT BLAME SHOULD BE ASSIGNED TO U.S. NEWS?
But what about U.S. News? Each year, what is left of this national magazine publishes rankings that have a big impact on application volume, student enrollment, faculty recruitment and alumni giving. Yet, U.S. News takes little to no responsibilty for assuring the accuracy of the data it receives. The Financial Times, at least, does random audits of the data provided by schools for its rankings. U.S. News does no such thing.
Indeed, the only reason the scandal came to light was because the Fox School approached U.S. News after the publication of its online MBA ranking and told the magazine that it had misreported data in the first place. Only then did U.S. News kick Fox off its ranking in January of this year. The magazine did nothing to investigate the school’s earlier reported metrics and also did not comment on the accuracy of the school’s earlier rankings. Sources say it was an unidentified whistleblower who forced the disclosure by the school that ultimately led to yesterday’s sacking of Dean Porat.
The Fox School of Business is not the only school that has cheated. Jones Day had been hired by Tulane University after U.S. News ousted its Freeman School of Business for a similar reporting error in In 2013. The school admitted that it inflated average GMAT scores reported to U.S. News by an average 35 points for consecutive five years from 2007 through 2011. Freeman also conceded that it had falsely increased the number of completed applications it received by an average of 116 applications over the same time period.The magazine took the action after the school admitted that it had misreported key data to U.S. News—just as Temple Fox did this year.
U.S. NEWS HAS THE RESPONSIBILITY TO INSURE THE ACCURACY OF THE DATA IT USES
U.S. News would later reveal that the extent of the fraud was even somewhat greater than reported by Freeman. The organization found that the corrected average GMAT score for the fall 2011 entering class was 631 versus the 670 originally reported by Freeman—a difference of 39 points. A revision to the number of MBA applications received by the school showed an even greater difference than the originally reported number. The corrected figures showed that Freeman accepted 93% of its applicants for the fall 2011 entering class instead of 57%–a difference of 36 percentage points. Tulane also was suspended from U.S. News’ ranking for a year as a result.
Truth is, few schools are involved in the kind of systematic cheating detailed in the Jones Day report on the Fox scandal. There is some fudging of numbers that goes on here and there. Some administrators are likely to interpret ranking survey questions in a way that allows them to provide answers that are more favorable to their institutions. The administrators who are willing to shade the truth do so because rankings have assumed far too much importance. That is why U.S. News and other ranking organizations share some of the blame for what went on at Temple Fox. It has created an environment where there is undue pressure on schools to cheat because rankings have assumed such outsized importance in a school’s reputation.
Given the rankings monster it has created, U.S. News needs to do more to insure that the data provided by the schools is accurate and truthful. Random audits of schools, much like those conducted by the Financial Times, would be a solid step in that direction. Those audits should be ongoing, before and after the magazine publishes its rankings. If U.S. News doesn’t get its act together, it is as irresponsible as Dean Porat and his Fox colleagues at perpetrating this fraud.
For now, at least, Fox has lost a highly accomplished leader who clearly lost his own way.
DON’T MISS: TEMPLE DEAN SACKED FOR FALSIFYING RANKINGS DATA or ONLINE RANKING SCANDAL COULD WORSEN AT TEMPLE FOX
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