PHILADELPHIA — The former dean of Temple University’s Fox School of Business was convicted Monday of orchestrating a complex fraud scheme to boost the college’s reputation and attract students and donors by submitting phony data on its graduate programs to national rankings publications.
It took a federal jury less than an hour to conclude that Moshe Porat had worked with two subordinates to reverse engineer the criteria by which the magazine U.S. News & World Report evaluated schools and then falsify information for years to ensure that programs they oversaw appeared at the top of its lists.
Porat, 74, shook his head quietly at the defense table as the foreman read out the panel’s decision on counts of conspiracy and wire fraud.
He and his lawyers declined to comment afterward.
The moment marked yet another step on the downward trajectory of an administrator once considered a possible candidate to lead the university brought low, first by his 2018 firing when the rankings scandal was exposed, and now by a conviction likely to send him to prison.
“He was on top of the world, hailed as a visionary leader, a master fundraiser,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Dubnoff said. “But the image that the defendant created for himself and the Fox School of Business was based on fraud.”
Over seven days of testimony, government witnesses — including many of Porat’s former employees — painted him as a rankings-obsessed micromanager and a bully of a boss who pressured his underlings to do whatever it took to propel Temple to the top of the competitive national lists.
The rankings are the subject of fierce competition among universities as top spots on the lists can attract nationwide interest from potential students and millions in tuition dollars.
Prosecutors argued that Fox’s misrepresentations were a deliberate effort by Porat to catapult Temple’s online MBA program into first place for four years and to capitalize on that prestigious distinction by attracting student applications and donations to the school.
But Porat insisted throughout the proceedings that it was his subordinates, including Marjorie O’Neill, the administrator directly in charge of preparing the rankings submissions, who were to blame for any mistakes in the data.
Two of the school’s graduates testified that they had applied to the school primarily because of its rankings and felt cheated out of their tuition dollars once they learned the truth.
“I paid for fine dining,” said Ibrahim Fetahi, “and I got McDonald's.”
Fox’s false data first came to light in early 2018 when an article posted by the higher education website Poets & Quants questioned some of their submissions.
When Temple notified U.S. News & World Report that the data it had been submitting for years had been inaccurate, the news magazine removed Fox’s online MBA program from its annual evaluations.
The law firm hired by the university to investigate found that Fox in some cases “knowingly” provided false information. And the fallout has led to costly legal settlements with the U.S. Department of Education, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, and former students who contended that their degrees have been devalued as a result of the scandal.
Later in 2018, the university agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by former online MBA students.
Temple’s Online MBA program has since returned to the rankings. This year, it was tied for 100th place.
Temple estimated in December that its cost of cleaning up the scandal was $17 million, and it has instituted a series of remedial measures, including establishing an internal verification unit, which oversees data submissions; making online and telephone hot lines available for whistle-blowers; hiring a third-party auditor for data submissions; and more training.
“We respect the justice system and the jury’s decision in this matter,” Temple University spokesperson Steve Orbanek said in a statement Monday. “This is an unhappy moment for our students and alumni, but our focus remains on delivering the best possible outcomes for our students.”
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