PHILADELPHIA — A former Temple University business school dean led a scheme to cheat on college rankings submissions for financial gain and prominence, harming students and donors who fell for the lie, prosecutors argued during the conspiracy and fraud trial against him that opened in federal court Wednesday.
Moshe Porat, who was fired by Temple in 2018 in the wake of the scandal that rocked the North Philadelphia university, was “singularly focused, relentlessly focused” on rankings, Nancy Potts, assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury during her 35-minute opening statement. She also said he bullied his employees to provide false information that allowed the school’s programs to soar to the top of the lists, bringing in more applications and donations.
“This is a case about cheating for money, power and prestige,” Potts said. “The defendant … cheated to get higher school rankings, to increase his influence, to polish his reputation and to take money, because higher school rankings are big money, very big money.”
But Richard Zack, one of Porat’s defense attorneys, painted a very different picture, one where it was Temple University that was obsessed with rankings — that it even held seminars to instruct administrators on how to get higher rankings — and that it was employees who worked for Porat who provided the false data or did nothing to stop it.
Zack acknowledged that jurors may think Porat, who ran the school for more than two decades, should have lost his job. But that’s different from whether he committed a federal crime, Zack said.
“The dean is not a criminal just because he fell down on the job,” Zack argued during his nearly 30-minute opening statement.
With that, the trial of Porat, 74, got underway. Wearing a dark suit and tie, he arrived to court with his wife, who is in a wheelchair and sat behind him during the proceedings. Porat, like most others in the courtroom, wore a mask so his reaction wasn’t visible.
Porat is charged with criminal conspiracy and wire fraud. If he is convicted, he could be headed to prison for up to 25 years on the most serious charge.
More than 40 witnesses, a good chunk of them current or former Temple employees, could be called during the course of the trial expected to last about three weeks. Before lunch break, John A. Byrne, founder and editor-in-chief of Poets&Quants, which reports on business schools, testified about the importance of rankings and Temple’s rise in them. Testimony is scheduled to continue through the afternoon and then resume again Monday.
The case, believed to be perhaps the first time that a university administrator has faced criminal prosecution for misrepresentations in college rankings submissions, is expected to be closely watched in higher education circles.
Prosecutors have charged that from 2014 until 2018, Porat conspired with others to devise a scheme to provide false information to U.S. News & World Report. Its online MBA program ranked No. 1 for four consecutive years before the errors were reported. Its part-time MBA program also rose to No. 7 in rankings before errors were discovered.
Porat, Potts said, saturated the Philadelphia market with billboards, touting the high rankings. Even after Porat knew there was a problem with the data, he bragged about the No. 1 ranking and held a Champagne toast, Potts said, showing the jury a celebratory photo with Porat at the center.
“He was on top of it all. He was behind it all,” Potts told the jury.
She said the prosecution will show evidence that as early as 2010, Porat asked an employee to provide inflated numbers to boost another ranking and when she refused, he threatened her job.
But Zack, the defense attorney, blamed Marjorie O’Neill, the employee charged with preparing and submitting the data, and her supervisor.
“He was the dean and he relied on his employees to do the right thing,” Zack said.
He also faulted the rankings publications, which he said do not have a rigorous process and “simply make up the rules and arbitrarily change the rules.”
“They are not a model of clarity and they leave it to the schools to figure out how to interpret and answer those questions,” he said.
He said Temple at its seminar on rankings told administrators to “interpret those questions in the best light possible for the schools.”
The university, Zack said, also failed to make sure rankings submissions were accurate, though it had an office that was supposed to do so.
“Temple caused this problem, not Dr. Porat,” he said.
The false data first came to light in early 2018 when Temple notified U.S. News that the data it submitted for that year’s rankings were inaccurate. Subsequently, 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.
While it’s still unclear whether Porat will testify, jurors will hear directly from him. Prosecutors plan to play more than 70 video clips from a deposition he gave last year in a civil suit he brought against Temple for firing him in 2018 in the wake of the scandal.
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 hotlines available for whistleblowers; hiring a third-party auditor for data submissions; and more training.
