Ron Anderson was named dean of Temple University’s Fox School of Business in July 2019, a year after the ousting of Moshe Porat in the wake of the biggest rankings scandal in business school history. He talked with Poets&Quants of his years-long process to rebuild the school’s reputation. (Courtesy photo)
When he was first appointed interim dean of Temple University’s Fox School of Business in July 2018, finance department chair Ronald Anderson thought, perhaps naively, that the school would see a quick turnaround from the rankings scandal that had embroiled his predecessor. Jones Day, the outside law firm Temple hired to investigate the scandal, would release its report, Anderson believed, the school would act swiftly and accordingly, and everyone would move on.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
By the time Anderson was offered the deanship full-time a year later, Temple Fox’s reputation was in tatters. His predecessor, fired dean Moshe Porat, was facing increased scrutiny for his role in the scandal, including from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office. As details trickled out, it became more clear it was not a clerical error, but an orchestrated effort to knowingly submit false data to a prominent rankings magazine. Lawsuits would soon follow, first by students who had been defrauded by the scheme and then by Porat himself. Eventually, Porat would be charged (and later convicted) in federal court.
Ousted Temple Fox Dean Moshe Porat
TRIAL UNEARTHED DETAILS UNKNOWN TO FOX STAFFERS
Anderson had hesitated to take on the job of rebuilding Fox, a process that he knew would likely take many years. “One of the things that I always knew in academia, but perhaps I didn’t know as strongly as I do now: We are nothing but our reputations–as researchers, as teachers, and as institutions. We have to hold that as a really, really high standard that we would never touch,” Anderson tells Poets&Quants.
On March 11, former Fox dean Moshe Porat was sentenced to 14 months in prison for his part in the scandal that tore down the business school he’d spent more than two decades building. He was the first university administrator criminally charged and convicted for cheating in rankings, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania delivered a scathing rebuke of Porat from the bench.
Porat’s sentencing brought to a close a saga stretching more than four years. (See Anatomy Of A Business School Rankings Fraud.) In November 2021, a jury convicted Porat on one count each of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for repeatedly lying to U.S. News & World Report in order to boost Fox’s performance in its online and part-time MBA rankings. After seven days of testimony, it took the jury less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. Two other Fox staffers–Marjorie O’Neill, who submitted the false data, and statistics professor Isaac Gottlieb, who reverse-engineered the U.S. News methodology–pleaded guilty for their roles and are scheduled to be sentenced in May.
AN END TO THE SAGA, AND A NEW BEGINNING
Across town, a short 12-minute drive from the Philadelphia courtroom, Anderson and other Fox faculty watched the scandal unfold in media coverage from the trial and the sentencing. They learned of details they’d never heard before from stories with often salacious headlines: “‘I Paid For Fine Dining, But I Got McDonald’s’” or “Trying To Head Off An Independent Probe, Temple Fox Dean Tells Provost ‘If You’re In A Hole, Don’t Dig’”.
Porat’s sentencing arrived with a mix of embarrassment and relief. While the fraud was more egregious than previously believed, it put an end to the saga that had overshadowed Anderson’s and Fox’s efforts to rebuild.
Anderson recently connected with Poets&Quants via Zoom to talk about those efforts. In a long and candid interview, Anderson talked about his and the school’s reaction to Porat’s trial, prison sentence, and why Anderson believes such a scandal could never again happen at Fox. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
NEXT PAGE: P&Q’s interview with Fox Dean Ronald Anderson
Among Fox Dean Ronald Anderson’s first actions was to go an apology tour to Fox students, faculty, alumni, and donors. (Courtesy photo)
Tell us about your history with Fox School of Business and when you were approached about becoming interim dean.
I came to Fox in 2012. I had been at American University for a decade prior to coming to Fox. I’m a finance professor, so I started out as chair of the finance department, and I worked on creating a new curriculum, new programming and getting the department turned around. I did that for six years, and it went pretty well.
I guess the rankings issue started in January of 2018, but it took Temple five or six months to get through the Jones Day investigations. So I came down into the dean’s office in July 2018, and that was like two weeks after the prior dean had been dismissed. It was a pretty unsettling, kind of a shocking time for most of us.
So Moshe Porat hired you?
Yes. Dean Porat hired me as the Chair of the Finance Department.
How was your relationship with him, prior to the rankings scandal? What was he like?
That was kind of an evolving relationship, I’m going to be really honest about that. When I first came here, he and I were on very good terms.
As I worked under him more and more, he had a fairly autocratic management style, and I don’t have that type of management style. I’m more of an authentic, genuine manager in the sense that I want people to be who they are. I want to work with them that way. And I kind of expected it back, because I think that’s how you get innovation and entrepreneurship and so forth. So by the time this became public information, I mean, we had a working relationship and professional relationship just because we had to, but it was not a great relationship by that point.
How were you approached about becoming the interim dean?
When the president sent out the announcement that Dean Porat had been fired, I was in a bit of shock. I’ve never seen that before at a university. So over that two week period between his firing and me coming in as an interim, the provost and the president did a series of interviews with some of the senior faculty in the building.
They were incredibly supportive during this period. We wanted to separate the legal issues from the academic issues. The president, provost and I, along with the Board of Trustees, decided that we would focus on handling the academic issues, ensuring that students were taken care of, and that the faculty understood what we were doing. We wanted to build a lot of transparency into the system. One of the things that I think we were all really proud of is that we delivered really good student outcomes, and we wanted to continue doing that.
The first couple weeks were a bit difficult because I was out doing what I call the apology tour. We owed a lot of people, a lot of apologies. And we took ownership of what happened. I think that was really important to our stakeholders and our constituents. It was more than a couple of weeks, I spent a couple months doing the apology tour. When you do stand up and say ‘I’m sorry’, it’s really important that it’s a sincere, authentic, ‘I’m sorry.’
And we were.
Who specifically were you apologizing to?
So the first meeting was with the faculty. I think the faculty were shocked. I mean, Porat had been dean for 22 or 23 years, and he had spent his entire academic career here. Everybody knew him, and they didn’t think this was possible. The first couple of meetings were showing them that it really did happen, that no, not 100% of these kids had GMAT scores.
The second group that was perhaps most important to me was the students. There was kind of an interesting break in the students. The undergraduates weren’t nearly as concerned as the graduate students. Because, as you know, graduate students are really focused on rankings. So I spent a lot of time with our MBA students across all the different programs explaining what happened, that we were very, very sorry that it happened, and the things that we were going to do to make it right.
Next page: What is Fox doing to ensure this never happens again.
Fox School of Business at Temple University.
I noticed that a few current Temple and Fox employees wrote letters to the court on Dean Porat’s behalf before his sentencing. Was there a constituency of Fox employees who stayed loyal to Porat throughout the investigation and trial?
One thing about the trial, and I’ll say this for myself and I’ll say it for everybody at Temple, we actually learned an incredible amount from your writing and from the Philadelphia Inquirer, because we didn’t know a lot of that stuff. So as it came out, the support clearly dwindled.
On the flip side, though, Moshe did a lot of good things here. We have beautiful infrastructure, we have beautiful classrooms, the faculty is amazing when it comes to research and teaching. He had done a really nice job building the school. I think, particularly with the more senior faculty, the people who have been here a long time, he had gotten them through some really difficult periods. So, yeah, they expressed a fair amount of loyalty and some of them still do.
What was the mood like in those first meetings with faculty?
In the initial ones, it was absolute shock and bewilderment. They just didn’t believe that it could be true. I think the other thing, though, is that the faculty and the staff cared very, very deeply about how this would affect the students.
What has Fox and Temple done to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again?
The first thing I did was reorganize the dean’s office into a new governance structure. It was a very opaque environment before that in which one or two people made all the decisions. I separated a lot of the functions–personnel was separate from finance, academics was separate, the research function was separated somewhat from the teaching function and so forth. So whereas Porat only had two direct reports, I have seven. So the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing at this point. I also allow, and I want, my senior staff to challenge me. We’re very good about that.
The other thing that we did almost immediately is establish what we call our performance analytics unit, Analytics and Assessment. We came off the rankings market for about two years. We didn’t submit data to anybody because, in academia, you’re nothing but your reputation. So we pulled out of the market while we were going through this.
We established Analytics and Assessment so that everything that comes out of Fox now is checked here at the school, it goes to central and it’s checked again. And then Temple started what we call the Data Verification Unit and it’s checked a third time. Then it comes back to me, I sign it and we submit it. It can’t happen again, it would be impossible. So I do feel good about how seriously we took this, because we have started resubmitting to the rankings organizations here in the last couple of years.
The other thing is our accrediting body, AACSB, put us on a form of probation right after this happened. I want to say that AACSB was a fabulous partner in working through this. The way that they accredit schools provided a roadmap for us to start working out of this. The first thing that we did starting in October of that year, we went into the strategic planning process. The strategy under the prior dean had been a ranking strategy, and obviously, that wasn’t going to work anymore, and it wasn’t anything that we wanted to do. So we developed a new strategy based on educational innovation, research excellence, inclusive culture, and community engagement.
That took us about a year because I wanted consensus and buy-in from students, faculty, staff, and all of our stakeholders. So we’ve been working on that plan now for about two and a half years. And it’s made a huge difference at Fox because rather than focusing on rankings, we now focus on content. If we get the content right, it will make a huge difference in our students’ lives, and hopefully, it’s reflected in the rankings.
What are some of the measurements of that strategy? How do you know if you’re hitting your goal posts?
One of the things we take great pride in is our student outcomes, and we call them excellent student outcomes. So if students are looking to get jobs, and that’s typically what they are looking to do after business school, I want them to get good jobs. I want them to get the jobs that they want. Our undergraduates, for example, we place 93% of them within three months of graduation, and many of them are getting multiple offers. We look at placement, the number of offers, the amount that they’re earning. One of the things that we do suffer a little bit from here in Philadelphia, is that Philadelphians don’t like to leave Philly. So I’m trying to get our average wage up for the undergraduates, and that requires a little more mobility on their part.
For MBA students, it’s kind of the same thing. For those in the full-time program, we have 100% placement.
Next Page: Has MBA rankings culture gone too far? + How has the scandal impacted enrollments?
Fox School of Business at Temple University. Former dean Moshe Porat is credited for overseeing the construction of many of Fox’s new, spacious facilities and classrooms, as well as recruiting excellent faculty, says current dean Ron Anderson.
What do you think of the rankings culture around the MBA? Have rankings become too important, do you think?
I get why students and parents look at rankings. Higher ed needs to be more transparent, and it’s hard for an outsider to look in and understand, for example, ‘How does a finance professor writing in the Journal of Finance help my student or help me?’ I get the opacity, transparency problem.The other thing is, rankings are incredibly powerful advertising for the schools, especially for graduate students and international students. If you’re not ranked, it’s really hard to get Asian students because it’s their No. 1 criteria.
I wish rankings measured the raw material a student gets in a program and the outcomes that they get at the other end. If we could measure the difference a school makes in a student’s life that way, I think rankings would be better. But that’s a hard thing to measure. (READ: Rethinking The Rankings: USC’s Geoff Garrett Calls For A Paradigm Shift)
Do I think we’ve taken rankings too far? Yes. You saw what happened here. You’re seeing what’s happening up at Columbia now. The upside to the schools of really high rankings is really high, and it’s more than embarrassing that people will go so far as to use fraudulent data to get there. So I do think it’s gone too far. Absolutely.
What rankings does Fox participate in now?
So we’re back in US News and World Report. We’re doing QS (Global). We’ve started doing Poets&Quants. I mean, we do care about rankings, but we don’t have a ranking strategy. We do participate and the simple reason is because students pay attention. (Fox confirmed that it also participates in Business Insurance and Princeton Review rankings.)
And, how do new students coming to Fox feel about the scandal now? How has it impacted enrollments?
So, the undergraduates don’t care. It’s still a little bit of a topic for current MBAs. They know it’s there. You don’t have to Google very far until it comes up. I get questions about it. Could it happen again? No. Does it hurt enrollments? Yeah.
I think of everything we’ve been through in the last four years, it’s hard for me to disentangle which parts are from the ranking scandal, which parts are pandemic related, and which parts are demographics. But it has hurt enrollments, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. Because our rankings went down, rightfully so, and it’s going to take us a while to rebuild. Students use rankings. For the good or bad, they use them.
You know as well as I do that all MBA programs are suffering. Some of that is just the normal suffering, some of it’s the pandemic, some of it’s the international problem. In the MBA world, unless you’re one of the Magnificent Seven, it’s a really rough world to play it right now.
Next page: Is Porat’s prison sentence a deterrent to other administrators? + What’s next for Fox School of Business?
Temple University’s Fox School of Business in Philadelphia
One of the things emphasized at the trial was that Moshe Porat is the first university dean prosecuted and found guilty of lying to a rankings publication. Do you think his trial and 14-month prison sentence is a strong enough deterrent to other business school administrators who have maybe been more creative in the data they submit to a ranking outlet?
Anecdotally, I’ve talked to many other deans, and I can tell you it’s a deterrent. There are a number of deans that are shocked at the sentence. ‘You mean I can go to jail for submitting rankings information?’ So, yes, I do think it’s a deterrent for other people. The other thing that I’ve seen over my last three years here as dean, is the number of schools and deans that I talked to that now take greater care in submitting. You know, sometimes when you read those US News questions, they can be interpreted a couple different ways.
Yes, I was very surprised just listening to the trial testimony, how much interpretation goes into the ranking questions. It just seems ripe for abuse.
Exactly. When we have any questions now at Fox, we actually reach out to US News and ask them, ‘How do you want this interpreted?’ I think obviously, people are going to interpret the way that’s in their best light, but I think there’s probably a little bit less of that going on out there. I think the data that is getting submitted is probably of higher quality. I know it’s of excellent quality here.
At least anecdotally, I can say that other deans are much, much more aware of what’s going on in their rankings data. And they were surprised at the sentence. You know, for me, the 14 months and a quarter of a million dollar fine, that’s hard for me to gauge and I might not be the right person to ask because I’m the one that suffered through it all trying to rebuild and so forth. But I think 14 months is a pretty hefty sentence, and I think it probably sends a fairly strong signal to the outside world that you do want to be doing the right thing.
What was it like at Fox during the trial? There were some pretty salacious headlines coming out then.
During the actual trial, it was pretty tense up here. The people who were subpoenaed and testified, I had a lot of sympathy for them because they had known Porat really well, and I think they learned a lot during the discovery period as well. I think they were very disappointed in him as an individual, and I think they were disappointed that our governance structure fell apart that much. But for those who did step up, number one, I’m really proud of them for testifying because it was the right thing to do. But it was hard on them. You could see it from a personal perspective–they were losing sleep over this and they felt really bad about it.
You said that many people at Fox actually learned quite a few details from the scandal from the media reports of the trial. What was the most surprising thing to you?
The first time I became aware of this whole problem was probably in February or March of 2018, and the way it first was relayed to us was that it was a clerical error. As time kept rolling on, by the summer of ‘18, we learned that it was more than that. Then things kind of went dark here for a while because of the investigation.
So, as the trial was going on, and we were finding out that this was intentional–-it was not clerical, it was intentionally done–that was a hard thing to learn. Yes, it was done by a small cadre of people who are no longer here, including Parat himself, but it was intentional. Especially in academia, where we take truth and integrity and ethics so highly, hearing that was shocking, bewildering.
So you’ve had a couple of years as dean to start rebuilding Fox’s reputation, particularly with peer schools. Then the trial and sentencing come and you’ve got all this media attention again. What kind of work have you been doing to rebuild the trust, and what do you need to do in the future?
Like Warren Buffett said, ‘it takes a lifetime to build a reputation in about five minutes to destroy it.’ This reputation repair is an ongoing process. One of the reasons I am so glad that the trial and the sentencing are over is, first of all, it said it was a small cabal of people, but now it allows us to tell the story of what happened in that it wasn’t a systemic problem here. It really was a small cabal of people.
The other thing that’s important for me is, like in US News in particular, peer perception is sometimes up to 30 or 40% of your total ranking. So, if you didn’t know us before the rankings scandal, you certainly knew us after. Our peer perception is still not as strong as it used to be, and perhaps fairly so. So I spend a lot of time working with other deans and other schools, and AACSB, so they know what happened here, that we’ve corrected it, that we have systems in place, and that we have the governance in place that this could never happen again. I’m hoping that at the next deans conference and at AACSB that I can actually stand up and explain to the outside world what did happen here, because I think it would be healthy for the industry. I also think it would be really good for our reputation.
What kind of reaction have you gotten from donors and alumni?
You probably got a sense of it when you were at the trial and in Philly, but we’re Philadelphia’s business score, and we have 65,000 alums just at Fox, 300,000 at Temple. They love the school. They’re really really committed to it. They were hurt by this, there’s absolutely no doubt. But as part of the apology tour, I was out talking to them as well. I said, ‘We own this. We did it. I’m sorry.’ Again, authentic apologies go a long way to fixing problems.
In terms of donors, it’s been really interesting. Porat had a couple of really large donors who were very close friends and associates of his, and they’re gone. They left with him back in 2018. It’s just the way life falls, I guess. Having said that, our donor dollars are up compared to pre-Porat to right now by about 30%.
When you say pre-Porat, do you mean back when he started as dean or just before the scandal?
His last years as dean, say about 2016-2017, we’re up about 30% on that now, maybe a little bit more. But we’ve also changed the way we interact with our donors and our alums. It’s not transactional. I want my alums here. I want my donors to share, to come to class, to give their time and talent. And if we do that right, then we will get the treasure.
For example, in our full time MBA, students all have an executive coach mentor who is one of our alums. So, for at least one of them, they’ve got the CEO of Kendal Corporation, as their mentor. Another one has the CEO of LyondellBasell as their mentor. So this really makes a big difference both for the alums and the students. It’s a really symbiotic relationship.
What’s next on the horizon for Fox? What has you excited?
I think the biggest thing for me is that over the last year or so, we restructured our academic departments to be more focused on the future of work. One of the things that we’re very, very focused on here is data analytics, machine learning, AI. We’ve restructured the curriculum so that all undergraduates will get that, and we’ve started several specialty master’s programs focused around that, and now the MBAs are also getting much more exposure to that as well.
We’re starting down the road of virtual reality for our students as well. We’ve just finished our third or fourth course in the virtual reality space. It’s interesting, I did an interview with a couple students yesterday about that. It’s not like being on Zoom, and it’s not like being in the classroom. They liked it a lot because you have to be engaged. Those goggles are on your head, so you have to be engaged. I think VR is going to have a big place in the future of education.
From a research perspective, one of the things that’s been really important to me, is that Fox is always a research leader. We’ve always been excellent at it. But, I want the faculty to take the research a little bit further. So, as a finance professor, when I got my Journal of Finance article that used to be good enough. I just put it on the shelf and go on to the next article. Now, I want the faculty to do their TED talks, or podcasts about their articles. What that’s doing is it’s taking the research from the journal, and it’s putting it in the classroom. It’s putting in the boardroom, in industry, and it’s giving us a bigger research impact.
And, on the third pillar of culture, we have a really diverse population at Fox, primarily because we’re an urban school. We work a lot at inclusivity to make sure that students, the faculty, and staff have a voice at the table. That’s something that’s relatively new at Fox, so I spend a lot of time working on DEI initiatives. We established a new center called the Center for Equity, Diversity and Workplace Culture, and we’ve got a lot of Fortune 500 corporations on the board–people from Comcast and Walmart, and so forth. They have been incredible, incredible supporters.
And finally, there’s community engagement where I probably spend 50% of my time. When we talk about the community here, it’s the students, it’s the faculty and staff, but it’s also our neighborhood. We’re in North Philly, it’s a rough neighborhood. So we’re working more with neighborhood high schools and started some lifelong learning programs. One of them is called Before You Soar, where we bring kids in from the local high schools, and they get to take college classes. Once they start passing college classes, they believe they can do it, and we’re having incredible success. These kids often go on to apply to college, and whether they come to Temple or to Fox, it’s not really our concern. Our concern is about helping the neighborhood.
What do you want Fox to be known for?
Number one is that we are a place of great integrity and ethics. I don’t want anybody to think that the rankings scandal was a systemic problem.
Two, is we’re setting our students up for the future of work. When I look at the workplace, and I might be a little bit biased here because I’m a quant, but data is changing how business runs. The idea that Amazon does so many transactions per day, they probably know what you want to buy before you do. Our students need to become aware of this, how to use data, how to incorporate it into all the different disciplines.
A third part that’s very, very important to us is experiential learning. Many of my faculty are former executives. The idea of bringing experience into the classroom is great, but it’s even better when we can get our students out working with these executives. It changes them. You know, 30% of our undergraduates here are still first generation. One of the other things that we really want to do is give them, to the extent we can, is international experiences as well.
More About The Temple Rankings Scandal
How It Happened: Anatomy Of A Business School Rankings Fraud
Jones Day Investigation: Temple Dean Sacked Over Ranking Scandal
The Indictment: Former B-School Dean Indicted On Fraud Charges In MBA Rankings Scandal
MBA Rankings: Why Business Schools Are Willing To Cheat
Trial Coverage: Trial Begins For Ousted Temple Dean In Rankings Fraud Case
Day 1: ‘I Paid For Fine Dining, But I Got McDonald’s’: MBA Student Testifies In Rankings Fraud Trial
Day 2: Ousted Dean: ‘Innocent Mistake’ Caused B-School To Be Thrown Out Of Ranking
Day 5: Rankings Fraud Trial: Fox Dean Promoted Book In Wake Of Unranking
Day 6: Ousted Fox Dean Wanted App That Would Make His Messages ‘Disappear’
Day 7: Prosecution And Defense Rest In MBA Rankings Fraud Case
Verdict: B-School Dean Found Guilty Of MBA Rankings Fraud
Commentary: Arrogance Is What Ultimately Caused This B’School Dean’s Downfall
Sentencing recommendations: U.S. Seeks Up To 11 Years Of Prison Time & $5.8 Million From Ousted B-School Dean In Rankings Fraud Case
Sentencing: Moshe Porat, Former Temple Fox Dean, Sentenced To 14 Months In Prison For Rankings Fraud
The post New Temple Fox Dean: Ranking Scandal ‘Could Never Happen Again’ appeared first on Poets&Quants.
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