A former administrator and a retired statistics professor at Temple University were sentenced to probation this week for assisting the former dean of its business school in a scheme to inflate its position in national rankings publications.
But standing before a federal judge in Philadelphia, Marjorie O’Neill, a onetime finance manager at the Fox School of Business, and Isaac Gottlieb, who was a tenured professor, struck vastly different tones when it came to accepting responsibility forthat she, under the direction of former dean Moshe Porat, had falsified data on students at the school to help propel it to the top of influential lists like U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of top business school programs. She told U.S.
“To this day, I still question myself why I had participated in this scheme and wish I had never acquiesced to multiple pressures,” she said. Meanwhile, Gottlieb — who helped Fox cheat more effectively by reverse engineering the criteria by which U.S. News ranked schools — showed flashes of defiance at his sentencing hearing Wednesday.Those varying levels of contrition exemplified both the seriousness of the fraud they’d committed and the mindset among rankings-obsessed U.S. universities that drove the Fox administrators to cheat, Pappert said.
“It is important for other institutions to realize that this chase for rankings is not worth it,” the judge said Thursday. “There are lines you can’t cross. It’s important for people to see there are going to be criminal consequences and penalties for doing that.”