PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The former dean of the Temple University business school has been sentenced to more than a year in prison, after being convicted for inflating the school’s program rankings.
Moshe Porat, 75 from Bala Cynwyd, was sentenced Friday after his conviction in November on fraud charges.
Related audio: The charges Moshe Porat faced after an investigation into his multi-year scheme at Temple University.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said he deceived “the school’s applicants, students, and donors into believing that the school’s business degree programs legitimately earned top rankings so that they would pay tuition and make donations to Temple.”
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Porat served as the dean of the Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management from 1996 until 2018.
In what prosecutors said was a multi-year scheme, he worked with professor Isaac Gottlieb and Marjorie O’Neill, an employee, to give U.S. News & World Report false information about the Temple MBA and part-time MBA program.
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With the false information, U.S. News and World Report ranked the Temple MBA program No. 1 in the country from 2015 to 2018, and the part-time MBA ranking rose from No. 53 in 2014 to No. 7 in 2017. They also used the higher rankings in Temple business school marketing materials.
"The defendant conspired to provide false information about Fox programs and students in order to boost its appearance and fraudulently manipulate those who sought to support a top-tier school,” said U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams in a statement.
“Today an unhappy chapter for higher education in Philadelphia has come to a close and Moshe Porat has been sentenced to a term of imprisonment appropriate for his crime.”
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