Business School

  Villanova University has named Patrick G. Maggitti the new dean of the School of Business, effective June 1. Maggitti will succeed James Danko, who left on July 31 to become president of Butler University. His post has been filled in the interim by Kevin Clark. Maggitti, 44 and part of Villanova's faculty since 2008, is currently director of the school's Center for Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship, where he is also assistant professor of strategic management and entrepreneurship.

When it comes to training the region's business leaders, there is no such thing as a local curriculum, said Jaishankar Ganesh, the new dean of the Rutgers School of Business in Camden. "Business is global. Period," he said. Just months into his tenure, Ganesh is demonstrating that. He and Rutgers-Camden chancellor Wendell Pritchett are currently in India, where Pritchett was invited to sit on a panel on higher education. If all goes as planned, the two also will lay the groundwork for expanding Rutgers to India.

Alter Hall, the new Temple University business school building opening Tuesday, was under construction for so long that associate business school dean Diana Breslin-Knudsen dreams about it. "I like to fly through the building like a bird," she said. In her dreams, she swoops through the atrium, flitting through a mobile of flags from many nations, painted on metal fishlike shapes. On the second floor, she wings her way past the huge revolving stock ticker, which frames a circular student lounge, just across the way from the stock-trading room.

HARTFORD, Conn. - Four years of tuition at the University of New Haven's business school? About $120,000. A chance to get it free? Priceless. UNH's new business school dean, a former MasterCard executive responsible for its "Priceless" advertising campaign, has issued a challenge to the university's incoming freshmen: Bowl me over with your entrepreneurial idea and win free tuition for your undergraduate degree. Larry Flanagan calls it an opportunity to draw the kind of creative students that the University of New Haven wants and to help carve out the small private school's niche in higher education as an incubator for innovative business education.

Glenn Wilchacky, a marketing major in West Chester University's School of Business, likes the school, especially his classes with Robert Kokat, a marketing professor who joined the WCU faculty two years ago after a long career in business. Now Wilchacky and some of his classmates are perplexed over the college's decision not to renew the contracts of Kokat and another member of the faculty, management professor Walter Smock. "I enjoyed his class a lot," Wilchacky said. "It was probably the most interesting class I had here, because he talked about his experience in the business world.

Drexel University on Tuesday morning will announce a whopping $45 million gift from corporate executive and alumnus Bennett S. LeBow for a new academic center for its business school, which already bears his name. It's Drexel's largest gift from a single donor and the 12th largest to be made to a U.S. business school, Drexel officials said. At a cost of $92 million, the spacious, 12-story limestone-and-glass building is to open in 2014, consolidating Drexel's four business school buildings into one. It will allow enrollment in the business school to grow by about 500 students, to 4,100, president John A. Fry said in an interview.

The economy's in the dumps, the market's in the slumps and even one-time bastions of job security such as banks and law firms are handing out pink slips as fast as paychecks. What's an ambitious college grad or jobless soul to do? Go, maybe, $40,000 deeper in debt by signing up for business school or law school. And believe it or not, recession or no, that's exactly what's happening - and in record numbers that might seem to defy logic. Or at least common sense. The number of people nationally who applied to law schools for this fall's term reached a record high of 94,200, according to the Law School Admissions Services in Newtown.

In another move that bolsters its prominence in South Jersey, Rowan University yesterday received a $10 million endowment from the foundation of a late business leader to enhance its business school. The gift is the largest to the university since industrialist Henry Rowan pledged $100 million 13 years ago and Glassboro State College was renamed in his honor. The result of the latest gift is that Rowan's College of Business will be renamed the William G. Rohrer School of Business, subject to approval by the university's board of trustees.

Madly scribbling an equation on a dry-erase board, Steven A. McNeil, dean of the Rowan College School of Business, looks the part of a professor teaching undergraduates a business lesson. This, though, is his pitch for the school's future, coming straight from a former Campbell Soup Co. corporate officer, a one-time Bumble Bee Tuna & Seafood president, and a past Haagen-Daz North America general manager. His formula: A common body of knowledge plus skills plus experience divided by a liberal-arts education equals student success.

The chairman of Rowan University's board of trustees - and his mother - announced a $2.5 million donation yesterday to create a professorial chair in the business school and an endowment for the library. In addition, a portion of the gift will buy a house for the university president. The donation is the second largest in the university's history, overshadowed only by the $100 million awarded to the school by industrialist Henry J. Rowan in 1992. Out of gratitude to Keith Campbell, his wife, Shirley, and his mother, Ann Campbell, the university will rename its library in their honor, president Donald Farish said.

  Villanova University has named Patrick G. Maggitti the new dean of the School of Business, effective June 1. Maggitti will succeed James Danko, who left on July 31 to become president of Butler University. His post has been filled in the interim by Kevin Clark. Maggitti, 44 and part of Villanova's faculty since 2008, is currently director of the school's Center for Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship, where he is also assistant professor of strategic management and entrepreneurship.

In the past, bringing sports executives to Temple University's Fox School of Business to address students was not an easy process. "Typically, to coordinate an executive in residence, it will take a year to a year and a half. But in this particular case, we started in November," said Gregory L. DeShields, the school's managing director of business development. "I didn't have much experience with social media, but after this, how quickly it worked, I am absolutely speechless in my impression of social media.

HARTFORD, Conn. - Four years of tuition at the University of New Haven's business school? About $120,000. A chance to get it free? Priceless. UNH's new business school dean, a former MasterCard executive responsible for its "Priceless" advertising campaign, has issued a challenge to the university's incoming freshmen: Bowl me over with your entrepreneurial idea and win free tuition for your undergraduate degree. Larry Flanagan calls it an opportunity to draw the kind of creative students that the University of New Haven wants and to help carve out the small private school's niche in higher education as an incubator for innovative business education.

Pushing back against Gov. Christie's proposal to merge Rutgers-Camden into Rowan University, the president of the Rutgers University system told a state legislative panel Monday that it was unlikely his university's governing boards would "willingly relinquish the campus. " "Given our choice at Rutgers, if we could pick and choose among the recommendations . . . we would not want to turn over the Rutgers-Camden campus to Rowan University," Richard L. McCormick told the Senate Higher Education Committee during a hearing in Trenton.

Stewart Fulbright, 92, a trailblazing black educator who piloted a bomber during World War II as one of the Tuskegee Airmen and who later served as the first dean of North Carolina Central University's school of business, died on New Year's Day in Durham, N.C. Born in Springfield, Mo., Mr. Fulbright enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943. He was one of about 1,000 men trained in Tuskegee, Ala., as the first African American pilots, navigators, and bombardiers in the U.S. military.

IN INTERVIEWING protesters of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Philadelphia and, yes, Occupy Doylestown, I've been struck not only by the inability of the protesters to state what they want done, but also by the conspiracy theories that they lapse into to explain their problems in a tough economy. While Woodstock united young people who were rallying against America's involvement in the Vietnam War, the Occupy demonstrators seem to be against everything. Their complaints about the Wall Street bailouts are shared by a lot of my listeners, but the younger people have gone from protesting Wall Street to an assault on capitalism and corporations.

A little money can go a long way in turning what seems like a good idea by a college student into a product or service that can be used by customers. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania just got a lot more money with which to provide small grants to its students. The business school announced last week it had created the Wharton Innovation Fund, which will provide about $125,000 in grants annually in amounts ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. Wharton alum Alberto Vitale , the former chairman and chief executive of publisher Random House , is supplying the cash.

Alexander Heffner is a freelance journalist who has written for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and RealClearPolitics As I return for my senior year of college, I will join a minority of fellow history concentrators, and as national reporting and surveys show, I will be outnumbered by the unprecedented swarm of economics and finance majors across American higher education, many in pursuit of lucrative salaries in investment banking...

A La Salle University professor has been suspended after reports that a recent lecture offered more in the way of lap dances than learning, colleagues said Monday. Jack Rappaport - who taught statistics at the business school - reportedly hired strippers to perform at a March 21 extra-credit seminar at a satellite campus in Plymouth Meeting, the Philadelphia City Paper reported on its website Friday. While La Salle administrators remained tight-lipped about those allegations Monday, university spokesman Joseph Donovan said the school had opened a "full-scale investigation into what took place and who was responsible.

A La Salle University professor has been suspended following reports that a recent lecture offered more in the way of lap dances than learning, colleagues said Monday. Jack Rappaport - who taught statistics classes at the university's business school - reportedly hired strippers to perform at a March 21 extra credit seminar held at a satellite campus in Plymouth Meeting, the Philadelphia City Paper reported on its website Friday. While La Salle administrators remained tight-lipped about those allegations Monday, university spokesman Joseph Donovan said the school had opened a "full-scale investigation into what took place and who was responsible.