Business School

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.

Insurance risk managers, no less than gamblers or pool players, are in the business of figuring winning odds. So M. Moshe Porat, who has spent a career studying risk management, can be presumed to have known what he was doing when he agreed last month to become dean of Temple University's School of Business and Management. In some ways, the deck looks stacked against Porat, 49, who has taught risk management at Temple since 1979 and chaired its department of risk management since 1988.

Administrators, professors and graduates of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School have long liked to think of themselves as the creme de la creme. Now they have it in black and white. Business Week yesterday named Wharton the country's top business school, moving it up from fourth place in the last poll two years ago and putting it ahead of business graduate schools at Northwestern, Chicago and Harvard. Late yesterday, word swept the school and celebrations started to break out, Wharton dean Thomas P. Gerrity said shortly after the poll results were released.

The Internet boom is fast fading, but it has left a permanent mark on higher education. Educators at area business schools say they have incorporated e-commerce into almost every aspect of their curriculums. Drexel University is taking applications for its fourth class of what it calls techno-M.B.A.s, people who get their masters of business administration degrees in a program taught almost completely online. The program, which Drexel began offering last spring, got about 50 applications the first time.

He's been called a corporate raider, a business tycoon, a maverick financier, and a volatile one-man band. He's been labeled "pugnacious" and "colorful" and "renegade. " Tuesday, however, when he visits his alma mater, Drexel University, Bennett S. LeBow is likely to be addressed as "Sir. " LeBow, 72, Drexel's largest benefactor, is donating $45 million to build a new academic center for Drexel's business school, which is already named in his honor. "The current building is completely inadequate," he said Monday in an interview from his home on the exclusive Fisher Island in Miami.

  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.

With a $12.5 million gift, Drexel University will start a school of entrepreneurship that will help students start and grow their own businesses - and get paid for it, president John A. Fry said Wednesday. The new school, named after the late Charles D. Close, a 1936 Drexel graduate in engineering, will offer joint degree programs in entrepreneurship and other disciplines across the university. Some programs within the school will begin in the fall, but students won't officially enroll in the joint degree programs until September 2014.

ROSETTA BRANDON came from Halifax, Va., where she was raised in a church-going atmosphere with family and friends who imbued in her the ideals of hard work and service to others. "Halifax was known for its church people," said longtime friend Robin Cunningham-Gladden. "They believed in working hard, save your money, do the right thing, be a lady. All those old-fashioned virtues. " Rosetta brought those virtues with her to Philadelphia when she arrived in 1958, took jobs in the computer industry and worked with children as a teacher's aide.

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.

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.