Business School

Villanova University said yesterday that it recruited a top administrator at Dartmouth College to head its 500-student graduate business school. James M. Danko, 51, has been named dean of the College of Commerce and Finance, effective Aug. 1. He replaces interim dean Edward J. Mathis, who is retiring. Danko said in a phone interview that he planned to use his experience in the business world and at other top business schools at Villanova. "You really do gain a sense of quality of what a business school should be all about," he said.

Temple University yesterday introduced William C. Dunkelberg, a Purdue University economics professor and specialist on consumer credit and small business, as the new dean of its School of Business and Management. Peter J. Liacouras, Temple president, said Dunkelberg's appointment culminated a year-long search in which about 120 candidates were interviewed. Dunkelberg, 44, will assume office on July 1. "We are very committed to the business school," Liacouras told business and community leaders at the Four Seasons Hotel.

My father's one claim to fame in the 1939 Northeast High School yearbook was that he was the shortest boy to graduate that year. At 63 inches, he was pictured in the yearbook shaking hands with the tallest guy on the basketball team. A resident of Port Richmond, my father attended Charles Carroll Elementary School and John Paul Jones Academy before enrolling in Northeast in 1936. In spite of the hardships imposed by the Depression, my father and his seven siblings, children of parents who never made it beyond fourth grade, all graduated from high school or business school.

With more than 1.1 million clergy and lay employees, the Catholic Church's American workforce rivals Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s in size. The retailer, the nation's largest private employer, has 1.3 million U.S. workers. So church leaders are increasingly aiming to run the church's finances like a business. One source of training is the two-year-old Center for the Study of Church Management, which is part of Villanova University's College of Commerce and Finance. "We thought this would be a happy marriage between the business school and theology," said Charles Zech, director for the center.

Tapping into China's growing demand for Western-style business expertise, a coalition of 25 Jesuit-run universities in the United States yesterday announced it was starting a business master's degree program at Peking University in Beijing. The program, to begin next year, will be taught by Peking University professors along with some of the 1,000 business professors at the American schools, including St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. The bulk of the students, about 80 percent, are expected to be Chinese.

Eric Brucker, the new dean of Widener University's School of Business Administration, comes on board just as Widener embarks on the construction of a $9 million business school on its Chester campus. The building, expected to open in the fall of 2002, will feature computer classrooms and a stock-trading room that will enable students to work with the financial community, he said. "It's really a very exciting place," Brucker said. "It's a very responsive business school" that is keeping pace with the needs of business.

I had to stop writing this column for a couple weeks. That was in early November. I realize, of course, that it's now January. Time can get away from you in this racket. The reason I had to stop writing the column for a little while was that the company sent me to business school. If you knew me, you'd know just how funny a one-liner that was. It wasn't until I was packing my Roy Rogers book bag with sharpened crayons and fresh composition books that I got around to admitting to people in the newsroom that I was going to Wharton.

Two professors in the West Chester University School of Business, hired as part of an effort to bolster the university's business curriculum, have been ousted. A third has been told by administrators at the business school that his contract would not be renewed - a recommendation that was rejected by university president Kenneth L. Perrin. Though no reasons for the action were given to the three professors, some of those involved say they had "fallen out of favor" with dean Linda Pickthorne Fletcher, who recommended the dismissals.

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.

SENDING crack dealers to business school (Fatimah Ali, op-ed August 14) was a provocative idea with a lot of merit. I wonder if Wharton or Kellogg could figure out a way to allow someone with a non-traditional background to matriculate. One thing, however, troubled me. She uses the phrase "when they launch businesses in our neighborhoods. " Using the word "our" sets up a de facto segregation that can never be inclusive to all. Wouldn't it set off red flags if a white columnist wrote something along the lines of "a lot of white folks resent (Asians, Arabs, Blacks, whoever)