Fox School to use budget surplus for new scholarships

Temple’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday approved the allotment of $3.5 million to match donation for endowed scholarships in the Fox School of Business.

Moshe Porat, Fox’s dean, wrote in a September memo attached to the board meeting’s agenda that the school had a $7.5 million surplus which came from a tuition differential – in other words, higher tuition than most of Temple’s other schools and colleges – that was first implemented in 2007. The surplus later grew to $8.25 million.

According to a Fox press release, the differential stemmed from a need to add faculty, advisers and new technology quickly, in order to accommodate the growing demand for attending the school. While in-state tuition for a lower-division undergraduate in the College of Liberal Arts is $14,006, Fox students in the same financial category are charged $18,084 before financial aid.

Of the surplus, $3.5 million will be used for matching endowed scholarships, so potential donors can be reined in with the promise that donations greater than $25,000 to scholarship funds will be matched by the university. In total, $7 million will be added to the scholarship fund for the school.

Five new professorships will be offered as well, Porat said in a statement released to The Temple News.

In the memo, Porat wrote that he was requesting new professorships since Fox’s six were already occupied.

“In an extremely competitive landscape of the Top 50 quality business schools, our best faculty members are constantly being recruited to other schools with offers of chairs and professorships,” Porat wrote. “The only tool we have in our war chest is to be able to offer them named professorships to stay in the Fox School.”

The professorships will be named after deceased former presidents of the university, including Charles Beury, Millard Gladfelter, Paul Anderson and Marvin Wachman, the namesake of academic buildings on Main Campus.

Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@temple.edu or on Twitter @JBrandt_TU.