B-School Flap at Ohio U.

Prof alleges mismanagement in India program. Also, female footballer signs up at Chicago; mags rate schools for Hispanics and Mexicans; Maryland signs onto a Chinese reality show

by Janie Ho

It's an unsettling time for the Ohio University's College of Business.

First an internal audit found that in 2002 clerical errors allowed one student in the school's MBA program in India to graduate when he shouldn't have and three others to advance with GPAs below the minimum. Now a marketing professor, who claims that the problems in the India program were intentional, has raised new assertions that the business school dean is rewarding professors with improper pay, according to the campus newspaper.

The dean, Glenn Corlett, denies any improper use of money, which is from a philanthropic endowment and is used to supplement salaries of professors, the campus paper, The Post, reported.

The flap at the business school comes at a time when Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, is grappling with issues of widespread cheating and the arrest of several student athletes on charges of fighting, and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. The university is also looking into alleged cases of plagiarism involving current and former graduate students in the university's Russ College of Engineering and Technology. In late September, the college organized a campus-wide "Day of Discourse" to discuss the dishonesty charges.

The latest flap in the business school involves a marketing professor, Ashok Gupta, who asserts that the manipulation of grades in the India program was intentional, aimed at maintaining the program's competitive edge with prospective students in India and to keep the tuition dollars flowing to the college of business.

An internal audit of the incident provided by the school to BusinessWeek.com found that the problems in the program "were a result of inadequate training of college staff." The school's president, Roderick J. McDavis, in an Oct. 4 statement to the college community, without mentioning Gupta by name, said the allegations of mismanagement were thoroughly investigated. "There is no evidence of wrongdoing," he said.

Gupta, in an interview with BusinessWeek.com, says that he was threatened with loss of tenure for tarnishing the reputation of the business school.

Corlett, in a separate interview, admitted threatening Gupta's tenure, but instead removed him from a professor's chair. Corlett said that because of Gupta's accusations to the media against fellow professors, he had forfeited a leadership position.

Female Football Player Joins Chicago GSB

Teresa Erickson traded in pigskins and protective gear for PDAs and Excel spreadsheets, as the former linebacker for the Cincinnati Sizzle entered University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business this fall.

For two and a half years Erickson, now 26, played for the National Women's Football Assn.—the largest (and largely unknown) women's tackle football league in the world. This time-consuming, though part-time, activity taught the sales engineer to learn from, motivate, and rely on her teammates—much as she'll have to do for countless group projects in B-school.

So will men—or female football buffs—want the former linebacker on their team? Erickson laughs and says, "We're just getting into the semester, so I don't really know about that. A lot of people admire what I did. It takes a lot of work and determination. There were definitely days I wanted to quit."

Luckily she stayed with it, and now has brought her talents to a new turf.