Wharton degree trial to go back to court

In October, a federal jury awarded over $400,000 to a former student who claimed the University cheated him out of a degree from the Wharton School.

But on Jan. 27, Penn was granted a new trial by the federal judge that presided over the initial lawsuit.

On Oct. 18, 2005, ex-student Frank Reynolds filed a suit against Penn for breach of contract, claiming that the University would not give him a Wharton degree after having promised him affiliation with Wharton upon completion of the Executive Masters in Technology Management graduate program. The lawsuit’s trial was concluded last October, and Reynolds was awarded $435,678.

In his order granting Penn’s request for a new trial, presiding Judge Thomas O’Neill of the United States District Court for Pennsylvania’s eastern district described that evidence submitted by Reynolds may have been altered.

A comparison of Reynolds’ and Penn’s copies of documents such as PowerPoint slides turned up several inconsistencies. For example, a Wharton logo that appears in one of Reynolds’ copies of a PowerPoint slide didn’t exist until after Reynolds would have received the slide. Subsequent inspection of the data sources of these documents led Penn to believe that they were altered, but O’Neill refused to grant a motion from Penn to exclude the evidence in the trial’s preliminary hearings.

However, right before the start of the trial, fellow classmate Anurag Harsh dropped a similar lawsuit that used the same evidence. Reynolds was granted a motion to preclude the possibly altered documents on the grounds that Harsh’s dismissal of her lawsuit would reflect poorly on his case. As a result, the evidence in question was not used in the trial.

“Upon reconsideration, I find that the introduction of the allegedly altered documents would not create a side issue. Instead, that evidence is directly relevant to the jury’s determination of Reynolds’s credibility,” read O’Neill’s order granting Penn’s motion for a new trial.

Reynolds, now CEO of the start-up laboratory InVivo Therapeutics, alleged in his complaint that though he was led to believe he would receive a degree from Wharton, the University told EMTM students that they would only be considered graduates of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The EMTM program, started in 1988 and cosponsored by the Wharton and Engineering schools, “was designed to provide an integrated educational experience in the management of technology at the intersection of technology and business,” EMTM Director Dwight Jaggard wrote in an e-mail.

Jaggard also said students in the EMTM program gain about half of their course units from Engineering courses and half from Wharton courses.

On the web site for InVivo Therapeutics, Reynolds lists his graduate education as including “a M.S. in Technology Management Program from The Wharton School of Business and a M.S. in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.” The University declined to comment on the validity of this statement, but since 1988, Jaggard wrote, students of the EMTM program “receive a masters degree in engineering (MSE degree) and a certificate signed by the deans of Penn Engineering and the Wharton School.”

Neither Reynolds nor Reynolds’ lawyer Richard Heleniak returned multiple requests for comment.

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