Dean of St. Joe’s business school, its biggest college, is retiring
With 27 years at the Erivan K. Haub School of Business and 13 at Widener University, Joseph DiAngelo says he is the longest-serving business school dean in the U.S.
Even as Pennsylvania’s prospective college student population flattened and some Catholic feeder high schools closed, the business college at Saint Joseph’s University has doubled enrollments, adding programs, professors, and donors since Joseph DiAngelo Jr. took over as dean in 2000.
DiAngelo said last weekend he’s retiring. “I’ll be 79 next July,” he said. “I need to spend some time with my wife” and family.
“DiAngelo has been a defining force at Saint Joseph’s University and a visionary steward,” university President Cheryl A. McConnell said in a statement. As dean of the Erivan K. Haub School of Business, DiAngelo built it into “a premier, AACSB-accredited, nationally ranked school,” McConnell added.
He will serve until the end of the current school year, and plans to teach a class next fall, as dean emeritus. DiAngelo will remain active in fundraising for St. Joe’s, one of the 99 universities worldwide that are run by the Jesuit order of Catholic priests. The university has not named a successor.
Son of a West Philly grocer, DiAngelo says he’s the longest-serving dean among U.S. business school leaders, counting 27 years on St. Joe’s Hawk Hill as of his retirement next spring, and after 13 years running the Widener University business school and its Chester, Wilmington, and online programs.
DiAngelo met many of his peers through the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, an accreditation group for which he served as board member, chair, and secretary-treasurer.
After attending St. Thomas More High School in West Philly, he graduated from St. Joe’s with a scholarship from the former Food Fair grocery chain, after a stint studying for the priesthood at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary during which his best friend, a fellow student, died of cancer. “I got mad at God,” left the seminary, and later married his high school sweetheart.
After college and service in the Army National Guard, he taught religion and coached baseball at his old high school and then at Archbishop Carroll High School in Delaware County. He began teaching management at St. Joe’s in 1979, earning his doctorate at Temple at night and refereeing high school games on weekends “to put food on the table.”
DiAngelo joined Widener in 1980 as assistant dean, taught management, and was named business school dean in 1987. By DiAngelo’s count Widener doubled its MBA student body, to 950, expanded the cooperative education program, added undergraduate majors, and extended classes from Widener’s Chester campus to its Delaware foothold.
He returned to St. Joe’s to head the Haub business school in 2000.
On DiAngelo’s watch St. Joe’s expanded its Saturday MBA and online education programs, doubling graduate-school enrollment to 1,200 as big pharmaceutical companies along the U.S. 202 corridor enrolled early- and mid-career salespeople for their MBAs.
Haub undergraduates have also doubled during his tenure, to around 2,600. Total university enrollment is around 5,000, also including the college of arts and sciences, and the nursing, pharmacy, health, and education schools.
Among the programs added under DiAngelo is the Maguire Academy of Insurance and Risk Management, started with $10 million from James Maguire. Expelled from Saint Joe’s in 1954, Maguire returned to finish his degree after a stint in the Army, and went on to start Philadelphia Consolidated Holdings Corp.
