The piece begins in 2006 with Ward being busted by immigration agents after returning from a trip to Thailand, where he enjoyed copious amounts of sex with prepubescent boys. Fortunately for prosecutors, he brought home the DVDs to prove it.
It wasnt the first time Ward had been charged with sex crimes against children.
Some 13 years earlier, the good professor was charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a minor, but found not guilty.
He continued to teach at Wharton.
Three years later, he was accused of soliciting sex from a 23-year-old undercover state trooper posing as a 15-year-old boy. Ward pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution and the attempted corruption of a minor.
And he continued to teach at Wharton.
After his arrest in 2006, federal agents went to Wards office at the universitys Huntsman Hall and found 80 images of Ward fondling a 15-year-old boy. The very presence of those photos made the campus itself a crime scene.
The universitys response to calls from reporters about Ward and his alleged crimes was, No comment. All media inquiries were effectively stonewalled.
And what happened?
Well, heres what didnt happen: The university didnt hire the former head of the FBI to investigate how Ward managed to elude detection and stay employed at the school despite his numerous arrests and rather obvious problem.
If the school investigated itself for its handling of the matter, it didnt make the results of that investigation public.
Other than the excellent story in Philly mag, there was no great media campaign to make the university come clean about how and why it protected a known child molester for years.
As pointed out in the story:
In 1993, Ward had been the subject of a sting at his Ardmore mansion, where several teenage boys lived with him, and he was accused of molesting a 13-year-old there as often as 100 times. But after two highly publicized trials, he was sentenced to just five years of probation, during which time he continued to teach at Wharton and to travel on Penns dime to Thailand and other hot spots where the touch of a young boy could be had for a price.
So not only did U of P look the other way while Ward engaged in hundreds of crimes against children in this country, it subsidized his kiddie sex trips abroad.
Again from the story:
Though he taught only 22 courses from 1999 through 2005, Wharton still paid for him to teach at its partner school in Bangkok an especially baffling arrangement, since right there, in his CV filled with research on kids and his consulting jobs overseas, is the blueprint for his lifestyle, one made possible in large part by his connection to Penn.
So here we have an Ivy League school not only refusing to deal with a known pedophile in its midst, it enables him to continue to sexually exploit dozens (hundreds?) of poor children in foreign lands.
And yet, no outside agency not the Ivy League, not the U.S. Department of Education, not any university accrediting agency has found the necessary chutzpah to demand the University of Pennsylvania cough up $60 million with the goal of helping sexually abused children.
Ward was every bit the star at Wharton that Jerry Sandusky was at Penn State. Like Sandusky, Ward also founded a nonprofit program for at-risk kids. But he was different in one respect: Ward was far wealthier than the ex-football coach. He made millions serving as a marketing consultant and by being on various corporate boards.
He used his wealth, smarts and his social status as an esteemed Penn professor to discredit his pathetic accusers and to elude justice for years. And yet, if his colleagues had any problem with that, there is no public record of it.
By 2005, Ward had finally become enough of an embarrassment for Penn to take the extreme action of reducing him to the status of professor emeritus. He was arrested and locked up for good a year later.