Involving a degree granted the governor's daughter, despite a dearth of evidence of her actually earning it.

It started with a phone call from a newspaper reporter in October seeking to verify the academic credentials of Gov. Joe Manchin IIIÂ’s daughter Heather Bresch. But in less than three months, the inquiry has mushroomed into a controversy that risks casting a shadow of cronyism over this stateÂ’s flagship university.

Officials at the college, West Virginia University, have been accused of rewriting records last fall to document that Ms. Bresch had earned an executive master of business administration degree in 1998. An investigation by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded that she had completed only 22 of the required 48 credit hours.

The university has begun an investigation of its own into the matter.

Ms. Bresch, 38, works for Mylan Inc., the world’s third-largest generic drug company, which employs 2,000 people in Morgantown. The company’s chairman, Milan Puskar, is a major campaign contributor to Governor Manchin, a Democrat, and is the university’s largest donor, having given it $20 million in 2003. Ms. Bresch has insisted that she earned her degree, and university officials have blamed a failure to transfer records for nearly half of her course work to the appropriate office for the situation, as documents were moved to electronic format from paper. But so far, the university and Ms. Bresch have not produced copies of her transcripts, receipts or other proof of her having paid for course work, or documents from the courses where grades seemed to have been entered years after “incompletes” were given.

If, as claimed, there are paper records that were not transferred to the electronic system, it should be easy enough to prove. Just produce the records. Surely there are records to justify the changing of grades YEARS after the fact.

Or are there?

Or is there just Daddy's political pull and the aid of one of the state's largest employers, which gives millions to the University?

Posted by: Greg at 11:25 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 340 words, total size 2 kb.