MBA Made In A Mountaineer Minute
MayorBob.
Posted to Etcetera on Fri Apr 25, 2008 at 08:39:20 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
It's not often the allegation of an unearned academic degree warrants much more than a departmental inquiry in the school which conferred the degree. But, this case is different because it involves the school in question giving a pass on almost half the credits required to earn the degree. It's different because the course work was waived on orders from high-ranking officers at the school. It's also different because the student in question is the daughter of the governor of the state whose university apparently gave her the M.B.A. she didn't earn. Those are the findings of a report delivered by a five member panel following a three month period of getting at the facts of the matter of the bogus M.B.A.
West Virginia University (WVU) is the school which finds itself with academic egg on its face. Heather Bresch is the spurious MBA recipient. Bresch is also an executive with a large, western Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. Bresch had included an M.B.A. received from WVU in 1998 on her resume. Back in October, the local Pittsburgh paper did some research and couldn't find any record of the degree. Thus, the folks at WVU were contacted and asked to confirm the degree.
According to the report (link to which is the first link in the last link in the intro paragraph), the powers that be at WVU found they couldn't verify Bresch's degree -- for a good reason. It seems that she had only completed 26 of the 48 credit hours required for the degree. Bresch is also the daughter of Governor Joe Manchin III, thus it must have put a bit more pressure on WVU officials to decide what to do. By the way, the report does not allege that Manchin or even school President Mike Garrison were directly involved in what happened. It does indicate that school Provost Gerald Lang and "representatives of the president's office" did their best to accommodate Bresch.
What they did was find whatever way they could to grant her a degree. According to the report, Lang and other WVU officials were more interested in not "rocking the boat" than actually determining if Bresch earned the degree. Thus 22 credit hours were granted to Bresch as a result of her experience in the business world. They accepted her word that she was "excused" from having to complete those 22 hours. Even still, Bresch is sticking to her story that she did earn the degree. But the report says:"Mistake was compounded by mistake. An unnecessary rush to judgment, spurred in some measure by an understandable desire to protect a valued alumna and to respond to media pressure, produced a flawed and erroneous result."
Roy Nutter is a WVU professor who served on the panel issuing the report. He has not made any statement about the report. However, when appointed to the panel, he remarked if a degree was awarded to a student who had completed only half the credits, "I am indeed livid and heads should roll." David Ryan, opinion editor for the school newspaper, says:"We're just sort of worried because we're actually earning our degrees and if these things are happening, power and coercion are happening, what does that mean for the credibility of our grades and our degrees?"
Accordingly, an editorial about the case in the school newspaper pulled no punches about what this has done to the school's reputation.
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