Great Job of Basic Investigative Reporting

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette broke this story and deserves credit for doing the basic leg-work of checkign the facts of a story. Read the whole thing (emphasis added):

WVU made 'flawed' decision
University revokes degree after scathing report on M.B.A. awarded to Bresch
Thursday, April 24, 2008
By Len Boselovic and Patricia Sabatini, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- West Virginia University administrators made a "seriously flawed" decision fraught with favoritism in awarding Mylan Inc. executive Heather Bresch a graduate degree she didn't earn, investigators said in a scathing report released yesterday.

Provost Gerald Lang said he would follow the recommendation of the investigative panel and the university's Board of Governors and rescind the degree.

The report by the five-member panel concluded administrators acted hastily, using ambiguous and incomplete information to award an M.B.A. degree retroactively in October to Ms. Bresch, the daughter of West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin.

The decision was made following a telephone conversation between the governor's daughter and WVU President Michael Garrison, a family friend and former business associate of Ms. Bresch, the report said.

The report concluded administrators falsified Ms. Bresch's transcript by adding courses to her record that she did not take and by entering grades "simply pulled from thin air." The actions reflected "failures of process and failures of leadership" at the state's flagship university, it said.

Top administrators "should have been more deliberate, more discerning and more detached in assessing the evidence that they had in hand," investigators said. "They should have hesitated to rely so heavily on fragments of self-serving, hearsay conversations that they could not and did not even try to confirm or verify."...