Heather Bresch seemed on the fast track to the top. Already chief
operating officer of a large West Virginia company, she had friends in
all the right places. One was the president of West Virginia
University, where she claimed to have earned a master of business
degree in 1998. And the president of her firm is one of WVU’s largest
benefactors, having coughed up $20 million in 2003.

But you really don’t need an MBA on your resume if your father is the governor, Joe Manchin III, a first-term Democrat.

This story isn’t about Mr. Manchin. He wasn’t involved at all in the
controversy that erupted after a Pittsburgh newspaper, routinely
checking the degree Bresch’s employer listed on its Web site, found
there was none.

The posturing, lies, and backfilling that went on at WVU cost school
president Mike Garrison his job last week after a panel of professors
concluded that the school retroactively stated that Bresch took courses
she never attended and earned grades the school “pulled out of thin
air.”

Bresch maintained that she struck a deal to use on-the-job experience
for some of the 22 credits she needed to reach the required 48.

But this yarn isn’t about Bresch, either. Presumably she’s done fine in
the decade since she left or she wouldn’t be chief operating officer at
Mylan, a generic-drug maker with 2,000 employees in the state.

Since the U.S. is largely a pay-to-play society, why can’t we just
decide to sell her the desired degree? Pay-to-play is good enough for
Congress and the White House. Why wouldn’t it work in the halls of WVU?

We’d need a little disclosure. Bresch would get a slightly different
degree known as the MBA-FS — the commercial “for sale” version. That
way, we’d know that she’d played by the rules and had decided to buy
the degree to bolster her current status. That way, we wouldn’t have
mass carnage at the halls of WVU that cost the president, provost, and
business school dean their jobs (the latter two floated gently back to
earth, reverting to tenured professorships).

Your school needs a little extra money to make ends meet? Put some “FS”
degrees on the block. Let supply meet demand. We’ll not squawk as long
as we know. We’d have no more scandals over falsified academic
credentials. This is a society that brags about how much something
costs.

We’ll surcharge for backdating. Bresch got WVU to vouch in 2008 that
she’d earned hers in 1998 — an assertion contradicted by a panel of
five academics appointed to study the mess.

We’re taking our cue from the 440 inhabitants of the U.S. Congress and
100 over at the Senate. They know how pay-to-play works. Lobbyists (who
outnumber legislators by about 10-1) offer special interest groups
access to Congress — specifically, to hometown “earmark” specials.

For a fee of around 10 percent of whatever largesse they can wrangle
out of Congress, the lobbyists go to work. Nobody’s at all shy about
soliciting campaign contributions. After meeting with a key esteemed
legislator, a lobbyist and his client understand that such a
contribution is required.

We do not call this “bribery” in the U.S. when the money technically
doesn’t go into a public servant’s pocket. But it’s money, just the
same, and it greases the same wheels within the Republi-Pay and
Demo-Cash parties.

Earmarks took off in 1995 when Republicans, newly in charge in
Congress, saw them as a chance to create a permanent majority.
According to an Associated Press report, they exploded in the next
decade: from 1,300 worth $8 billion in 1994 to 14,000 carrying a $27
billion price tag by 2005. Though they represent only 2 percent of
total spending bills, the House Appropriations committee counts 23,438
requests this year (about half will get chopped, but passed).

Some supporters say earmarking is a streamlined way of getting needed
programs in areas such as university cancer research or a national bone
marrow donor-registry. Approaching Congress pays off. A few thousand in
well-placed donations can produce a return “earmark” worth 10 to 30
times more, the Associated Press report noted.

Web sites for Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Center for Responsive
Politics (non-profits) track the inner workings of pay-to-play. The
more we know, it seems, the less we object. A fund-raising phone call
coming within 48 hours of a key meeting produces the campaign loot
(it’s illegal to actually raise money in the halls of Congress).

Back in West Virginia, how do we mark up Ms. Bresch’s MBA mess? We
flunk the WVU administrators for fabricating grades, and their PR flaks
for proclaiming “clerical” glitches.

But let’s say we changed the rules just a bit. For $25,000, going to a
tenured professorship, Ms. Bresch can purchase her MBA-FS degree. And
for another $1,000 per year, she could get it backdated all the way to
1998. We’d all know about it, and she’s free to boast to whomever she
wants.

“I didn’t have to go to all the classes to get my MBA,” she’d say. “But
I wanted to support the school and respect the degree. So I just bought
one.”

The Usual Suspect is a founder of the Aspen Daily News and appears
here each Sunday. Counsel, console or berate him at ddanforth@aol.com [1].
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