West Virginia University's faculty senate yesterday recommended that a three-member panel investigating an M.B.A. degree awarded to the governor's daughter be modified to include people not connected to the university.

The senate voted 46-34, with two abstentions, to recommend that three people "independent of any governmental agency or interested party" join the panel.

They also recommended that one member of the current investigative team, Bruce Flack, a high-ranking executive of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, be removed from the panel because the commission is controlled by Gov. Joe Manchin. The faculty said it supported the two other current panel members, professors Roy Nutter and Michael Lastinger.

The current panel was selected by WVU Provost Gerald E. Lang to review his and the university's actions in retroactively granting a master's of business administration degree to Mylan Inc. executive Heather Bresch in October, nearly a decade after she left the program. Ms. Bresch is chief operating officer at Cecil-based Mylan, whose chairman, Milan Puskar, is WVU's largest benefactor. She contends she earned an M.B.A. in December 1998.

The panel was formed in response to public concern after a Dec. 21 story by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that raised questions about how the university awarded the degree even though official records showed Ms. Bresch had completed only about half of the credits required.

Since the panel members were announced Jan. 2, some faculty members and independent experts have said the probe should be conducted by outsiders because of the political and corporate connections involved. Independent educational authorities and editorial pages, including the Post-Gazette's, also have called for an outside investigation.

Several faculty members who spoke in favor of yesterday's recommendation to expand the panel to include both outsiders and insiders said they thought it was a good compromise.

Yesterday's vote is nonbinding on the university, but Mr. Lang said it was so conclusive that he probably would follow the recommendation.

Under the recommendation, the outside members would be nominated and approved by the full senate.

Mr. Lang had previously said he didn't want outsiders participating in the inquiry.

"I believe we have respected faculty members capable of making that decision," he repeated yesterday when asked why he thought that adding outsiders was a bad idea.

Mr. Lastinger also spoke against the appointment of outsiders, telling faculty members doing so would hinder the panel's work and delay its report.

"It will not be helpful," he said.

Senate Chairwoman-elect Virginia Kleist, who recommended Mr. Nutter and Mr. Lastinger for the panel, said she supported adding outsiders but abstained from voting because of her personal feeling that College of Business and Economics Dean R. Stephen Sears, who approved Ms. Bresch's retroactive degree, did nothing wrong.

Another faculty member who supported expanding the panel said she felt strongly that "anything we can do to make [the investigation] dignified in the eyes of the world ... would be helpful."

"I would like to feel at the end of the investigation that this wasn't a good-old-boys decision," she said.

A letter submitted in support of adding three outsiders to the panel recommended that the new members be "completely independent of WVU and all West Virginia governmental units and preferably should be from other states." The letter was signed by the six faculty members who chair WVU's science department.

Earlier, senate members struck down an amendment that would have retained Mr. Flack on the panel and added two outsiders.

Mr. Lang has not set a deadline for the panel's report but said he hoped members would act quickly. He said he would share the findings with the faculty senate and the university's board of governors. The findings also would be made public, "except those protected by federal privacy laws."

Senate members said it was important that the panel's inquiry be evidence-driven, but it was unclear how much of that evidence would be released publicly, especially if it includes Ms. Bresch's academic records, which the university cannot release without her permission.

"The university, because of its investigation and the fact that investigators have a right to know, can look at [Ms. Bresch's] records," Mr. Lang said. "But whether they can publicly disclose those records, I think, is the issue at hand."

Mr. Lang said he had asked the university's integrity officer to study that issue.

The Post-Gazette's investigation found that WVU officials retroactively added six classes, including grades, to Ms. Bresch's record with the registrar. In addition, two classes that had been marked "incomplete" were changed to show letter grades. Together, the revisions were worth 22 credits in the 48-credit program.

The newspaper's research determined that officials made the changes without evidence that Ms. Bresch registered or paid for the classes, and without consulting at least five of the six professors who taught the classes added to her record.

In December, Mr. Lang issued a brief statement saying Ms. Bresch's record had been "appropriately corrected."

In an interview last week, Mr. Lang said business school records had been lost and he did not know what records, if any, Dean Sears used to determine that Ms. Bresch earned the degree.

Reminders of the issue were present on campus yesterday as WVU's 28,000 students began the spring semester.

The student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum, had a banner front-page headline reading: "Degree confusion drags on." An editorial urged informants to come forward so the issue could be resolved.

"If the university lost this many records for one student, how many records have they lost for other students?" the editorial read.

It also said that students and faculty who have told the news media that the degree was not earned must make themselves known, or suspicions will remain that "veiled critics are taking part in an elaborate hit-job against our university and all of state government."

Most students interviewed last evening had at least heard about the issue from friends or the news media while on winter break, but said they knew few details about the case.

Liz Fodor, 18, a junior psychology and English major from Follansbee, W.Va., said she is waiting to see how it plays out.

"For me as a student here, I don't want the university just giving away a degree, because I'm working hard to earn mine," she said, while working on a laptop in the student union.

Brett Bucholtz, 19, a freshman exercise physiology major from Greensburg, said he felt the faculty senate yesterday made the right move in calling for the appointment of additional members to the investigating panel who are not beholden to state government or any interested party.

"It keeps it neutral," he said.