The Faculty Senate at West Virginia University chose three academics from other states today to join a university-appointed panel that will investigate whether the daughter of Gov. Joe Manchin III was granted a master’s degree she didn’t earn, the Associated Press reported.

The faculty had pressed for outsiders to be added to an investigative panel chosen this month by the university’s provost to look into the developing scandal. That panel consisted of two university professors and an official with the state’s Higher Education Policy Commission. The state official agreed to step down after some educators worried that he was too close to the Manchin administration.

The newcomers to the panel are Arthur L. Centonze, an associate professor of finance and economics and a former dean at Pace University; Lori S. Franz, a business professor and former associate provost at the University of Missouri at Columbia; and John M. Burkoff, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The previously appointed West Virginia faculty members are Michael Lastinger, an associate professor of French, and Roy S. Nutter Jr., a professor of electrical engineering.

The panel will examine allegations, first reported in December in an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that raised questions about how the university granted an M.B.A. degree to the governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, even though university records showed that she had completed only about half of the credits required. Ms. Bresch, a top executive at a West Virginia pharmaceutical company, says she earned the degree in 1998. —Charles Huckabee