Horror at Hillsdale : Low times on a conservative campus

Shortly after noon on October 17, Lissa Roche unlocked her husband's gun cabinet and removed a .38 special. She stepped out of their kitchen door into the backyard, crossed the grass, and went through a wooden gate leading to the Hillsdale College arboretum. She proceeded down a narrow trail to an open hollow with a stone gazebo. She sat down, placed the barrel of the gun behind her ear, and pulled the trigger. When her husband, George Roche IV, arrived just minutes later, her flesh was still warm to the touch. But she was dead.

The suicide of Lissa Roche has reverberated throughout the entire conservative movement.

Tucked away in rural Michigan, Hillsdale College may seem no different from any other small liberal-arts school in the Midwest-yet it is one of the most important institutions in American conservatism. It is a college that teaches a traditional curriculum, promotes intellectual diversity, and refuses to accept a penny of federal aid. For conservatives, Hillsdale is meant to be a model for how higher education should work.

But Lissa Roche's suicide has ruptured the college, guaranteeing that Hillsdale will long be known as the school whose prominent president, George Roche III, allegedly conducted a 19-year affair with his daughter- in-law, who was the mother of his grandson and an employee of the college. "Hillsdale College has been overwhelmed by this crisis," says Gleaves Whitney, an aide to Michigan governor John Engler. Whitney has been in daily contact with the school's administration. "It may take a long time for the college to recover."

George Roche III arrived in the sleepy town of Hillsdale, just north of where Indiana and Ohio meet along the Michigan border, in 1971. As president, he would almost single-handedly transform the place, making it famous on the right as an intellectual hub that features a world-class lecture series, holds the libraries of Russell Kirk and Ludwig von Mises, and publishes a monthly newsletter reaching nearly 1 million readers. The school also boasts a $184 million endowment suitable for a college many times its size. Roche, in fact, was one of America's best conservative fundraisers. In his 28 years as president, he brought in more than $324 million, including some $45 million last year.

Hillsdale needs all of this money because Roche, for most of his presidency, refused to buckle under pressure from the federal government to alter admissions policies for the sake of affirmative action. In 1985, it even became necessary to tell students they could not accept GI Bill benefits or Pell grants, because the Supreme Court ruled that this would make Hillsdale "a recipient of federal funds" and subject to the coercive dictates of Washington regulators. Roche cited Hillsdale's impressive history of nondiscrimination-it was admitting women and blacks before the Civil War-and refused to budge. He became a hero to conservatives, a plucky David who stared down the federal Goliath.

Hillsdale's isolation is one of its major appeals to students (there are currently 1,138) and parents. Removed from the distractions of big cities and political correctness, the college seems an ideal place to focus young minds. Yet there had long been rumblings that not all was well.

A number of professors have said that they were fired, and several students have claimed that they were expelled, for clashing with Roche or the administration. In 1988, the American Association of University Professors censured Hillsdale for "inadequate protection against an improper exercise of administrative power." The student newspaper has been censored. For many years, there was a feeling that Roche had not only built Hillsdale, but lorded over it. In 1996, an unnamed former employee told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "It's a rather Stalinist kind of environment." Hillsdale's greatest assets-its remoteness and Roche-were simultaneously severe weaknesses.

In the late 1970s, Roche's elder son, George IV (nicknamed "I.V.," pronounced "eye-vee"), attended the college. There he met Lissa Jackson, a classmate. They fell in love and married. In 1980, Lissa and George III (President Roche) began an on-and-off affair, which lasted until her death-this, according to Lissa herself, who told this story in the final hours of her life.

For years, there had been speculation on campus about Lissa and President Roche. As Ronald Trowbridge, a vice president of the college, puts it, "A lot of us suspected that Lissa might have been in love with George." But the speculation had been confined to whispers and rumor.

President Roche himself was married to June Bernard Roche, the mother of his four children. But in August 1998, after 44 years of marriage, he filed for divorce. Mrs. Roche moved out of the president's home-known as Broadlawn-and into another house in town. Roche asked I.V. and Lissa to move into Broadlawn with him, ostensibly to look after his aged mother. Lissa was excited; I.V. resisted. But they went. At this point, according to I.V., he had no knowledge of an adulterous relationship between his father and his wife.