When we called George Roche's office last year before the scandal broke (see below), they stated that his position is that there is no such thing as any religion but his version of Christianity, that all other religions weren't "Real" religions."  What is a real religion, Mr. Roche?  What you have been practicing?  Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be known."  This is a summary of information collected from several sources including Washington Post, Salon Magazine, Atlanta Journal Constitution and others about George Roche III.

(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when looking at allegations about anyone.     Don't believe us, think for yourself and investigate for yourself!  And remember, the Religious Freedom Coalition does not represent any political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor are we involving ourselves in the political process. 

While championing family values, former Hillsdale President George Roche III was sleeping with his daughter-in-law!

It used to be that Hillsdale College thought its curriculum built character and a respect for Christian "Family Values".   Maybe it still does, no thanks to the disgraced George Roche III, who in forcibly retiring has turned his institution into a school for scandal.  Roche, so far as anyone knows, wasn't a graduate of the school. And from the looks of it, he was too busy on other fronts to even audit a single class. He also had a Dean Smith complex, as seen in his having the college's athletic facility named after himself. If there's any lesson here it's that a creepy man who raises hundreds of millions of dollars sooner or later starts to see himself as the second coming of Donald Trump. The always saintly Al Hunt of CNN's Capital Gang  named Roche his outrage of the week, calling "this long-time hero of the political right" an "all star" hypocrite who "makes Newt Gingrich look good."

For nearly the past three decades Mr. Roche has made tiny Hillsdale College the darling of the American conservative movement by championing morality, Judeo-Christian principles, and right-wing philosophy. During much of that time Hillsdale forsook all claims to federal financial aid both for itself and for its students.  Roche, himself, brought in more than $324 million in private contributions. To a large extent Mr. Roche was Hillsdale College. According to reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education and National Review Online, he ruled the place with an iron hand.

The reason for Mr. Roche's downfall lies in a messy conflict between his publicly stated positions on morality and his personal behavior.  In November 1999, another right-wing wolf cloaked in family values sheepskin was unzipped to the American public. George Roche III resigned as president of conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan after accusations of a quasi-incestuous relationship with his daughter-in-law, Lissa. Although no public acknowledgment has been given, it was widely rumored on the campus that President Roche had conducted a 19-year-long illicit affair with his daughter-in-law Lissa Jackson Roche. Ms. Roche was a college employee who had major responsibility for the publication of its well known journal of conservative thought, Imprimis. Lissa  Roche was married to President Roche's son George Roche IV (on campus Roche IV is known simply as I-V), who is a history professor on the campus.

Apparently not content with his 19-year dalliance with his daughter-in-law, President Roche decided to divorce his wife of 44 years so that he could marry one Mary Hagan.   According to a story by John J. Miller in National Review Online, the impending union between Hagan and President Roche caused Lissa Roche severe distress - to the point where she left I-V for a day or two before the wedding. The relationship between President Roche and his new wife seems to have gotten off to a rocky start.  On October 15, 1999 he informed Lissa and I-V that he was going to dump Hagan.  Lissa was ecstatic at this news.

The next day President Roche, a lifelong diabetic, suffered an insulin reaction. At the hospital I-V learned that his father had reconciled with his new wife. When informed of this, Lissa is reported to have said "Oh, shit, oh, no."

On the 17th of October Lissa was in a highly emotional state, and had threatened suicide in a phone call to President Roche who was still in the hospital.  On the morning of Oct. 17, 42-year-old Lissa and her husband, George Roche IV, visited the 64-year-old Roche at the hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for diabetes.  With her husband and father-in-law and the new Mrs. Roche as witnesses, Lissa claimed that she and the elder Roche had been off-and-on lovers for 19 of the 21 years she and her husband had been married.  According to the National Review Online story, I-V is quoted as saying President Roche "didn't say a word..." at that time, although later he denied Lissa's claim while at the same time refusing I-V's request to leave Hillsdale so that he and Lissa could start over.   Lissa returned to her campus house after the confession and armed herself with a .38-caliber handgun. She walked out of her backyard and through the college's arboretum to a stone gazebo, a secluded location where students once went to relax, guzzle a few beers or liaise with members of the opposite sex. There, Lissa ended her life.

Needless to say, these events shook the Hillsdale College campus to its very core.   Following meetings between the college board of trustees and a very upset I-V, President Roche was forced into retirement on November 10th.

"We have proved that integrity, values and courage can still triumph in a corrupt world," he wrote in his letter of resignation. "Hillsdale College is a monument to those beliefs." His statement made no reference to the firestorm raging at Hillsdale.

Roche is rumored to have bailed out with a golden parachute. The college refuses to confirm the amount of his retirement package, but a member of the Roche family puts the figure at $3 million.

The fallout from Roche's spectacular blowup has stunned the conservative movement. During Roche's tenure from 1971 to 1999, Hillsdale College -- in the words of William F. Buckley Jr. -- "became the most prominent conservative college in the country." Roche was a movement hero, adored by his followers for savaging a system of higher education hopelessly infested by government money and political correctness. He was propelled to right-wing stardom after the Supreme Court's 1984 Grove City decision, which ruled that colleges enrolling students who used Pell grants, veterans' benefits and other forms of government aid were "recipient institutions." Grove City forced all recipient institutions to
comply with Title IX provisions, which prohibited sex discrimination.

Grove City would have allowed the government to monitor the race, age, sex and ethnic origins of Hillsdale's employees and students, which was ideologically unacceptable to Roche and Hillsdale's conservative backers. To keep the government off its back, Hillsdale announced it would no longer admit students receiving government aid, thereby eliminating itself as a recipient institution.

Roche figured that Hillsdale's refusal to accept students with government funding would attract big money, enough to replace the government's cash with private aid. By all accounts, Roche excelled at coaxing conservative fat cats to open their wallets for Hillsdale. A former senior-level employee of Hillsdale calls him "one of the great fund-raisers in the history of political ideologies." Roche had hauled in nearly $325 million by the time he resigned -- enough to increase Hillsdale's endowment from $4 million to $184 million, build modern facilities and provide ample student aid to any of Hillsdale's 1,200 students who needed it. If Roche seldom made rounds on campus, it was understood: He was out raising money to beat back the liberal devils lurking outside Hillsdale's gates.

Conservatives were delighted with their school, which they referred to as the "bastion of freedom," the "citadel of conservatism," the "city upon a hill." They praised its traditional Great Books curriculum. And, as the student body became more hardcore Christian right, some may even have sung hallelujahs to God for sending George Roche III to Hillsdale College.

This attitude has understandably softened a bit since the Lissa affair went down. While Roche says he's innocent, it would take hard work to fill a country church with believers. Hillsdale supporters may now deem George Roche a lecherous beast cloaked as a family-values conservative, casting him with the lot of Dick Morris and Henry Hyde. Reflecting on the news coming from Hillsdale, Chicago Tribune columnist John McCarron wrote, "It was enough to make a secular humanist believe in divine retribution."

Roche had syndicated several ethics oriented columns just before the story broke.  It makes for somewhat poignant reading. For example, one of his columns under the general heading "Views From a Heartland Campus" is subheaded: "The Importance of Moral Standards."

"In an age increasingly removed from any fixed standards or individual codes of conduct, removed,  indeed, from the individual capacity to choose, we must take a hard look at the source from which ethical systems derive their author-ity," writes Roche, who certainly comes on as a windbag, even if his hypocrisy is only alleged.

In what could be read as a dig at President Clinton, Roche states that we live in an age when men often no longer acknowledge any spiritual authority. He thinks that the separation of church and state doesn't mean the exclusion of religious values from the educational system.

"A fixed moral code in no way limits individual freedom of choice," Roche argues. "People without moral codes are free from moral problems in exactly the same way that people who have never learned to count are free from mathematical problems."

There's more of these "heartland views" from the pious Dr. Roche. It's all neatly word-processed and camera-ready to go in the newspaper. But we can't get past the idea of his poor, dead daughter-in-law maybe helping him prepare the material and reading it with him as they labor to get his message out to the great unwashed.

For many who have dealt with Roche, the Lissa affair is simply the crowning hypocrisy of his reign. "This man," says one Hillsdale professor, "is a phony and a fraud." The Roche family member explains, "He's not really the type of person that everybody thinks he is. He's kind of like a Jekyll and Hyde." Roche had a reputation for possessing a free-range phallus rumored to have visited students and college employees. The senior-level employee who marveled at Roche's fund-raising skills claims to have fled Hillsdale when he suspected Roche was putting the moves on his wife. Roche was considered downright ruthless by those unfortunate enough to cross him.

"What a study in the use of almighty power," says another Hillsdale professor. "The meanness and the spite of Roche are beyond any human being I've seen." In a 1996 interview with the Detroit Free Press, Hillsdale spokesman Ronald Trowbridge told the paper that Hillsdale's trustees "think George walks on water." In other words, Roche could do whatever the hell he wanted -- like allegedly screw his son's wife for 19 years -- as long as it didn't embarrass the school.

The result of Roche's attitude was students and professors who claim they were unjustly kicked out of Hillsdale. The most prominent example is Mark Nehls. According to Hillsdale officials, Nehls got the boot in 1991 for improperly signing a business contract while he served as treasurer of a student organization.  Over the years, the school's explanation for expelling Nehls has evolved. Trowbridge told the Detroit Free Press that Nehls was expelled for misrepresenting his off-campus newspaper, the Hillsdale Spectator, as an official school publication. The school has always denied that it expelled Nehls because of the Spectator, which ran editorials illustrating how Hillsdale was a land of hypocrisy. But the school's denials, which have evoked laughter and mutterings of "bullshit," have never carried much weight among those at Hillsdale. According to Nehls, "Everyone with enough awareness to realize the United States was carpet-bombing Iraq knew I was expelled for publishing the Hillsdale Spectator."

Students at Hillsdale can't protest or disseminate literature without administrative approval. And the student newspaper is censored by the administration. Dean Carol Ann Barker was the designated censor while I worked for the Collegian, Hillsdale's student newspaper. She killed a piece that argued Hillsdale needed a faculty senate. Editors were also warned not to print the names of professors who had "disappeared," meaning their contracts were terminated.

"It's a legal matter," Barker told Lingua Franca in a 1996 interview about her censoring duties. Barker implied that such censorship was necessary to avoid potentially libelous stories and that students were ignorant of liability law.

"The stated reason is often lawsuits," said David Bobb, who edited the Collegian in 1995. "The unstated reason is embarrassment to the institution." Indeed, Hillsdale's imitation of Pravda was enough to make some conservatives wonder if a state university swarming with the most rabid breeds of feminists, multiculturalists and gays could be any worse.

Hypocritical, holier-than-thou platitudes are de rigueur for Roche, who pocketed one of the nation's highest salaries for a college president. In 1999, Forbes magazine reported that Roche's total 1997-98 compensation package came to $524,000. Yet in his 1994 book "The Fall of the Ivory Tower," Roche points to generous presidential salaries as an example of corruption in higher education. "In 1990-91, at least three universities paid their presidents more than $400,000 a year in salary and benefits," complains Roche, "and twelve paid more than $300,000."

Critics also claim Roche mythologized some aspects of Hillsdale's past in order to attract donors. The most serious allegation -- that Roche lied about Hillsdale taking direct government funding -- was made by Robert G. Anderson, a professor at Hillsdale during the first two years of Roche's presidency. Roche "began a publicity crusade, both in written advertisements and public speaking, declaring that the college had never accepted 'one cent of government funds in its entire history,'" writes Anderson in "George and Me," an essay published at LewRockwell.com. Roche "knew, and he knew we knew, that this was a lie."

Hillsdale spokesman Frank Maisano admits the school participated in a work-study program from 1969 to 1977. Hillsdale received only a "small amount of dollars, mostly for low-income families," stresses Maisano. Even so, Hillsdale's participation in the program overlaps a period in which Roche proclaimed to the world that Hillsdale was free of the government's tainted money.

As a committee made up of trustees, William F. Buckley and others, seeks a new president, Hillsdale's conservative critics warn that the scandal isn't over yet. "Central Hall [the college's administration building] must be reformed before any real change will take place at Hillsdale," says Marc Kilmer, a 1999 Hillsdale graduate. "The problems were much deeper than George Roche." Indeed, tyrants like Roche typically surround themselves with sycophants, henchmen, cowards and other lowlifes. Until Roche's boys are flushed out of Hillsdale College, the school will continue to be a boil on the conservative movement.

The Religious Freedom Coalition finds the goings on at Hillsdale College more than a bit strange. It's hard to imagine that neither Lissa's husband, nor anyone on the college board of trustees had a clue that President Roche and his son's wife were carrying on an affair for 19 years. Generally, we feel that private relationships between consenting adults should remain private. However, if one plays that game there should be a few rules. First, it is extremely bad form to have such a relationship with a subordinate employee. Colleges and universities less independent than Hillsdale have rules against this sort of hanky-panky.  Second, it is even worse form to be playing around with your son's wife, particularly if your son is also your subordinate. The family that plays together doesn't necessarily stay
together. One doesn't need to be a $188,000 a year college president to figure that one out.

If there is any good to come from this most sordid of affairs, it is that the students at   Hillsdale probably have learned a lesson in Christian Pseudo-Ethics that they will not soon forget.  Undoubtedly, it's going to take some time for the campus to recover its equilibrium.  Those Judeo-Christian principles are a bit battered right at the moment.

CLICK HERE TO TO GEORGE ROCHE Part II

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