In mid-November, after repeated attempts to ignore the scandal exploding on its own campus, Hillsdale College announced plans to hire a law firm "to guide" the school "in an investigation of reported incidents that have led to the retirement of former President George C. Roche, III."
These "reported incidents," you'll remember, include a 19-year affair between Roche and his daughter-in-law, Lissa, and her subsequent death by suicide. The announcement was designed to mollify critics who had accused the college of staging a particularly inept cover-up, and for a while it seemed to work. William Bennett, who had resigned in frustration from the school's presidential search committee, called Hillsdale's president to congratulate him on the move toward openness.
That was three weeks ago. As of Friday, Dec. 3, Hillsdale had made no obvious progress toward an investigation of any kind. The school has not hired a law firm, nor announced when it will. In fact, says a spokesman, Hillsdale's board of trustees has not even decided whether hiring a law firm will in the end be necessary. "Before a special counsel is appointed," he explains, "the Justice Department makes sure there's a reason for a special counsel to be appointed."
Meanwhile, Ron Trowbridge, Hillsdale's vice president for external affairs, is still collecting a salary. In the days following Roche's departure from Hillsdale, Trowbridge orchestrated an unusually vicious smear campaign to discredit both the deceased Lissa Roche and her grieving husband, George IV. Though Trowbridge is no longer acting as the school's spokesman, there appear to be no plans to fire him. As for former president Roche, he is said to be "on his way West" somewhere. The college says it does not know where he is, though presumably he is still receiving installments on his $ 2 million pension.
As Hillsdale decides whether to find out what really happened, a number of news organizations are already working on it. Last week, after filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the Associated Press received a copy of the extensive police report prepared after Lissa Roche killed herself. The report is filled with depressing and strange little details -- Lissa Roche's husband stopped for a hamburger at a fast food restaurant on the way back from the police station after reporting her suicide -- but it makes at least one thing very clear: Hillsdale administrators knew within hours of Lissa Roche's death (and likely even before) that she had been sleeping with the college president. According to the police report, George Roche IV told Hillsdale provost Robert Blackstock about the affair on the day of the suicide. Blackstock is now acting president of Hillsdale. As of last week, he was still pretending that the relationship between Roche and his daughter-in-law was an unsolved mystery.
"Maybe we just can't know," he told the AP. "Maybe all this will be fruitless."
Maybe so, but only if Hillsdale continues to stonewall.