A Family Secret Kept In the Ivory Tower?

George Roche III was a conservative hero. Then came the accusations

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Now police are in front of the Roches' homes on campus to keep away the curious. And Hillsdale students are struggling to reconcile their feelings for the school with their evolving judgments about Roche. Many Hillsdale students say they stopped looking up to Roche last year, when he and his wife of 44 years divorced in the midst of her battle with liver cancer. "The sooner we forget George Roche, the better off we'll be," says Stephanie Gast, 21, a senior from New Jersey. Just five months later, Roche married another woman. "He's made this school and the whole conservative movement laughable," said history senior Chris Ratliff, 20. The accusations have proved equally troubling to at least one of the conservatives who rushed to Hillsdale's defense. After Roche's resignation, former Secretary of Education William Bennett became head of its presidential search committee. But last week Bennett, who loudly denounced Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, stepped down, accusing the Hillsdale board of refusing to ferret out the truth. "First it was represented to me that the allegations were true. Then this week people said she may have been lying," he says. "The school can't just move on. A woman is dead." Ron Trowbridge, Hillsdale's vice president for external affairs, says, "We may never know the truth about the alleged affair." But Bennett insists, "They have an obligation to tell the truth." It's something St. Paul might have said.

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