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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 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. 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.

Earlier in the year, George Roche III had shocked Hillsdale by divorcing his wife of 44 years (who had cancer) and remarrying five months later. Lissa, according to George IV in an interview with National Review, was very disturbed by the presence of a new woman in her father-in-law's life. On Nov. 9, with the story breaking in the national media, Roche resigned after 28 years as Hillsdale's president.

"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.

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