IX. CONCLUSION
At the start of this essay, we pointed out that the story of Mark Nehls's expulsion was a synecdoche of the way Hillsdale is run and the sort of people who rise to top there. Plainly, they are not cream. In concluding this essay, it would be easy to marshal damnatory adjectives to describe the place and those who run it. A more profitable way of concluding is to compare Nehls's case with the college's attitude toward cheating and plagiarism, i.e. toward academic fraud.
I arrived on the Hillsdale campus in the fall of 1977. The previous spring had seen a major cheating scandal. A business professor had discovered that certain students had broken into his office, stolen his examination, and distributed copies to other students. His examination compromised, the professor required his students to take a new exam. In the fall of 1977, there was a student demand that something be done about student cheating. I volunteered to serve on the ad hoc faculty committee for devising a cheating policy. At the committee's several meetings, the dean then in office, who was not Heckenlively, mobilized every sophistry in his arsenal to prevent the adoption of a strict policy. His rationalizations went on and on about "a small, informal community," "the personal touch," "the need for faculty vigilance," and other irrelevancies. At the end a very lenient policy was adopted. Only after three offenses were the students liable to suspension, and the sentence was not mandatory.
Rodler Morris arrived on campus in the fall of 1978. A VMI graduate, he had little tolerance for cheaters and threw several of them out of his classes, failing them along the way. After the change of deans in 1983, the faculty again revisited the cheating policy. Both Dr. Morris and I strongly supported a strict honor code. Many of the faculty were horrified by the thought of severely punishing cheaters. One of them told Morris and me that he had been to a college with an honor code and the Jews--his words, not mine--used the code as a cover for cheating. At one faculty meeting, I spoke strongly in favor of an honor code. When I collected my mail the next day, I found an anonymous note in my mailbox directing me to two magazine articles. One of the articles turned out to be written by George Roche; the other was written by Ed Opitz. From their date and contents, it was clear that Roche had plagiarized Opitz. The plagiarism had occurred in the early seventies.
Plagiarism is one of the most serious offenses in an academic community. It is far more serious than anything even alleged against Nehls. Nehls was summarily expelled on trivial charges. Roche continued in office for twenty years after his egregious offense. It is impossible that the trustees and administrators who worked with him all those years did not know what sort of man he is. For twenty years, he shamelessly violated the norms of an academic community. He has abused his wife before strangers; disported himself in public with his daughter-in-law in a manner clearly presaging the scandal that ended his presidency; run devoted--and conservative--professors out of the place; used college money to purchase luxuries for himself while enforcing an austerity budget on the college; and plagiarized many of the speeches he has used in fund-raising activities. The list is endless.
Throughout all of this, the administrators and the dominant trustees of Hillsdale College have looked the other way, denied what was obvious when forced to look, made excuses when denial was not possible, and most despicable of all, blamed Roche's victims and their supporters. Ron Trowbridge's recently attempted smear of George IV and Lissa Roche is simply part of the standard drill for silencing Hillsdale's critics. The shovelful of blarney Blackstock laid on the students and faculty of the college at the assembly called to announce Roche's "retirement" is simply the other side of the coin of blackening the reputation of Hillsdale's accusers. "The Hillsdale leadership" never admits wrongdoing. It may be true, as Blackstock contended, that all men are sinners, but it is irrelevant. The issue is what Roche has done and whether his long-time associates are worthy of confidence as his successor at the helm of Hillsdale College.
John of Salisbury, I believe, wrote that the rule of a tyrant is god's punishment on a sinful people. Tyrannicide, therefore, is unlawful, unless it is the result of the repentance of the people. It is also useless, because a corrupt people will call forth a new tyrant. The bloodless "tyrannicide" orchestrated at Hillsdale in November 1999 by Roche's chief lieutenants and associates was not an act of repentance, but part of a cover-up of more than twenty years of misgovernment in which they had acquiesced or participated. So corrosive is the vitriol of Roche's shameless tyranny, an episode of which has been chronicled here, that the only defense against it is rebellion or flight. Those now in charge at Hillsdale, both trustees and administrators, have done neither. They are unworthy of the confidence of the college's nationwide supporters and donors. Any president they might select will also be unworthy of confidence.
Hillsdale needs lustration far more than it needs a new fund raiser as president. To purge it of the contamination of the Roche presidency, with its sources in Hilldale's a past and its still-living residue, Hillsdale requires denazification, the removal of Roche's lieutenants from positions of power, and de-Stalinization, the rehabilitation of those defamed and otherwise injured by the Roche regime, including Mark Nehls.
To select a president with the will and ability to carry out these duties, (1) the present presidential search committee, which is dominated by trustees, must be expanded to include conservative scholars of national reputation; (2) the dominant trustees, i.e. the chairman of the board and the members of the prudential and finance committees, must agree to resign as soon as the new president is appointed so that the board and its operations may be reformed to make it worthy of the college's national profile; (3) all incumbent administrators, deans, departmental chairmen, and "endowed professors" must tender their resignations to the new president once he is appointed; and (4) there must be an independent investigation of the misdeeds of the Roche administration and the publication of its results. The consequences of not taking such steps are clear to everyone who knows Hillsdale. The next presidency will simply be a continuation of the Roche regime by other means. The "leader" has died, but the party remains.