Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Hillsdale Stonewall 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...
...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...
...Maybe so, but only if Hillsdale continues to stonewall...
...The college says it does not know where he is, though presumably he is still receiving installments on his $2 million pension...
...We were not adequately protecting the citizens of the United States from these organized-crime figures...
...That was three weeks ago...
...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...
...It's so hard to get good help these days...
...But the DEA's annual evaluation of Mexico's efforts to combat drugs was regularly whitewashed by Constan-tine's superiors in the administration: "The policy makers from the National Security Council and the State Department started with the premise that they were going to certify Mexico," Constantine said...
...The schlemiel...
...Maybe all this will be fruitless...
...He left when the lights came up—the program said there would be no intermission—and missed the second half, which was apparently just as funny as the first...
...As Hillsdale decides whether to find out what really happened, a number of news organizations are already working on it...
...Crimson, the agenda consisted of "fundraising, academic planning, admissions, and computer technology...
...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...
...Meanwhile, Ron Trowbridge, Hills-dale's vice president for external affairs, is still collecting a salary...
...Yet when they are overseas, China's leaders too often show scant respect for values precious to other nations...
...And it was no ordinary student: Wang Dan, before he was exiled to America and enrolled at Harvard, may have been the most famous former student of Peking University, which he attended until being arrested for his leading role in the 1989 democracy uprising in China...
...Oops Correction of the week, from the Washington Post: "In yesterday's paper, reviewer Peter Carlson kvetched that Jackie Mason's performance at the Kennedy Center was too short...
...As for Harvard, it considers the incident a private matter between Wang and Peking University's leaders, even though Chen was an official guest and the incident took place on Harvard property...
...Though Trowbridge is no longer acting as the school's spokesman, there appear to be no plans to fire him...
...As of last week, he was still pretending that the relationship between Roche and his daughter-in-law was an unsolved mystery...
...Maybe that was parochial, but I felt like I was the only person there who felt like that...
...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...
...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...
...In an account in Time's Asia edition, Sin-ming Shaw noted that "Wang, hardly the firebrand portrayed in Chinese propaganda, meekly obliged...
...Your Facts Are Correct, But...
...But the most disturbing aspect of the meeting was the decision by the Chinese university administrators, notably the president of Peking University, to exclude a Harvard student from their meeting...
...My concern was that we had kids in this country dropping like flies...
...Scrapbook The Hillsdale Stonewall 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...
...As of Friday, Dec...
...The school has not hired a law firm, nor announced when it will...
...Before a special counsel is appointed," he explains, "the Justice Department makes sure there's a reason for a special counsel to be appointed...
...Their question was, 'How do we get around the facts presented by Tom Constantine?'" According to the Times, "other Clinton administration officials were resolute: American concerns about Mexico's corruption and drug-trafficking problems were secondary to trade and other economic interests...
...According to the police report, George Roche IV told Hillsdale provost Robert Blackstock about the affair on the day of the suicide...
...Despite being the nation's top drug-enforcement official for five years, Constantine told reporter Tim Golden, he never once was called on to brief the president, or even chat with him about drug policy...
...What's troubling is how willing the rest of the world is to exercise self-restraint, even at the cost of bending its core values...
...As for former president Roche, he is said to be "on his way West" somewhere...
...In a Chinese academic context, it is unthinkable for a student to refuse a 'request' from a superior, even a former one...
...Constantine was especially disturbed by what he saw as a concerted effort in the administration to ignore the drug trade in Mexico...
...According to the account in the Harvard...
...3, Hillsdale had made no obvious progress toward an investigation of any kind...
...I watched that situation for five and a half years, and every year it became worse," he told Golden...
...Maybe we just can't know," he told the AP...
...The Post regrets the error and Carlson regrets having missed the rest of the show...
...To paraphrase Alice Roosevelt Long-worth, if you don't have anything nice to say, e-mail it to Scrapbook@Weekly-standard.com...
...Black-stock is now acting president of Hills-dale...
...None of the 20-odd Harvard students and alumni of Peking University who were present protested...
...Everything of concern to college administrators, in short, with one conspicuous exception: academic freedom...
...Everyone would say, 'Your facts are correct, but there are bigger policy issues involved.' " Harvard's Peking Duck The last weekend in October, Harvard University played host to a group of university presidents—five from the United States and seven from China...
...E-MAIL THE SCRAPBOOK In response to popular demand, THE SCRAPBOOK is now reachable 24/7...
...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...
...The idea was, if you said those things publicly, if you release documents, you will just aggravate the situation,' [Constantine] said...
...Even at fair Harvard...
...Buried in the New York Times the day after Thanksgiving was an amazing interview with Thomas Con-stantine, head of the Clinton administration's Drug Enforcement Administration from March 1994 until his retirement last summer...
...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...
...Communist China unfailingly demands that others respect its internal values...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 13
