Last week, Purdue University announced that president Mitch Daniels would step down in January after more than a decade at the helm. Daniels will leave behind a legacy of principled leadership and responsible management that’d be impressive in any era, but that’s downright remarkable at a time when too many peers have proven to be feckless spendthrifts motivated by fear of the mob.
Back in 2011, Daniels, a former Bush White House official and two-term Indiana governor known for his conservative horse sense and low-key manner, passed on a White House run and went on to accept the Purdue presidency.
Daniels did what college presidents are supposed to do but too few do today: He provided a model of ... [+]
In 2016, the columnist George Will wryly lamented, “Purdue has the president the nation needs.” Daniels’s tenure kept illustrating what Will had in mind.
In March 2013, just months after assuming the Purdue presidency, Daniels announced a two-year tuition freeze. It was the first time Purdue tuition didn’t go up since 1976. At a time when college tuition at big-name institutions keeps going up, while college presidents plead helpless, Daniels just kept on not raising tuition. In fact, Purdue has frozen tuition for a decade. Meanwhile, Daniels also cut room and board costs by five percent.
In a twist that has added resonance in a nation struggling with inflation for the first time in decades, it’s actually cheaper to attend Purdue now than when Daniels took office a decade ago. You’d think that fact alone would make Daniels the go-to speaker for every conference on higher education. The fact that this hasn’t happened says everything one needs to know about the crocodile tears that campus mandarins shed about the cost of college.
Indeed, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s story on Daniels’s announcement continued an ongoing effort to omit Daniels’s accomplishments by eliding the tuition freeze, reporting, “Daniels’s list of accomplishments includes some items that might not have been possible, or even desirable, for many other college leaders. At the top of that list is a tuition freeze that has remained in place for 11 years and will continue through the 2022-23 academic year.” Anybody who wants to know why Americans are losing faith in higher education need only to know that it’s a place where flat prices are jeered rather than cheered.
In an era when higher education has been overrun by ideological agendas, Daniels embraced free expression, with Purdue adopting a robust free speech policy modeled on the University of Chicago principles. Daniels also firmly but graciously stood up to the campus bullies. Pressed by campus ideologues to embrace their agenda when a handful of white supremacist posters appeared on campus, Daniels instead explained, “This is a transparent effort to bait people into overreacting, thereby giving a minuscule fringe group attention it does not deserve, and that we decline to do." Rather than permitting an attention-seeking fringe to hijack his campus, he promised to respond firmly to any actual provocation while offering a master class in a leader keeping his eye on the ball.
In fall 2020, while most college officials across the land kept campuses closed, Daniels bluntly insisted that Purdue had a duty to bring students back to campus. It’s safe to say that the past two years have made it pretty clear that Daniels had the better of the argument. His decision was popular with students and avoided layoffs, even as it subjected him to sniping from faculty who wanted campus shuttered (but their paychecks to keep coming).
Daniels did what college presidents are supposed to do but too few do today: He provided a model of statesmanship, wisdom, and moral authority for his campus and his nation. In his occasional Washington Post columns, he offered principled, nuanced discussions of timely issues. He made the principled case for why college athletes shouldn’t be paid, highlighted the importance of protecting Ukrainians from Russian aggression, and explained the moral obligation of governments to be responsible stewards of public funds.
Throughout his tenure, Daniels challenged graduates to model timeless values like personal responsibility, individual excellence, and simple kindness. These are virtues too rarely articulated in higher education today. Just recently, in his commencement address, Daniels offered his last graduating class some sage advice that could go far to heal a divided nation.
His words had particular import for colleges reeling under the onslaught of identity politics. Daniels noted, “There will be people who want to take away your ‘you.’ There always have been . . . [those who] assert that whatever you are, your choices have little to do with it. What matters is not what you think or do, they claim, but what group they have assigned you to.”
But there’s a better way forward, Daniels said: “A friend told me of a commencement he attended where the speaker, to inject a little levity, advised the graduates, ‘In life, it’s not who you know that counts. It’s whom.’ (I assume at least the English majors in the crowd get it.) A funny line, but bad advice. It is who that counts. Not who you know, but who you are.”
Daniels’s entire tenure was a testament to the power of the choices we make. It’s what made him the nation’s best college president.
