Monthly Conversation With Mitch Daniels

Despite a slowdown wrought by the Purdue Senate, school president Mitch Daniels says he still thinks next year’s graduating class could be the first one to need to pass a civics exam to receive a diploma.

On this edition of WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with Mitch Daniels, we ask him about that timeline, and the one deciding the future of the Purdue Armory, which many community members seem to want to save.

It came as little surprise when, earlier this month, Purdue President Mitch Daniels announced the school would extend its tuition freeze another year. The bigger financial news was the offering of a $500 bonus to employees making less than $75,000 a year.

At the beginning of each year, Purdue President Mitch Daniels pens an open letter to campus. Mostly, it talks about the high points of the past 12 months, but this year’s mentions an increasingly common topic: grit. It’s a qualitative measure of how ready a student is for school, life, and the challenges both pose.

A number of elite schools, including members of the Ivy League, have gotten rid of the need for an ACT or SAT test score to get in. But Purdue President Mitch Daniels says in a recent Washington Post editorial that the West Lafayette campus will not be following suit.

On WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with him, we ask President Daniels why not and have him respond to an editorial in the Purdue student newspaper that points out what its writers think may be hypocrisy on the president’s part regarding how he talks about grade point averages and their worth.

While he was governor, Mitch Daniels talked a lot about reversing Indiana’s worrying “brain drain” trend. A dismal number of Hoosiers complete college, and many who do venture outside the state to make their way in the world. But now Purdue’s President has a plan for “brain gain.” We ask him about it on this month’s edition of WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with Mitch Daniels.

Purdue University is a $2 billion a year industry, so from time to time in our monthly conversations with President Mitch Daniels, we have to talk about money.

This month, we ask whether the huge marketing budget for online enterprise Purdue Global – some estimate it’s close to $100 million – is potentially stepping on the marketing budgets of other Purdue programs.

Quite a number of journalists took issue recently when Purdue President Mitch Daniels attempted to argue in his regular column for the Washington Post that there was too much scrutiny of government allowed by public records laws and attempts at transparency.

On this month's conversation with him, he says he’s in favor of those types of laws in principle, but do his actions – including using processes that restrict transparency in the State Street and Purdue Global deals – match up with his rhetoric?

As we were preparing for this month’s conversation with Purdue President Mitch Daniels, a question came in from a loyal listener. Why, he asked, would Purdue even consider taking the name of Papa John’s Pizza founder John Schnatter off of the business center his $8 million gift to Purdue helped endow, even if Schnatter admits to repeating a racial slur on a conference call with his company’s executives? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to limiting free speech on campus?

In his yearly commencement address, Purdue President Mitch Daniels urged graduates to help stop the tribalism that’s plaguing the country. He also repeatedly mentioned how they could use the wealth they’ll generate to benefit society. But on this month’s conversation with him, he disagrees with the notion there’s a wealth gap in America, saying the statistics have been trumped up.

Shortly after we taped this month’s conversation with Purdue President Mitch Daniels, the school’s trustees announced he would stay on as president until at least 2021, with year-to-year contracts after his current deal ends.

As you’ll hear, the president didn’t let on during our discussion that the new contract was in the works, but he does say some interesting things about whether it’ll be him or his successor who ends the school’s tuition freeze.