Mitch Daniels' Quiet Revolution at Purdue

A decade of reform offers lessons for leaders

As we finish 2022, the Purdue University basketball team is 11-0 and ranked number one, with blowout wins over Gonzaga and Duke, which is a fitting send-off to its retiring president Mitch Daniels.

Over a decade when many universities were charging far more money for far less education, Daniels went back to basics. Teach hard sciences, engineering, business, and real humanities for a reasonable price. Beginning in March 2013, Daniels froze in-state tuition at $9,992 – and it hasn’t budged since.

Unsurprisingly, undergraduate enrollment is up 29% since 2015. Even as total enrollment approaches 51,000, selectivity and quality improve, with Purdue now ranked in the top 10 public universities and the top five in many engineering disciplines. This year the school hired 213 new professors, and it launched a major new suite of degrees in semiconductor design, materials, and manufacturing.

Growth at the main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, is exploding, with a host of new partnerships with private aerospace and semiconductor firms. But it doesn’t stop there. In 2017, Purdue bought Kaplan University, one of the largest for-profit online schools, and launched Purdue Global to serve working adults and a whole range of new remote education. Daniels also launched three polytechnic high schools – two in Indianapolis and one in South Bend.

Daniels didn’t merely allow free expression, he demonstrated it. Purdue was the first college to adopt the University of Chicago free speech principles back in 2014. But Daniels went beyond a paper statement. Among other initiatives, he invited and hosted dozens speakers of diverse interests and perspectives, from former ACLU president Nadine Strossen to biographer supreme Ron Chernow. I specifically remember attending lively discussions with reporter Barton Gellman on Edward Snowden; James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, on the dangers of artificial intelligence; and physicist Steve Koonin, author of Unsettled, on climate change and energy. In a rousing retirement gathering on December 6, Daniels interviewed a rollickingly funny George W. Bush – as a crowd of students (and probably some professors) protested outside.

Driving much of Purdue’s acceleration is the dean of engineering (and Daniels’ successor) Mung Chiang, who envisions a hard tech corridor from West Lafayette south to Indianapolis. Chiang is a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who left Tianjin, China, for Hong Kong at age 11. He recently spent a year as chief technology advisor at the U.S. State Department. Chiang is leveraging that experience to elevate Purdue’s contributions in tech policy. With former DocuSign CEO and Purdue alum Keith Krach, the school launched the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy (where I’m a visiting fellow) to study and shape an exploding list of international technology policy conflicts, both commercial and military.

One of Daniels’ finest moments was during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020, fear and uncertainly reigned. The world hunkered down, paralyzed. Businesses, schools, and every university had closed. Risk averse governors, CEOs, and public health leaders, acting on the precautionary principle, could not imagine a balanced approach to reopen society. Most assumed colleges wouldn't open in the fall of 2020.

Daniels, however, had been pouring over data from all over the world, which showed that Covid-19 was extraordinarily risk-stratified. Older people were at significant risk, but most middle-aged and young people (including college students, of course) were not. With some basic precautions, Daniels believed Purdue should plan to open in the fall. On May 6, he was the first university president to announce a fall opening in a campus email, which he then explained in one of his excellent Washington Post columns, concluding: “failure to take on the job of reopening would be not only anti-scientific but also an unacceptable breach of duty.” The decision encouraged many other college presidents – though not nearly enough – to follow suit. The reopening turned out, of course, to be a great success.

Daniels’ mix of cost-cutting and exuberant growth at Purdue is a template for imperative reforms across the higher ed landscape. But I think his example should be more widely studied and emulated. Over the last decade, too many CEOs and leaders of all types of organizations seem to have lost their way, submitting to every fashionable trend and taking their eyes off both today’s basics and tomorrow’s vision. In today’s world, Mitch Daniels’ radical common sense is revolutionary.