Monthly Conversation With Mitch Daniels

On last month’s conversation with Purdue President Mitch Daniels, we chatted about the way the school is now tracking incidents involving electric scooters and motorized skateboards. Now, the school has convened a task force to determine whether new rules need to be made regarding their use – to keep both riders and drivers safer. We cover that on this edition of WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with Mitch Daniels, as well as how the school’s interest in bulking up its contracts with global defense companies aligns with a newly-announced directive by Governor Eric Holcomb to triple the number of federal dollars coming to Indiana for defense.

When, in late October, a Puerto Rican Purdue student was denied the purchase of cold medicine at a CVS store across the street from campus, international students and students of color hoped for more of a public response than they got from school administrators – and, undoubtedly, a different response than they got following a recent Purdue Student Government meeting . On this month’s conversation with Purdue President Mitch Daniels – which was taped before that meeting -- he comments on why he’s been relatively quiet on the subject. And he questions what the boundaries of campus are, with respect to where and when a comment must be made about a student being harmed.

In any organization, the line item that requires the most money is personnel – so at a place like Purdue, which has many thousands of employees, pay and benefits are a big topic of discussion. So it goes on this edition of WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with Mitch Daniels. We talk with him about the fact he’s getting about eight percent more money this year than he did last year, while the average employee got between two and three percent, and what kind of message that sends -- especially in a time where so much has been written about CEO pay in America and disparities between it and the pay of rank-and-file employees .

Two topics come up time and again on this edition of WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with Mitch Daniels: food and money. Faculty have opposed the opening of a Chick-Fil-A location on campus, in part because the company’s founders oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds. So is making the proprietor sign boilerplate language about inclusivity and non-discrimination enough to quiet those concerns? And what’s the difference between this and giving money back to the founder of Papa John’s Pizza after he made insensitive remarks?

Purdue President Mitch Daniels disagrees with the notion that he’s sometimes snarky in the regular column he writes for the Washington Post. He’d prefer to call it sarcasm or humor. But in a recent column about politics – a subject he regularly comments on, even if there’s little connection to his current role in higher education – his language jabs at both parties, but is notably more dismissive to Democratic ideals.

Sometimes news changes fast. When we taped our conversation with Purdue University President Mitch Daniels this month, the school had just announced it’ll change its IDs to make it easier for students to vote in Tippecanoe County. As you’ll hear, Daniels says Purdue isn’t in the elections business, and advises that the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles – which he oversaw as governor – will give free IDs to those who ask. That’s true, and it’s a fact the county election board seized upon a couple days after the interview was taped. But there’s a problem – getting that ID can mean students would have to give up their driver’s license from their home state.

When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced a few months ago he planned to move the department’s headquarters out of Washington, D.C., Purdue University President Mitch Daniels endorsed the idea every chance he got, and even started his school making some preparations in case Indiana was chosen as the new home. That honor went instead to Kansas City, Missouri – but was there more Indiana could have done to back up its bid?

Admitting as much when he used it in this year’s commencement address, Purdue President Mitch Daniels chose what he called a “distasteful, but descriptive word” – snowflake – to describe graduates at some of Purdue’s competitor institutions. President Daniels insists he’s received more positive comments about the remark than about almost any other speech he’s given, but the backlash was swift on social media, saying he shouldn’t have even invoked a term that’s often been co-opted by some conservatives to describe people with whom they don’t agree.

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.

A hallmark of Mitch Daniels’ time as Indiana governor was the expansion of testing of Hoosier students. The tests given to K-12 students have never been more high-stakes than they are now, and that’s rankled plenty of teachers and administrators. Somewhat less rancor has been generated by the Purdue President’s latest testing proposal – a civics exam students would have to pass before they’re awarded a diploma. On this edition of WBAA’s Monthly Conversation With Mitch Daniels, we address how that test might be administered and whether another exam will solve the problem of American governmental illiteracy. Also on this month’s show, a remembrance of Purdue alum and Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. Mitch Daniels says he once worked on a Senate campaign trying to defeat Bayh, but later came to know him as so many did – a giant of public life whose days seem more bygone all the time.

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. Our listeners want to know where the money is coming from, and why it’s not being added to the pool of merit raises, so people get more of a structural increase in their salary and benefits. And the longer the tuition freeze goes on and the school foregoes some income it could be getting, the more the cost of living rises – so is compensation actually going up or just keeping pace with inflation? Also on this month’s program, President Daniels responds to criticism from a former math professor that the school has issues with diversity. And a listener asks for more open access when prospective political candidates canvass in West Lafayette.

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. Also on this month’s show, could increasing the Department of Child Services budget help get more low-income and first-generation students to Purdue, or does such a move merely decrease the overall state funding pool and shrink the amount available for higher education?

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. Also on this month’s show, a blogger takes a look at how President Daniels views a current urban design buzzword: placemaking. We’ll ask whether the thought process that helped envision a State Street overhaul has evolved from one which got the former governor criticized for allowing construction of an Interstate-69 extension that some derisively called the “zebra highway.”

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. The University already had some online offerings and some that attracted non-traditional students, so is their biggest competition now another Purdue-branded product? Also, President Daniels understandably gets a little cross when we point out that very little of his so-called “at-risk” pay is actually at-risk, but for the first time this year, the school’s Trustees gave him a 100% rating on his assessment. So on this month’s program we suggest a name change that might better reflect the facts on the ground, and might be more palatable to Purdue employees who might actually be at risk if they lost any of their pay.

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?

Money is a common topic on WBAA’s Monthly Conversation with Mitch Daniels, and this month is no stranger to such talks. On this month's show, we address with Purdue’s President the decision – after a longer period of time than some schools took – to finally to part ways with the founder of Papa John’s over his use of a racial slur. We’ll talk about Daniels’ recent editorial claiming states like Connecticut that are in dire financial straits could look to Indiana for help. A couple newspaper editorials disagree with his assertions and say Connecticut – and other states – deserve more from Indiana than they get.

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? We ask that of President Daniels on this month’s show, but we also consider the flip-side: Can Purdue afford to be associated with a rich white businessman who’s now made two high-profile missteps in talking about the black community within a year? Also on this month’s program, did the president actually tell Bloomberg News he feels “homeless,” given the current state of the Republican Party as run by Donald Trump?

In the last few years, Purdue has spent significant time and resources on trying to improve its recognizability in the global defense industry. The school now has its own defense research institute, but it was recently informed it did not win a bid to run the nuclear weapons-researching Los Alamos National Laboratory. This month on WBAA’s conversation with Purdue President Mitch Daniels, we ask whether the bid was designed as a profile-raising exercise as much as anything else. Also on this month’s show, President Daniels writes a sardonic editorial in the Washington Post suggesting changes to the nation’s social safety net, which he says few people have the courage to fix, and he also pens another op-ed reflecting on the life of former President George H.W. Bush – but is he looking back at the only one-term president since 1980 through rose-colored glasses?

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.