Last week, as Purdue faculty members of the University Senate settled in for its monthly meeting, President Mitch Daniels found himself defending the “calculated risks” theme of the annual letter he’d sent to the university community several weeks earlier.
That drumbeat’s nothing new for Daniels. His annual letters, including the one he issued the day he arrived on campus in January 2013, have been laced with references to what he labeled “the skeptical trends of recent years” when it comes to higher education. One of his go-to favorites from annual letters past: The pajama test – as in, can Purdue provide enough value to a new generation to fend off the promise of the kind of online school a student could attend after rolling from bed to a laptop on the couch?
The 2017 version included a series of stats for slippage in higher education’s standing in public opinion and his belief that “denial … would be both irresponsible and dangerous.” Among his examples: More Americans doubt that a higher education is a good investment; more say a college education is no longer necessary to someone’s success; that rising college costs were driving potential students away; and predictions that “residential colleges would become ‘the debutante cotillion of the 21st century,’ a quaint artifact of enduring attraction only to a cloistered, almost irrelevant few.”
David Sanders, University Senate chairman, challenged whether Daniels “repeatedly misread the data” to fuel assumptions and drive questionable changes at the West Lafayette campus. Sanders’ take: “Matters are not as dire as one might have been led to believe.”
Daniels allowed that people could differ – and he and the faculty have differed in ways big and small.
“I would just be very, very careful,” Daniels told faculty there in Pfendler Hall, “not to engage in denial, not to blind ourselves to risks. Saint Joseph’s College, right up the road from here, we all know now is in danger of closing. … There are problems. And there are dangers. I’m just convinced that Purdue can stand far apart from those … if we make the right decisions.”
That exchange, out in the open, was rattling around as the administration and trustees at Saint Joseph’s College, a 125-year-old, 904-student liberal arts school 40 miles north in Rensselaer, mulled what to do about money shortfalls that totaled $100 million, including a need for $20 million committed by June 1.
“Dire” was the word Saint.Joseph’s President Robert Pastoor used when the college’s problems, kept quiet until late January, went out along with desperate fundraising missives.