WEST LAFAYETTE – Purdue President Mitch Daniels told students, faculty, staff and alumni that the university would continue to push to find ways – sometimes controversial – to keep Purdue lean, affordable and ahead of trends he says are eating away at higher education.
In his traditional letter to Purdue University students, faculty, staff and alumni, sent each on the first day of the spring semester, Daniels pointed to a 1 percent loss in enrollments nationwide – punctuated by the suspension of operations of St. Joseph’s College in May 2017 just 40 miles north in Rensselaer.
“It’s not yet clear that this is the ‘tsunami’ that Stanford President John Hennessy predicted for traditional residential education a few years back,” Daniels wrote, referencing lines from his first letter to campus, delivered his first week as president in January 2013.
“But it might be, in which case our duty at your university is to identify higher ground and strive to gain safety by reaching it.,” Daniels wrote. “All the new projects and goals we set for ourselves these days have this basic purpose.”
Here are some of the highlights from Daniels’ letter.
Business reforms, job titles on campus: Daniels continued to rail on inefficiency he sees in Purdue’s operations – “dollars we waste in operations and administration are dollars that could have hired new professors, enhanced our compensation of the most productive employees, or simply been left in the pockets of our students and their families.”