Purdue President Mitch Daniels is looking for ways to deal with large lecture classes, including this one in Lilly Hall, as the university looks to reopen for the fall 2020 semester under lingering conditions of a coronavirus pandemic. (Photo: J&C file photo)
WEST LAFAYETTE – Purdue President Mitch Daniels spent the past week explaining on national TV interviews why the West Lafayette campus was doing everything it could to reopen as normal – or something as close to normal as possible in the days of a coronavirus pandemic – for the fall 2020 semester.
His letter to the Purdue community, sent April 21 and eventually distributed wide to national audiences, positioned Daniels out front of a movement among schools aiming for full campuses and a return to in-person classrooms that had been ditched at spring break as the first confirmed case of coronavirus emerged in Indiana.
But how was that playing on his own campus, among Purdue faculty?
“It was quite bold, certainly,” Cheryl Cooky, chair of the faculty-led University Senate. “There just are so many questions still out there.”
Daniels’ argument: The coronavirus “poses close to zero lethal threat” to the bulk of 44,551 students typically on campus, as he wrote. And prospective students, surprising Purdue by voting with deposits for the fall semester at rates that Daniels contended could push out a record freshman enrollment, were clamoring to come to Purdue and get a campus experience. (The university declined to release actual enrollment projections, which wouldn’t be released until June, according to Tim Doty, a Purdue spokesman.)
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