The Atlantic - 04.2020

(Sean Pound) #1

16 APRIL 2020


Dispatches SKETCH


In his own department of bio-
logical sciences, despite the
campuswide improvement
in the student-teacher ratio,
“introductory-class sizes are
much larger,” requiring more
students to monitor lectures
remotely. And as resources get
reallocated, “there’s far more
competition between faculty
and between departments,” he
said. “The institution is less col-
legial.” (Most faculty members
contacted for this story declined
to comment.)


However widely these
misgivings are shared, no one
denies that the freeze and the
other innovations have set Pur-
due in a new direction, one
much more in keeping with
Daniels’s brand of populism.
“When I got here,” he
told me, “there was an effort
to become the ‘Stanford of
the Midwest,’ an elite institu-
tion along those lines,” which
would have meant shrinking
enrollment, cutting out kids at
the low end of the class to skew
the average toward the top.
Daniels speaks frequently
of Purdue’s mission as a land-
grant school, chartered under
Civil War–era legislation
that helped establish colleges
devoted to teaching agricul-
ture, engineering, and other
practical arts to the children
of prairie pioneers. “We were
put here to democratize higher
education,” he said.
The number of domes-
tic under graduate “under-
represented minorities”
at Purdue (URMs, in the
acronym- happy world of col-
lege admissions) grew from
2,483 in 2012 to 3,461 in



  1. Yet as the student body
    has also grown, the percent-
    age of URMs among under-
    graduates has remained about
    10 percent—while black and


Latino students alone account
for 36 percent of the U.S.
college-age population.
Daniels expresses frustration
at the relative lack of progress.
A few years ago, he got the
idea for the university to spon-
sor high schools in Indiana’s
largest cities. “We realized we
had to build our own pipe-
line if we wanted to recruit
minorities and poor kids,” he
said. “We couldn’t wait on the
public high schools to catch

up to us.” The original Purdue
Polytechnic High School, in
Indianapolis, will graduate its
first class, of 115 kids, in 2021.
“My dream is that we can slip a
Purdue scholarship in with each
diploma,” he said.
Even so, Daniels hasn’t
escaped the controversies that
attend diversity issues in higher
education. Last November,
Purdue’s student news paper
released audio of Daniels dis-
cussing faculty hiring with a
group of mostly minority stu-
dents. “At the end of this week,”
he told them, “I’ll be recruit-
ing one of the rarest creatures
in America—a leading, I mean
a really leading, African Ameri-
can scholar.”
Social media erupted. The
hashtag #IAmNOTACreature
took off on Twitter. D’Yan
Berry, the president of Purdue’s
Black Student Union, wrote
that she was “disappointed

but not at all surprised by his
reference ... to Black students
as creatures. It afflicts me that
this is how he speaks even when
‘boasting’ on students.”
After complaining that
his figure of speech had been
mis interpreted, Daniels took
two weeks to issue an apology.
“The word in question was ill
chosen and imprecise and, in
retrospect, too capable of being
misunderstood,” Daniels wrote.
“I accept accountability for the
poor judgment involved.”
Beyond the new Purdue-
run high schools, the other
great populist initiative of Dan-
iels’s tenure—and perhaps the
most controversial—is the pur-
chase, for $1, of the for-profit,
mostly online Kaplan Uni-
versity, from the Washington,
D.C., businessman Donald
Graham, in 2017. Overnight,
Purdue Global, as it’s now
called, brought approximately
30,000 online students, most of
them part-time, into Purdue’s
orbit and made the school one
of the largest online educators
in higher ed.
Daniels had long thought
that online education would
be crucial to expanding the
school’s mission of accessibil-
ity, but the idea of building
the infrastructure from scratch
was daunting. The purchase of
Kaplan U solved the problem.
Kaplan—best known for its
test-prep service— continues
to provide back-end and mar-
keting services for Purdue
Global in return for a percent-
age of revenue.
Daniels presented the
Kaplan deal to the Purdue
com munity as a fait accompli;
the trustees quickly approved
it. Reaction ranged from sur-
prise to puzzlement to deep
skepticism. Foremost was the
worry about commingling
the operations of a public

university with a for-profit
business. “It’s an attempt to
inject free-market principles
into public education,” says
Bill Mullen, an American-
studies professor. It’s “a way
of blurring the lines between
public and private. There’s less
of an appreciation for higher
education as a public good.”
But Daniels appears unfazed
by the criticism, and the larger
Purdue community seems
quite happy with the way the
institution has grown in size
and reputation. As it happens,
Graham visited the campus
last September, and we tagged
along as Daniels snaked his way
through the stadium parking
lot, choked with tailgaters fuss-
ing over grills the size of Ping-
Pong tables. Young and old
greeted him like a rock star—a
short, balding rock star. No one
called him by his title or his last
name. Mitch!
A grill master in a Purdue
apron, Purdue sweatshirt, and
Purdue cap saw me scribbling
and offered a comment. His
name was Chuck, he said. He
was from Green castle, and
his two kids had gone to Pur-
due. “This man here,” he said,
pointing at Daniels, who was
grinning for an endless line of
selfies, “saved me thousands
of dollars.”
By the time we had crossed
the parking lot, half an hour
later, Don Graham was beam-
ing from his trip through the
delighted scrum of parents and
students and alumni.
“These people love you,
Mitch!”
Daniels shrugged but was
clearly pleased.
“Well,” he said, “they know
it’s reciprocated.”

Andrew Ferguson is a staff
writer at The Atlantic.

AT PUR DUE,
NEARLY
60 PERCENT
OF UNDER-
GR ADS LEAVE
SCHOOL
WITHOUT
ANY DEBT.
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