ILLUSTRATION BY ARINZE STANLEY 15officer. The benefits of the
improved balance sheet can
be seen across campus. Accord-
ing to the university’s fi gures,
Purdue’s full-time faculty at
all levels has increased, result-
ing in a student-teacher ratio
of 13 to 1, compared with the
Big Ten average of more than
15 to 1. Faculty pay is up too.
Th e salary of a full-time profes-
sor at Purdue has increased by
12 percent over the past fi ve
years, against a conference-
average increase of 7 percent.
Meanwhile, a visitor can’t
help but notice that large
stretches of Purdue’s campus
are construction sites: for new
research facilities; new residence
halls; a learning center the size
of a power plant, which is what
stood in its place until six years
ago. Applications for admission
are up 37 percent.
Tuition increases were once
a fact of life at Purdue. The
chair of the board of trust-
ees, Michael Berghoff , recalls
his first meeting as a trustee,
more than a decade ago, dur-
ing which the school’s annual
tuition hike came up: “Most
discussions were about how
much, very little about whether
it was necessary.”
A few years later, the
board offered Daniels the
presidency— a controver-
sial choice, Berghoff told me,
owing to Daniels’s lack of
academic experience beyond
his Princeton undergraduate
degree and law degree from
Georgetown. During his eight
years as governor, Daniels had
become famous for his penny-
pinching, as he had in his
previous job directing Presi-
dent George W. Bush’s bud-
get office. Bush nicknamed
him “Th e Blade.” On the day
when representatives of gov-
ernment agencies came to pick
up their copies of the annual
federal budget, Daniels played
the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want”
over the loudspeaker. As gover-
nor, in his eff ort to balance the
budget and pile up a surplus, he
devised a host of economizing
measures, including printing all
state documents in the narrow-
est font he could fi nd to save
on paper and ink. “No saving istoo small to disregard,” he said
then and says now.
So Berghoff wasn’t com-
pletely surprised when Dan-
iels, at his fi rst trustee meeting,
floated the idea of a tuition
freeze. “I thought it would be
a one-off , just to send a message
that we could break this long,
long run of increases,” Dan-
iels told me. “It turned out we
could do it a second year, thenthe third. Th en it became the
thing we’re known for.”
In Indianapolis, Daniels’s
administration was known for
selecting successful business-
people and placing them across
state government. He’s done
the same at Purdue. Michael
B. Cline, the former head of the
state’s transportation depart-
ment, is now running Purdue’sadministrative operations, and
Ruhl, the former state budget
director, is now the university’s
CFO and treasurer.
What they described to
me could be a new model—
a change in the culture—of
fi nance in higher education,
bringing market pressures to
bear on processes that had
never faced them before. Sav-
ings came, Daniels said, “froma couple of big things, and lots
of little things.” Low-hanging
fruit was plucked early: Th e
residence halls, which housed
young people who all owned
cellphones, still used landlines,
so they were quickly removed.
Payroll, which incredibly was
still using paper time sheets,
was digitized. Food service
was centralized.
Daniels also addressed
complaints from students
and faculty about the price of
textbooks. After six months
of weighing options, Purdue
struck a deal with Amazon to
provide textbooks, saving stu-
dents 30 percent on average
and more than $2 million in
the first few years, according
to the school. Th e arrangement
lapsed recently, but Amazon’s
fi rst brick-and-mortar store is
still on campus, and textbook
costs remain lower than before.
And so a virtuous circle
was established, according
to Purdue and its president.
The predictably flat tuition
attracted more students, creat-
ing a larger student body that
brought in increased revenue,
which allowed for the hiring of
more and higher-quality faculty,
whose research the university
could profi tably license to the
private sector, where alumni,
delighted at the celebrated
achievements of their alma
mater, helped increase dona-
tions by 136 percent over six
years, which in turn has helped
keep the freeze in place.
While Daniels’s approach
wins mostly praise on campus,
David Sanders, a biological-
sciences professor and frequent
critic of Daniels’s policies, told
me he hears quiet grumbles.
“The freeze is a marvelous
admissions marketing tool,”
Sanders said. But the surge in
enrollment “puts a lot of stresses
on the city and the campus.”