Purdue University’s Board of Trustees has just voted unanimously to install Governor Mitch Daniels as the new president. As a doctoral student at the university, there’s a lot to say about this, and I intend to, but for now it’s enough to point out that while in office Governor Daniels pushed to cut funding to Indiana’s public universities again and again. I simply cannot fathom extending an invitation to lead an organization to a man who had worked tirelessly to defund that organization; it simply would not be countenanced in other contexts. In addition, Governor Daniels’s administration has repeatedly attacked public education and public teachers, pushing for privatization schemes like private school vouchers and ascribing broad educational failures to Indiana’s schoolteachers, without providing responsible evidence. The man is an enemy of public education in Indiana who has now been selected to run one of our public universities. Internal opposition to that selection is the purest, more rational self-interest regardless of the political views of the individuals so opposed. Our media, of course, will regard any protest as a sign of liberal bias, no matter what kinds of complaints are voiced against Daniels.
This is to say nothing of the extreme regression Daniels represents in terms of credentials. The woman he is replacing, Dr. France A. Cordova, holds a PhD in physics from CalTech, was an administrator at Los Alamos National Laboratory, chaired the department of physics at a major research university, was the youngest person ever to hold the office of Chief Scientist at NASA, sits on the National Science Board, was given the Distinguished Service Medal by NASA, and chairs the Smithsonian Board of Regents. Mitch Daniels is a career politician with essentially no educational administrative experience to speak of. Clearly, the Board of Trustees has failed to select a candidate with the kind of qualifications our previous president holds.
Finally, there’s the simple fact that members of a community and organization have a legitimate desire for leadership that reflects their values. No one would question protest of new leadership by firefighters, police officers, or any other constituency if there was a clear divide between the values of the new leadership and those of that constituency. But because our media diagnoses any expression of liberal values or liberal self-interest as inherently a matter of bias, they will inevitably ascribe such bias to protest of Daniels. Just watch.
Today, I’ve heard repeated stories of intimidation by security at the Board of Trustees meeting, including signs that forbid protests that were not in keeping with “accepted social behavior” and the like. I’m also hearing that students who took pictures of that signage and of security were followed and searched by security, unlike other attendees. Many described the meeting as unlike any event they had ever attended at Purdue in terms of the amount and aggression of security. I’m still trying to get all the facts, but as soon as I know enough and have pictures to share, I will report back to you guys.
Arclite
Wow, and I thought we had problems with our presidents out here at the University of Hawaii. But ours is small potatoes to having Mitch Daniels as president.
MBL
Mitch Daniels appointed most of Purdue’s trustees, if I remember correctly.
Nope. Nothing suspicious here. Move on, folks.
I’ve never been happier to have gone to IU.
LGRooney
Yes, your bias is clearly showing. Cordova isn’t even from Indiana and her name ends in a vowel. Anyone get a look at her birth certificate? Sheesh, be realistic.
Next thing, we’ll hear about some right-wing welfare network. Paranoia, anyone?
eric
Here we go with the liberal war on privileged, unqualified, white men. Nothing that gets said and done about public education surprises me anymore.
srv
Purdue should see if North Korea wants a satellite campus.
Mr. Longform
As he did with another of Indiana’s scant worthwhile assets, the toll road, Mitch will lease Purdue to a foreign corporation for 75 years and gain an immediate windfall which he will fritter away in a few months and leave the state with no control over one of its worthwhile institutions. This may be a joke, but after 8 years of Mitch, I’m scaring myself.
Linda Featheringill
Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such an aggressive security clamp down on a campus just because they hired a new president.
Are the students at Purdue exceptionally vicious or is Daniels just remarkably vulnerable? To what?
MBL
Anyone over about four feet tall is a terrible danger to Daniels. He gets stepped on a lot.
Canadian Shield
Ovem lupo commitere
Lolis
It is depressing how nobody is willing to fight for public education. Talk about destroying your organization from within. I sure hope Mitch handles it as well as he did as Bush’s budget.
Linda Featheringill
@MBL:
LOL! Now I understand. Thanks for the explanation.
:-)
Hunter Gathers
On the bright side, perhaps The Napoleon of Indiana can teach a course on how to deal pot and not go to jail when caught.
jl
@LGRooney: Also too, a woman, or anything else but a Very Serious White Man who specializes in getting at other peoples money and making sure it gets to the ‘right’ places. Anything she has done needs to be reissued and replaced to expunge the stain.
Also too, there is the ‘enterprization’ of research and education. Scientists and mathy types are inefficient and unfocused, and need managerial types to provide discipline and goals to ensure that there is good demonstrable ROI on the research and teaching that comes in on schedule dammit, and fits in with the marketing plan.
Seriously. I heard a new enterprise research management type say that at a meeting. After he had demonstrated in detail he did not know very much about, like, what he was talking about, either in the new subject area he was managing or in his supposed field of expertise.
Daniels will fit right in to that culture. Heck, he IS that culture.
RSR
between this & UVA, it looks like corporatizing *higher* education is next on the agenda
btom89
Well, Purdue could be doing this strategically, to immunize themselves against future funding decreases and have a built-in lobbyist on their behalf to make sure their education funds stay untouched or go up, but then again, I’m just a cynic.
If Mitch Daniels couldn’t even do that, he would go down as a grossly incompetent president who couldn’t even keep the school’s funds in good standing.
Is Daniels term-limited? How come he’s taking the jump to an university as opposed to private industry? I don’t get it. Does no one else want him? Does the elitists in their ivory towers want to adopt him and absorb him into their private sanctuary? But then I’d answer the question when I remember that he was the budget director during GW Bush’s administration and know no corporation would want him near their fiscal affairs.
Zifnab
@MBL:
It runs the same way down in Texas, and throughout much of the rest of the country. Governors select university school boards. University school boards select the Governor or his allies as Presidents / CEOs / whatever. Large amounts of university funding gets funneled into the back pocket of political allies. Those political allies fund the next Governor’s race. The circle of life is complete.
Expect Purdue to become a new home for wingnut welfare “intellectuals” in the next few years.
dr. bloor
@Mr. Longform: Anyone up for the Dupont Department of Physics or the Archer-Daniels Midland Department of Agriculture? After a hard morning’s work at curricula designed by
sales representativesfield experts from Dow, you can go get some exercise at the Nike Sports Complex followed by a bite to eat at the Coca-Cola cafeteria.Yutsano
@dr. bloor:
This already exists.
ET
Sounds like quid pro quo. He got them their jobs now they will get him his next one.
Lex
As someone in a thread below observed, Niemoller lives. First they came for the commies, then the labor unions, and now they’re coming for the, you know, experts.
Peter VE
The remark attributed to Lenin about the capitalists willingness to sell him the rope with which Lenin would hang them comes to mind.
beltane
@MBL: Sounds like the Vatican where the pope appoints the cardinals and the cardinals elect the pope. Not that this leads to corruption or anything like that…
The Moar You Know
Well, the plan is pretty obvious, no? It won’t be a public university for long!
Corey
I’m going to gently suggest that perhaps the hiring has more to do with Daniels’ (presumed) ability to raise funds and protect the university from further cutbacks, and less about his ability to actually run a university (which, presumably, is capably handled at lower levels).
Raven
@RSR: On the agenda? Do you live under a rock?
Laertes
@dr. bloor:
Or the Eli Lilly dept. of Biology? This is Purdue we’re talking about here. It’s a bible-belt Ag-and-Engineering school. It’s more Texas A&M than UW Madison.
Thunderbird
@MBL: 8 out of the 10. The other two appointed by the alumni association, IIRC.
As a Purdue alumnus, this makes me sad.
MBL
@Thunderbird: This may mark the first time in my life where something bad has happened to Purdue and my reaction has been to feel bad. :-)
alhutch
@Yutsano: That wasn’t very nice. Are you a Husky?
Dork
Having such a polarizing (and thus dispised by many) figure will almost certainly affect (read: reduce) alumni donations, I would think.
Raven
We have the fucking Zell Miller Student Learning Center!
David in NY
Not a doctoral student in English, I hope.
Laertes
The situation sounds pretty grim, and he’s certainly a letdown after that last President.
Maybe things won’t turn out to be quite as bad as one would reasonably expect, though. As the saying goes, “where you stand depends on where you sit.” I’d expect Governor Daniels to go after public education with a sharpened axe, but University President Daniels would probably see things a lot differently.
I’m not aware of any reason to imagine that Daniels has the kind of fundamental hostility to public higher education that, say, Bolton had to the UN.
Yutsano
@alhutch:
How do I put this delicately? HELL TO THE FUCKING NO!!
(allez le Cougs!)
Ben Cisco
@btom89: One goes to the wingnut welfare sources one has, not the wingnut welfare sources one wishes one had.
Seriously though, damn that sucks. Makes it pretty obvious how important education is to The Board of (Not-So) Trustees. Talk about a bad top-down example to set.
Laertes
@Dork:
The Purdue I knew (in the 80s) was wall-to-wall wingnuts. They (We?) went nuts when Reagan visited. I think you’ve got the wrong idea if you think a bunch of Engineers and MBAs are going to be turned off because some anodyne Republican is now the university president.
John M
As an IU grad, I’m tempted to say that I think Purdue and a president with a raging case of Short Man’s Syndrome are a perfect match, or to suggest that Mitch’s embarrassingly obvious comb-over reminded the trustees of former Purdue basketball coach Gene Keady. Really, though, setting aside the athletic rivalry, I think Purdue is a fine university and an asset to the state, and I hope Mitch doesn’t screw it up. It seems to me that Purdue’s presidents generally have tended to have both experience in academia and a strong background in the technical and/or scientific disciplines that are Purdue’s bread and butter. Mitch has neither.
burnspbesq
By the criteria you are applying to Mitch Daniels, Terry Sanford was unqualified to be president of Duke. I doubt you will find any set of stakeholders who consider his tenure to be anything other than an unqualified success.
Shorter me: chill. Sometimes people grow into jobs.
John M
@David in NY: Nah, it’s Purdue. Freddie was typing this post with one hand while he disemboweled a hog with the other hand.
Tokyokie
David Boren, who left the Senate to become the president of the University of Oklahoma nearly 18 years ago, didn’t have a Ph.D., either, but at least he’d been a Rhodes Scholar and earned a triple-major master’s degree from Oxford before returning to OU to get his J.D. And although he, too, had been governor and appointed regents, he’d been out of that office for more than 15 years when he took over at OU, so any sitting regents he may have appointed would have had to have been reappointed by a successor.
gene108
Funny thing about NASA. I was listening to the replay of This Week on Bloomberg radio, as I was driving up to visit my brother Sunday afternoon.
George Will had a comment that paraphrased the Romney campaign that if government was in charge of developing cell phones they’d still be as big as they were in 1986 or bigger and no innovation would’ve happened.
I thought, “boy I wish I was a guest on that show, because you know what else the government made all by itself THAT WAS HUGE? THE SATURN V rocket that got man to land on the moon.”
The Saturn V is like the biggest rocket evah. If government hadn’t crowded out private business, in the 1950’s, I bet we’d have zipped to the moon in a spaceship no bigger than the cars of that era!
Anyway, no one on the panel really was able to make the connection that government agencies, like NASA, can make some cutting edge technology.
***************************************
On Daniels getting the job at Purdue, it could be a blessing in disguise for Indiana Democrats.
Gov. Easley’s wife got an administrative job at NCSU, while he was governor and was paid something like $170,000 to organize guest speakers. She had some qualifications for the job, but the pay was way out of line.
It’s one of the corruption problems that dogged the Easley administration towards the end of its tenure and the perception of a corrupt good old boys network has really hurt the snot out of the NC Democratic Party.
Maybe this could boomerang on state Republicans in the same way.
jl
@gene108:
” George Will had a comment that paraphrased the Romney campaign that if government was in charge of developing cell phones they’d still be as big as they were in 1986 or bigger and no innovation would’ve happened. ”
What technical innovation are we seeing in the private
space shuttlerocket biz, that NASA is too old fashioned and rigid to do?A little snark there, but if anyone knows, please leave a comment.
What I see,from what I know, is a big lot of hoo haw over some private companies who are have gotten up the capital, expertise, and innovative management style to…. regress to older rocket technology. Am I wrong?
Edit: and Will seems to forget that a cell phone needs a network to do much good, The US was third behind the commie and over regulated Japan and Nordic countries to get networks, I think. Izzat right. So, US not a leader there.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@gene108:
Back when Pucker Carlson had his MSNBC show, he once made some offhand quip about “I don’t want NASA making rockets, I want GM and Ford to make rockets.” (This was a couple of years before the GM bailout).
Not only facile and ignorant (protip for the layman: cars != rockets), but also funny coming from a man who almost certainly drives a BMW/Lexus/Merc/whatever brand the Scions of Nepotistic Privilege are driving these days.
gene108
@burnspbesq:
Terry Sanford was a pretty damn good governor, who did a lot to beef up the college system and created the community college system in North Carolina.
He tried to bridge racial problems and didn’t run a segregationist platform, when other Southern governors were doing this.
He’s a bad comparison to Mitch Daniels, with regards to how he “grew” into the job as President of Duke University.
Gov. Sanford’s wiki page
alhutch
@Yutsano:
Well, OK then. Don’t mind a little ribbing from a Coug. Well played.
danielx
If Romney wins, Our (but not MY) Man Mitch won’t be at Purdue for long. University presidencies are well known launching pads for cabinet- or other high-level advisory positions – see Summers, Larry, or Gates, Robert Jr for starters. If Romney loses, listen for Mitch squealing as his successor Mike Pence takes yet another meat axe to state university funding.
He could have done himself a lot more good as a lobbyist. Why not, every other Republican who doesn’t have a prayer of achieving higher offices goes right out and peddles his ass for seven figures a year, and not a few Democrats.
@gene108:
As was true in the 19th and 20th centuries, nothing short of getting caught in bed with a live man or dead woman would hurt Daniels with average Indiana Republicans, although the more rabid types can’t stand him. Corruption? They do not give a flying fuck about political corruption or incompetence either one, or they’d be asking more questions about how Daniel’s Department of Revenue could just lose track of over half a billion dollars in tax receipts.
Carolus
Oh well.
I guess Indianans will warm to getting their diplomas from vending machines.
Given Mitch’s doper past, I’d expect Purdue to look like a stoner’s Liberty U. in a few years.
canuckistani
Didn’t I see this in a Yes Minister episode? Humphrey’s old college was slated for cutbacks so they invited Hacker to a fancy dinner and bribed him with fancy honourary titles and degrees?
Lalita
@David in NY: Just a teensy bit spiteful and unnecessary, don’t you think?
The Moar You Know
No, you are not. So far, private industry has managed to emulate the Soviet achievement of 1957, but with a bigger payload.
On that subject, I just want to say that I find it beyond appalling that this nation no longer has human spaceflight capability. We’re ditching any technological innovation that we have in the name of the Almighty Deficit, and that is just wrong.
If you need a dose of Broderism, our failure as a spacefaring nation has truly bipartisan causes. Few of our nation’s failures in the last 20 years have been of a bipartisan nature. But the killing of the space program has been done gleefully by both parties.
EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot this part. The Space-X Dragon flights have been funded by…NASA. So forget the 1957 part. Private industry on its own hasn’t done anything more impressive than a V-2 launch, albeit with a test pilot.
Yutsano
@alhutch: Dealt with the cow college/major in alcoholism jokes before. And Ducks always treat us good when we traveled. A little give and take never hurts.
MonkeyBoy
Appointing Daniels president may be much like having Purdue taken over by Bain Capital.
Maybe it can be cut into pieces and sold. Most of the College of Liberal Arts can probably just be shut down – that will teach the freeoading soshulists who work there!
danimal
@Laertes: Think big: The Koch Bros Dept of Environmental Studies.
Quarks
Echoing the cynicism here — speaking as a recovering college administrator, these days, much of the job of the president of a medium or large university focuses on fundraising and lobbying, with maybe 5% actually focused on what would be considered university operations. This also holds true for some deans of the professional schools (business, law, sometimes medicine). The actual administrative work gets done by various vice presidents (university level) or assistant/associate deans (school/college level) which is why university presidents and deans are now getting picked from lobbyist/politician types instead of research/administrative types.
meander
I’m sure that Daniels will soon forget about the criticism he’s surely made about public employee salaries and accept a huge salary as university president because “we need to compete with the private sector.”
StevenDS
I hear what you are saying about how he is an enemy of public universities.
But you lost me at “not qualified”. The guy was a governor for 8 years. Objectively, he has the qualifications needed to be a U.S. President. I wouldn’t vote for him, but it’s not like he’s Michelle Bachmann.
So I think he is qualified to be President of Purdue.
Linnaeus
Interestingly enough, the members of the Board of Regents at my undergraduate alma mater (and the governing boards of the other two major research universities in the state) are elected statewide, on partisan ballots, even.
BruceJ
See Kieran Healy’s internets-winning essay at Crooked Timber. It;s about the University of Virgina situation, but equally applies
Here.
Cluttered Mind
Don’t forget the endgame of all this. In a few years, after doing all the damage he can, Daniels will resign and get a gigantic severance package that the University can’t actually afford to pay because that money would be far better spent on actual education, but he’ll get it anyway.
JCJ
Purdue ’84
This is really disappointing. While I agree with @Laertes that Purdue has long been wall to wall wingnuts, I would have hoped a candidate for university president would have been an academic powerhouse in addition to being a wingnut. Well, I can expect calls for donations to increase if Daniels does as good a job as university president as he did as budget director for George Bush the Evil.
The Moar You Know
Just as wolves are very qualified to be guardians of sheep and other
yummy foodcute barnyard animals.I think Purdue can do better than someone whose life’s work has been dismantling public entities.
Pangloss
I wonder how strict he’ll be with students caught with marijuana, LSD, and illicit prescription drugs. My guess is the penalty will be in direct proportion to wealth and influence, as it apparently was when he was caught in 1970 at Princeton. Extra leniency will be given to those caught with Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals, ‘natch.
Omnes Omnibus
@StevenDS: What is his experience with higher education? Does he have any demonstrated interest in it?
Robert Lamb
8 of the 10 trustees who chose Daniels were appointed trustees by him. The head of the search committee that selected him is a man whose corporation received millions of dollars in state money while Daniels was governor. There is a state law prohibiting anyone holding office from accepting a job by a state institution within a year after leaving office, to avoid the appearance of corruption and impropriety. But I’m sure that this process was a fair one. In fact, I can actually say that it was altogether typical of how Purdue has always operated.
PurpleGirl
Yeah, do you guys need a reminder about a technological innovation whose development was supported by the government because private industry said it couldn’t be done…. We’re communicating with it right now.
StevenDS
@Omnes Omnibus:
What if Hillary Clinton was appointed the head of a university. Would she be qualified? What about Kathleen Sebelius? Or Andrew Cuomo? Or Rahm Emmanuel?
The executive experience that comes with 8 years serving as governor counts for something.
Omnes Omnibus
@StevenDS: I would say that they probably do not have appropriate experience. I would also say they are more likely to have a genuine interest in education.
MBL
@burnspbesq:
Did you just use the phrase “grow into” in a post about Mitch Daniels?
I see what you did there.
SiubhanDuinne
@burnspbesq:
Here’s the thing, though. Terry Sanford had a wonderful track record as governor in support of public education at all levels. From Wiki:
He had long since laid the groundwork to “grow into” the job of uni president. Daniels can’t make that claim.
schrodinger's cat
@David in NY: Unfortunately yes. According to teh Googles, he is a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition.
James Hulsey
@burnspbesq: Duke is a private university.
Purdue is not.
jl
@StevenDS: If Jerry Brown were appointed to head a liberal arts college, I might not say anything. But if it were a UC or CSU campus, I would wonder what was up with that.
But, like commmenter above, I would not wonder whether Brown would show appropriate zeal for its educational mission.
dollared
@burnspbesq: Burns, again. Do they teach sucking up to the nobility at Duke?
Oh, that’s right they do. Even Nixon found the place loathesome and elitist.
Capri
@Corey:
I hope it’s that. When he was gov., Daniels made a lot of remarks about how linking state funds with overall revenue was a “flawed analysis” and that the University could easily be in good financial shape if they only became more efficient.
I’m really hoping the trustees didn’t actually believe that he a solid idea for how to make his right-wing wishful thinking come true, and expect him to produce a magic pony now that he’s at the helm.
Odie Hugh Manatee
In Republican circles, this makes him an expert on education. Actually, it makes him an expert on anything he wants to talk about, as long as the crazies on the right agree with him.
Crazy is as crazy does.
Martin
@jl:
Not a chance in hell a politician would head up a UC unless they had an extensive educational background – so, Steven Chu, sure. Not sure how the CSUs do things, but I’d be surprised to see that as well.
The reality on the ground at least in the public system here in CA, is that the legislature and governor are not the path to salvation. There is nothing to be gained buddying up with them. The only path forward is toward decreasing dependence on the state, and so there is absolutely nothing to be gained by choosing leaders like Daniels.
It’s a bit different with the privates as their financial support does often come from the glorious elites that brought us such advances in civilization as the Iraq war, the banking crisis, and the BP oil disaster. Choosing one of their own seems appropriate.
Sasha
It is countenanced quite frequently actually. Namely, when anti-government conservatives who insist that government cannot do squat responsibly are elected into office and prove it.
Fax Paladin
@jl:
Among other things, engines that are cheaper, lighter and a lot easier to service. Faster turnaround when repairs are needed, and eventually a lot faster turnaround on reusing the engines. See also: Grasshopper
BTW, it helps a lot if you’re clear on the actual status quo, which is the space arm of the military industrial complex. The system that’s being threatened is precisely that of a government agency run mainly for the benefit of a few large corporations like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
clean willie
@burnspbesq: “Chill trolling”: the converse of concern trolling.
Why does it seem that you & the goon squad get all worked up over everything that doesn’t fucking matter, and urge apathy and indifference re everything that does?
karen marie
@Laertes: You are so funny. The other day Charlie Pierce was wondering where the turnip truck is parked. I’m wondering where there’s a lot large enough to fit the many turnip trucks this country obviously has.
Skerry
So sad. I wish I still gave them money so I could quit.
karen marie
Interesting February 2012 article about Daniels in The Daily Princetonian.
Cluttered Mind
This isn’t really so bad. In Massachusetts we had the brother of a gangster on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list in charge of the UMass system for years and years. Kind of hard to top that.
Bob
Desire all you want. Daniels reflects the values of the Board of Trustees, the people that count. He will be expected to carry out their joint agenda. Any ideas what that might include? And expect, after Virginia and Purdue, any public University president selected henceforth to reflect the values of its Board of Trustees. It’s over for the academe, you pampered princes. We’ll show you how a business is supposed to be run.
kay
The only thing that will be “public” about that school when Daniels is done with it will be the funding.
Daniels privatizes. That’s what he does. He takes publicly-funded entities and turns them into publicly-funded profit centers. He inserts a for-profit middleman between the public and the services they’re paying for.
kay
To understand Mitch Daniels you only really need to know one thing: “public” means “taxpayer funded” and that’s ALL it means.
Privatizers have taken the entire public education concept and history and stripped it down to two words: taxpayer funded. Anything that fits that definition is “public”.
Burnspbesq
@MBL:
I guess that’s my “oh, shit” moment for today.
Burnspbesq
@dollared:
Another pointless and stupid comment. Your evaluation for today is “Meets Expectations.”
Burnspbesq
@clean willie:
Say what, now? That requires an explanation. Standing alone, it’s completely incomprehensible.
Villago Delenda Est
@alhutch:
As a Duck alum, I’m appalled at the PhilKnightiszation of the UofO. He’s been slowly, over the past 20 years, buying the damn place building by building and he pretty much gets to call all the shots.
clean willie
@Burnspbesq:
Then let me flesh it out for you: It seems like you & “the goon squad” — i.e. David Koch, eemom, various posters with “Stuck” in their names — get all worked up over issues that don’t involve the prevailing power structure and challenges thereto; namely, issues of partisan politics and the minutia of electioneering. But you urge apathy and indifference, if not outright derision, toward issues that expose or challenge the power structure, from Julian Assange to kill lists to cases such as the present one in which a privatization-crazy pol is entrusted with the leadership of a public institution.
I find that interesting.
kestral
Woah. That’s my dad’s alma mater. …Well, crud.