The university has also reduced the price of food services and textbooks. An undergraduate degree from Purdue, in other words, is less expensive today than it was when Daniels arrived. Only when seen against the inflationary helix of American higher education can the singularity of this achievement be fully appreciated.
The college-affordability crisis has become a staple of academic chin pulls, news stories, congressional hearings, and popular books written in tones of alarm and commiseration. Only health care rivals higher education as an economic sector so consumed by irrational inefficiencies and runaway prices.
Read: Why is college in America so expensive? The consequences are plain. Roughly 70 percent of college students take out loans to finance their education. At Purdue, by contrast, nearly 60 percent of undergrads leave school without any debt at all. Each of these measures has been taken up by other public universities, even as most have increased their in-state tuition.
Proud as he is of his number, Daniels worries that all the attention paid to the tuition freeze scants the improvements that the school says it has simultaneously made in educational quality and financial health. The benefits of the improved balance sheet can be seen across campus.
Faculty pay is up too. The salary of a full-time professor at Purdue has increased by 12 percent over the past five years, against a conference-average increase of 7 percent. Read: The scariest student loan number. Daniels said one of the consequences for unvaccinated individuals means they will be selected for regular COVID testing. As far as coming to campus for the upcoming semester, there are requirements students need to follow. Daniels said the University was already planning to request mask in the classrooms, where he said there is a particular problem.
As the fall semester will soon be underway, that means Purdue football will also be starting soon. The fall semester will officially end on Saturday, December Until then, Daniels wants everyone on campus to take personal responsibility to ensure a safe semester. What's also important is that if there's any place where there are enough bright, intelligent, knowledgable people around to put proper plans in place to keep everyone safe, it should be in a university setting.
Months and months of meetings and planning lead me to believe that Purdue can have a proper plan in place when August rolls around. There has to be an awareness of the risks presently involved, for young and old alike. Some of you will cringe when you think that we're going to have to trust a bunch of to year olds to keep this thing in check, but that's where we are at right now.
We can make changes. We can be smart. We can count on people to make good choices. That "Protect Purdue Pledge'' might sound hokey, but it's the core to all of this getting done right.
Might people still get sick? That can happen anywhere. But with proper protocols in place, it is possible to lessen the risk. Not eliminate it, certainly, but lessen it for sure.
And act swiftly is someone does fall ill. We all have to make changes. I side with Daniels. A governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.
A governor has a responsibility to uphold academic standards as well as academic freedom. The movement to establish the Common Core State Standards in elementary and secondary education is premised on the idea that governors have a legitimate voice in saying what should be taught in schools. There is no bright-line distinction between saying what the substance of state standards should be and what should pass muster as a textbook.
This leaves the matter of whether he overstepped any bounds in going after a particular instructor. So far no evidence has emerged that he did. The central question is whether Mitch Daniels respects academic freedom. If the term is set out, Cary Nelson-style, to mean something like the absolute right of a faculty member to teach whatever he wants regardless of standards, the rights of students, the truthfulness of his statements, and the public interest in the integrity of higher education, then sure, Daniels sacrificed academic freedom in favor of other considerations.
But that notion of academic freedom and its more cautiously phrased but still self-aggrandizing cousins is just the rodomontade of demagogues.
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