The Dispatch Podcast - Mitch Daniels Talks Higher Ed

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Purdue University President and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels joins Sarah and Steve to talk about the state of higher education in America, wokeness on college campuses, and the national debt. Dan...iels explains Purdue’s new civics literacy test for all new students at the university, discusses his 2021 commencement speech and bringing back America’s “spirit of adventure,” and chats about riding into the ceremony on a motorized couch. Show Notes: -Purdue civics literacy test -Mitch Daniels’ 2021 commencement speech -FIRE study on college free speech -Mitch Daniels rides Couch to Commencement -Daniels op-ed regarding the national debt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. And this week, we are talking to Mitch Daniels. He is the president of Purdue University, the former governor of Indiana, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush. And he even worked in the Reagan administration, the White House director of political and intergovernmental affairs. We have a lot to talk about. But I think most importantly, what's going on in higher ed these days? Let's dive in, Steve, first to disclosure. Yeah, I have to start this podcast with a disclosure because I owe a lifelong debt to Mitch Daniels. You may not remember this, but I certainly do. The man who would go on to be the feared budget-cutting deficit hawk in George W. Bush's Office of Management and Budget is responsible for giving me, or at least pushing others to give me my first substantial raise in my professional life. I was running something called the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University, which was a project of a group called the Fund for American Studies. and Mitch Daniels was the chairman of the Board of Visitors of that program. And at one board meeting, he asked me to leave the room, met with the other Board of Visitors members,
Starting point is 00:01:41 and I later found out that you had recommended me for a pretty, at the time, for me, a pretty serious raise. So I'm really not going to be able to be objective here about this because that allowed me to buy, I used to buy something special every time I got a raise and that allowed me to buy a big television that my roommates and I called the prize. So I owe you for that
Starting point is 00:02:10 and I will not be able to be objective throughout the rest of this podcast. Well, you bring up a very painful memory. You know, I don't know what was wrong with me that day and I regretted it. I'm sure I apologize to the rest of the board later, but I guess you finally justified it, So I'll quit feeling guilty.
Starting point is 00:02:28 I'm not sure, but it was necessary. I needed it. I have a different bias that I have to disclose. This weekend, we are driving to Syracuse for my husband's grandfather's 96th birthday. He shares that birthday with my son. The grandfather is a World War II vet and Purdue alum. His son, my in-laws, met at Purdue. for their retirement, have moved back to West Lafayette, where he teaches at Purdue Medical
Starting point is 00:03:00 School. My husband is a Purdue alum, and my son has a little Purdue, you know, number one sign. I am a Northwestern grad myself, so a lot of Big Ten love in this household. Here's the question that I want to start with. Richard Vedder, another Big Tenor, he's a Northwestern graduate, University of Illinois, graduate, and a professor at Ohio State, said, President Daniels is the closest thing I know to an academic secular saint, whose innovations such as long-term tuition freeze, Purdue Global Online Education, and innovative income share agreements to finance college are highly praiseworthy. But in particular, he wanted to signal something you're doing this fall,
Starting point is 00:03:48 which is the plan to adopt a civics literacy graduation requirement for all undergraduates beginning with the Purdue students who enter this fall. What is the thought behind that? And do you think it can make a real difference? These questions are going to get harder, by the way. It's a daunting prospect. Yeah, well, it's hardly an original idea. And only time will tell whether it works well or doesn't.
Starting point is 00:04:17 I hope we do a good job of it. But the premise and the motivation I think should be pretty obvious for, I don't know, maybe three decades now, at least, everybody who's gone out and sampled or surveyed or tested young people in particular has found an abysmal lack of understanding of our free institutions, how they operate, why they are set up as they are. And, of course, now, decades later, the adults don't know these things either. So, you know, it'd be comical if it weren't so alarming when people think, I don't know, Judge Judy's on the Supreme Court, and I didn't make that up, by the way. And, you know, that only small minorities can explain to an interviewer even the most basic rudiments of our constitution, of our system of limited rights and how it's supposed to work. So we're pretty sure that boilermakers are a couple steps ahead of the average,
Starting point is 00:05:31 but nowhere near where they probably need to be. And so we don't imagine anything burdensome, but there will be three pathways a student can take, including taking a course or a series of podcasts. One of our alums founded C-SPAN, and we have the archives here, and we have a really, I think a pretty solid set of podcasts that they have put together. And then the third alternative is to attend at least six events. I try to make certain that we have a reasonable traffic flow of interstate, and diverse opinion coming through campus.
Starting point is 00:06:13 And so the student can pick any of those paths and then take a fairly simple test. And they can do that any time in four years. So it won't solve the problem, but it will say to the world that someone graduating from here, in addition to all the other great things we know about Purdue graduates,
Starting point is 00:06:32 readiness for work and so forth, is also civic certified. Civic education is, been lacking in the country, as you said for decades, what do you think was important about now? What was the urgency that pushed this over the edge for 2021 that perhaps had not been the case four years ago, 10 years ago? Well, first of all, I brought this up about three years ago, and I've got a lot of jocular ways of talking about the pace of change and higher ed, but I'll spare the audience those. But again, this is hardly a new.
Starting point is 00:07:09 concern. There have been civic groups. I remember Justice O'Connor, upon leaving the Supreme Court, one of the first speeches she gave, and I think I tried to start a movement for improvement here. So it was overdue. Now, I will say that these days, it's not simply a matter of young people being uneducated about our system and about its workings and its merits. They're being miseducated in too many cases. And so if there's greater urgency, I would, if you suspect there's greater urgency, I think you're right. You were carried into the commencement ceremonies on a couch last month. Why? Oh, for fun. You know, it's been a hard year in higher ed. We were open all year with a high percentage of in-person classes as probably any school our size.
Starting point is 00:08:10 And it was our first outdoor commencement. We make quite a practice here at Purdue of even at the size we've reached honoring each student individually. And so we weren't able to do that in our indoor auditorium. But no, this spring, couple of students in a very Purdue-like boiler maker tradition. You know, we're inventors here. Our graduates are engineers and tinkerers and innovators. And one day, two guys showed up blowing through campus about 12 or 15 miles an hour on their beat-up couch, just the one, Steve, you'll remember, from some college room with holes in it and, you know, probably hygienic problems, I'm not sure. And, yeah, they're.
Starting point is 00:09:02 They had motorized it, go-kart engine, and the chassis was, I think, was a garden cart from Menards or somewhere. And so I thought that looked like fun. And I got word to them that I wanted a ride before they graduated. And while we're taking the ride, we decided, hey, why not graduation day? your speech there you mentioned moments ago that you got the school through COVID through the pandemic lots of in-person classes I want to just read a section of your speech because you were very critical of others who didn't do that the speech was broadly about risk and taking risks and being smart about risks and you had some pretty sharp criticism
Starting point is 00:09:53 You said, this last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field, but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hope to accomplish. And here's where you get, I'd say, even sharper. Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero. In this case, zero risk of anyone contracting the virus, block out all other competing concerns like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses.
Starting point is 00:10:34 Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice, but to run from it. It's not leadership, it's abdication. That is tough criticism. Who were you talking about in that passage? I was careful not to single out anybody. It was a general comment about what I thought was a general shortcoming across the country. I was thinking certainly as much about people in elected public office or other public service capabilities, perhaps even more than people in the sector where I work now.
Starting point is 00:11:13 No, I mean, I just found it frustrating, and more so as the year went on. And I mean, I think we all have to be very understanding of decisions made in the early months of this. No one knew what we were dealing with. No one knew how deadly. No one knew what would work best to protect people. But the essence of leadership or the essence of one's duty in any position of broad responsibility or authority is by, it's by definition. It's to balance interests and to decide among competing priorities and to make trade-offs. And as a society, we did a lousy job of that.
Starting point is 00:12:01 And I think there's lots of responsibility to go around, including the way in which all this was reported or information was pervade about it. So, you know, that was, I thought it was an appropriate message for our students. We hope, we know, we know we are sending people out of here ready for leadership. And I just wanted to remind our students that they're going to, probably sooner than they expect, be asked to make choices and to make tradeoffs and to take the tools that they learned here of data analysis. I told them, listen, you've got the tools. You know not to confuse correlation with causation. You understand the difference between statistically significant and statistically meaningless numbers. You understand what the law of diminishing returns is. You've got the toolbox. What you're going to need, however, is the will to apply those
Starting point is 00:13:16 tools and make the choices someone has entrusted you with the duty to make. I want to talk about another part of the speech. It was a great speech, and we'll put the link in our show notes so that everyone can read it. Great societies before us tended to look backward for their inspiration, to locate their golden ages in the past. Here, in the United States in reference, our eyes have always been forward. Now signs abound of Americans losing that eagerness to move ahead boldly. Before the virus visit us, there were already troubling signs that fearfulness was beginning to erode the spirit of adventure, the willingness to take considered risk on which this nation's greatness was built, and from which all progress originates,
Starting point is 00:13:58 rates of business startups moving in pursuit of a better job, or the strongest of all bets on the future, having children, have all fallen sharply in recent years. And now there are warnings that the year 2020 may have weakened that spirit further. What do you attribute that to What are the solutions? I'm not sure I can trace it all to root causes. I'm just observing phenomena that many other people have fretted about for quite a long time. As I say, it all predates the pandemic. I thought it was aggravated or exacerbated by our reaction to that.
Starting point is 00:14:36 No, I mean, it's hardly a great insight to observe that progress, particularly the progress of a dynamic free society that we're lucky enough to live in, has come from reasonable calculated risk-taking from the, we once thought about the pioneer spirit and that certainly drove the early, the first and part of the second century of this country. And, you know, I hope we don't lose it. the willingness to innovate, try new things, experiment, take the risk of failure or setbacks, has never been more important than now. And this would be the wrong time as a society to see it wither.
Starting point is 00:15:24 You know, again, I was speaking to what I believe was a very appropriate audience for this. This is the university that sent 26 astronauts to the space program more than any other. first and most recent men on the moon. Amelia Earhart, I mentioned in the speech. You know, countless entrepreneurs and inventors and so forth. And it's what we're here for. And so it's a subject that I might have thought about for a long time and could have talked about elsewhere, but I thought it fit the moment and the audience.
Starting point is 00:16:04 what role do our politics have in shaping that for the future well i think unfortunately that a large one um and and it's let's not let's not uh beat up at least exclusively on our current generation of of politicians it's a risk in a democracy uh to play to the short term you know to know, by short-term favor, even at the expense of long-term success, we see this, of course, in the, you know, truly terrifying the levels of death that we're accumulating right now. And I think we see it all, we saw it also in too much, too often in the response to the recent pandemic in which there was a lot of cheap applause, let's face it, for those who took a completely absolutely absolutist stance. And quick condemnation of those who said, well, not so fast. What about
Starting point is 00:17:12 children? What about mental health? What about the unattended health consequences? We now know, and of course the commercial and economic damage that was being done. And we now know that those costs were probably even higher than people were estimating at the time. But both in the political system, and I must say in the journalistic world, you inhabit, there was precious little recognition that those questions might be legitimate. Let me ask you another question about risk, and in this case, on the college campuses. We've seen lots of, we've heard lots of discussion about the sort of new wokeness on college campuses, The University of Virginia put out a statement last week from its Board of Visitors to reaffirming its commitment to free inquiry.
Starting point is 00:18:09 It was kind of a good statement in my view, but sort of banal, didn't say anything new. And yet we know that those kinds of statements will be controversial in the current environment. And you have university administrators and leaders who are so afraid of offending students or pushing back on demands of students that they seemingly cave into. every request. And so in the form of new speech codes and safe spaces or harsh punishments from kangaroo courts, this new wokeness that purports to be about openness and breaking down barriers, as often as not in my view, results in a kind of closed-mindedness and new barriers to learning and understanding. Students are protected rather than engaged. Obviously, this is a big, you know, something that conservatives, political conservatives talk a lot about. In your mind,
Starting point is 00:19:05 as you listen to that debate, is, is it a crisis? Is it a problem the way that conservatives talk about it? And how have you addressed this or handled this at Purdue? Well, first of all, it's a serious problem. I don't tend to think of it, at least not exclusively, in philosophical terms. The screaming irony often remarked on over recent years that places that are very passionate about their commitment to, as we say now, diversity in some forms are have no particular regard for it.
Starting point is 00:19:55 In fact, may stamp out a diversity of thought. And the thought that gets stamped out, yes, is what we tend to call conservative in modern parlance. But, you know, that's not the worst problem to me. The worst problem is that it's only through the collision of ideas that knowledge advances, whether it's scientific or social policy or otherwise. And, you know, that's the raise on debt. of our universities is the advancement of knowledge, and of course it's transmission to younger people.
Starting point is 00:20:30 And so set aside ideology just for a minute and just contemplate the risk we're taking, the damage we may be inflicting when only one school of thought is permitted. So that's part of it. Here at our place, we have people who believe They have all the answers and that others are not legitimate, but I think fewer of them. New University is one of the most, as we say now, STEM-centric schools in the country.
Starting point is 00:21:07 There's very much by design over recent years, we've actually grown that, probably two-thirds of our undergrads and a higher percentage of our grad students are in science or engineering or mathematics. or, in other words, they and the faculty who teach them live more often in the world of objective facts and reality. So I think we've probably had fewer problems than some others have. But I'll just say our policy is respect but not deference. As I sometimes say, respect but not deference to young people who, after all, are paying us a lot of money to come here because of what they don't know. And we try not to lose sight of that.
Starting point is 00:21:57 You have in places like San Francisco, actually school administrators at the K through 12 level challenging the idea of objective reality. You know, math is racist. We can't have two plus two equals four because it grows out of a system of privilege and therefore the answer that that produces is somehow exclusionary.
Starting point is 00:22:20 You have college campuses that have quite literally created safe spaces to prevent students from being subjected to the kinds of inquiry that you're talking about as so important. How, I mean, it's hard for those of us who aren't living on a university campus, may interact with people from universities, either professors or students, to really get a sense of how prevalent that thinking is. Is it the kind of thing that's exaggerated? because, you know, it makes a good story, you can sensationalize it, and really our universities are more still places for free and open inquiry, or is it, is the environment as stultifying
Starting point is 00:23:00 as some who have been raising alarms would suggest? I know there are places where it probably is the dominant, prevalent point of view, and, you know, we've all read far too many accounts about that to doubt that. I think there are other places where it is, you know, we all should know whatever the context, not to confuse decibels with genuine support. And as in many other realms, I think the loudest, it makes good copy, it makes good, you know, pictures, I sometimes say three people on a cardboard sign is a page one. event on a college campus.
Starting point is 00:23:51 But, no, unfortunately, it is a very genuine problem. We here were the first public university, and there are now a few dozen at least schools who have signed what I like to call the Chicago principals, because University of Chicago wrote them first. It's very interesting, by the way, to point out to people that, that statement, which is a, you said, you know, banal, but I think still it's important to say these things. It's an affirmation of the importance of free debate, free discourse, academic freedom in the genuine sense. And that, that's a very good statement, which was so good that
Starting point is 00:24:39 I just suggested our board just adopted verbatim, not go through a lengthy drafting process of our own. And, but it was, it was, the committee that produced it was led by a self-avowed liberal from the 1960s who, Dr. Stone, a very eminent constitutional scholar who cut his teeth defending the freedom of people of left-wing views to speak freely about Vietnam and so forth. And to the more interesting evenings that I've sponsored here, Purdue, were Dr. Dr. Stone came, and Nadine Strassen, the longest serving or long-serving leader of the ACLU. Both of them have had this experience now of seeing the freedom of inquiry, the freedom of speech, they have championed so bravely over time, attacked by the people with whom they were, in earlier days, were allied.
Starting point is 00:25:39 Very ironic. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how, quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online,
Starting point is 00:26:14 no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos.
Starting point is 00:26:35 Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. I want to dive into this a little bit more because I find it fascinating. Purdue adopted the Chicago principals in 2015, as you said, the first public school to do so. At that point, only Chicago and Princeton had statements like this. It's been six years. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education released their poll results late in 2020 on where students stand.
Starting point is 00:27:12 And two distinctions came out of where students are more illiberal in terms of speech. One was the difference between Ivy League students and not, and then one was the difference between students who identified as liberal and not. I want to read you some of these numbers. Students identifying as extremely liberal said violence to stop a speech or event from occurring on campus was always or sometimes acceptable at a rate double that of students identifying as extremely conservative. More than 60% of extreme liberals said it's always or sometimes acceptable to shout down a speaker compared to 15% for extreme conservatives. But I almost found
Starting point is 00:27:52 the Ivy League numbers more interesting. Students at Ivy League schools were slightly more in favor of using violence to stop campus speech. 21% expressed some level of acceptance for violence in these cases. 37% of Ivy League students say that shouting down a speaker is always or sometimes acceptable, more than 10% higher than students enrolled at non-Ivey League schools. And almost one in five Ivy League students find it always or sometimes acceptable to block other students from entering a campus event compared to one in 10 non-IV. What is happening at those schools in particular that's not happening at your school? And what advice would you give Ivy League schools to increase the level of speech and debate?
Starting point is 00:28:40 and access to ideas that it appears as not welcome? I don't have a ready answer for that. I also am demoralized and discouraged by, you know, a rather constant flow of data like that and anecdotes. I may be a little wishfulness in this. There has been even taking last years out when nobody was around to, you know, to shout down a speaker or, or block a doorway. But even taking that out, there seemed to be some diminution in the number of such events.
Starting point is 00:29:25 And I hope that's a trend, that the excesses and the outrageous character of some of this has begun to have some effect. But, you know, we've all been waiting for some time, at least I have, for the market to begin speaking a little more loudly on some of this. And you've seen it over the course of time, over the last 10 years, of course, attendance in higher ed total has gone down every year. And it's not simply a matter of too few young people. That's a factor. but and we'll see it's going to be very interesting to see on the backside now of the pandemic with a very bad experience some people have had with their educational institutions
Starting point is 00:30:16 we'll be we'll learn a lot I think from enrollment this fall now I just tell you that we had a very surprising outcome here which was another record fourth in the last five years we're going to be bigger at Purdue than we've ever been this fall. And the models, which have been very impressively accurate, you spend any time in government or even business, like I have, you know, you learn to be a little leery of somebody's model, but ours have been really very accurate until this year, and we just missed by a lot. Where was the mist coming from? Well, well, I can just tell you is that huge influx from the other 49 states. And, including a lot of coastal states, and we talked to some of our Midwestern peers who are having something like that same experience.
Starting point is 00:31:09 So fewer people may go to school at all, and more may choose to go to a school where they think maybe there's more seriousness of purpose about the academic exercise, less of the, of the, of the, of the, pressure that you just talked about to conform. Now, the Ivy League is just in a separate category, financially and otherwise, you know, people will still clamor to get there just for the credential that it, the signal that it provides, if they never got to a single class, if they spent all their time blocking speakers, you know, they'd probably still believe they got a good deal from it. But there are an awful lot of other schools, some of the smaller private schools where the phenomenon we're talking about has been just as a graphic.
Starting point is 00:32:19 And some of them, I do believe, we're going to struggle. I want to talk about the deal you just mentioned because one of the things that sets Purdue apart that you have gotten a lot of praise for, some criticism for, is the tuition freeze. If you could explain how that works, because, again, I think part of what higher education is being criticized for when you get sort of past just the speech is the enormity of the increase in tuition and that that appears to be going largely to administration, to just palaces of dorms or gyms or, you know, like five Olympic pools because we can't
Starting point is 00:33:05 just have one Olympic pool. How is Purdue doing a tuition freeze? What are the results that you're seeing? And how do you respond to your critics who say that you are undermining the institution? Well, we haven't heard much criticism now for a number of years. I have to be honest with that, I guess maybe in the early days, people feared that we might shortchange the academic enterprise or that it was some sort of trickery going on. And we're now in year nine with with no increase. We actually reduced some other fees. So in nominal, unadjusted terms, it's cheaper to go here, less expensive, I should say, than it was in 2012. And, you know, I usually explain or answer your question by disabusing people of any suspicions. We didn't get more from our
Starting point is 00:33:59 state, actually less. We didn't take on more, let's say, international students. We've actually managed that number or that percentage downward. We didn't go, we didn't downshift to less expensive faculty. We actually have one of the highest tenure track percentages in the country. No, it was none of these things. First of all, it has, we think, consistent with our land grant mission, we are substantially bigger than we were, 15% or more bigger than we were eight or nine years ago, and so we have more revenue without raising prices. Meanwhile, my catchphrase is, we solved the other.
Starting point is 00:34:49 equation for zero. We ask ourselves on an ongoing basis, what do we need to do to keep tuition down? And let me just say that it's not unique to higher ed. It's certainly there in business, and it's there in a huge way in government, but there's a lot of low fruit in terms of expenses that really are not contributing to the mission, the core mission of the place. And so we find them as often as we can, I do believe that almost everybody here, especially now that we've shown some ability to do this and the feedback from students, of course, their parents, alumni, and taxpayers and just people in general has been very, very positive. And if you, as in any big endeavor, if you can charge.
Starting point is 00:35:49 a goal that is, that people can feel enthusiastic about and get the people aligned around it and everybody looking and contributing in ways large or small, you'd be amazed how much progress you can make. I've been amazed. I'd never imagined at the outset that we would be able to continue as we have. But back to where he started, I think everything that was said about trends. indiscretions of freedom and speech and so forth is true, and it's a big problem. But the biggest problem facing higher ed is the one we just got to, which is the value question. How in the world
Starting point is 00:36:33 can it be worth what I'm being asked to pay? How can it possibly be worth the borrowing I'm going to have to do with all the hurdles that's going to put in the way of my adult life? And I didn't think it took a, you know, clairvoyant 10 years ago to see that. And so we, we have never prescribed anything like the course we're on to anybody else. Thank goodness, higher ed has a huge variety in it. We need that. But we think it fit our, our mission, and we think it served our individual institution pretty well. I want to ask you about debt of another kind. You wrote we've amassed a ruinous amount of national debt current and committed mathematically beyond the capacity of any economy to pay this is a survival level threat to the america we have known
Starting point is 00:37:29 left unaddressed much longer it will permanently hobble the prosperity engine that's made us the world's great power and exemplar you wrote that in a book that was published in september 2011. It's almost a full decade later. We have added a new entitlement. We've expanded another. There are attempts to broaden a third in Medicare. We've seen Republicans basically abandon any pretense of caring about debt and deficits. Donald Trump famously ran against entitlement reform after Paul Ryan had gotten the party to embrace it. Joe Biden proposed $6 trillion in new spending before he'd been president for 100 days. There's no talk. This is not part of the national conversation. Our political leaders are not talking about debt and deficits restraint
Starting point is 00:38:22 spending. And since you wrote that our debt has grown from around 13 trillion to 28 trillion in climbing, if it was a survival level threat 10 years ago, what is it now? Oh, it's every, it's, it's, it's, uh, that and more. You know, I write columns, um, for an East Coast newspaper, not to be named. Uh, um, and, uh, I wrote one a few, a few months ago where I basically, uh, said it's time to throw in the towel. At the time I wrote the book, I thought the problem was looming. It was, it was, uh, you know, every bit as menacing as you suggest. is an incredibly unfair, in just thing we are doing
Starting point is 00:39:11 to the succeeding generations. Even if the nation survives this, our descendants will condemn us, and they should. For the burden we have left to them. But no, you know, what I've said more recently, I wish I didn't think this.
Starting point is 00:39:37 It was possible at the time that book was written. It was possible for several years after that to say that, look, come on, everybody, if this is a wrong thing we're doing and it's a very potentially damaging to our national future, let's agree on, there's time, we have time to do this. Let's start taking some common sense steps that won't injure anybody who is in need. I mean, I always talk about in terms of saving the safety net. People who profess to be, you know, the most concerned about income, inequality, and so forth are the very people who are mathematically destroying the systems we have built to buffer people
Starting point is 00:40:31 and help them, avoid destitution. And anyway, the position I'm in now lately is the one that I think may some people believe is the best approach to climate change, for instance. Okay, we're past a point where you can just wish the problem away or whisk the problem away. Let's talk about mitigation. Let's talk about how we manage this problem. we are never going to be able to honor the promises we've made. We can't. It's gone too far.
Starting point is 00:41:08 At least I know of no non-draconian steps that could be taken. But we better get busy now mitigating it in any way we can. And so that when the reckoning comes, it is as gentle and as protective of those who really need these programs for whom we originally designed them as possible. All right. Last question. We're so grateful for your time. My husband notes that the Purdue basketball team has the highest minutes played in the tournament
Starting point is 00:41:50 from players returning to this year's team than any other NCAA bracket team. Now, he wants to be clear. He doesn't want you to jinx anything here, but is this the year? This could be the year. It really could be. We've got a fantastic group of young men, enormous talent. We've got two of the top young players. They're both Hoosiers, by the way, in the country coming in as freshmen.
Starting point is 00:42:17 So we're very, very excited. But I just want to tell you something else. Our whole athletic department, first of all, pays for itself. We have never subsidized it here. It was something I checked before I took the job, by the job. the way, it would have bothered me a lot if we were, if we were taxing the 98.5% of our students who can't make an intercollegiate team to provide for the rest. So that's one thing that I really appreciate. And then secondly, academics and character really counts here. And so
Starting point is 00:42:55 our basketball coach is, some might say old school to me, that's a great compliment. but he leads a high character program. Now, haven't said that, you know, I always say that those are the prerequisites. When I think about our athletes, real students, taking real classes, getting honest grades, same standards of conduct as anybody else on campus, and pay for yourself.
Starting point is 00:43:23 And I say, now, I want to win. I want to win every game. And our basketball team this year is going to be a lot. of fun to watch, I promise it. Well, we're doing our part. My son is off the chart, literally, for height right now. He turns one-year-old on Saturday. He can catch a ball and dunk a ball.
Starting point is 00:43:43 So we have high hopes for approximately 18 years from now. We'll have an assistant coach out scouting him later this month. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate that. Thank you so much for your time. Mitch Daniels, check out Purdue and all the things that they're doing. You'll see them pop up in the news.
Starting point is 00:44:01 more often than you think, and it's not just the basketball team, although that's pretty fun too. Thank you. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca.
Starting point is 00:44:56 slash YANX.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.