 Frank, thank you so much for joining us on This Is Purdue. We're so happy to have you and feature Purdue Global. Well, Kate, I'm just delighted to be invited. You guys are doing such great work. Glad to be a part of it. Thank you. OK, so growing up, were you always interested in education? Where did this kind of passion come from? You know, I always liked school. And I mean, I was a good student. I loved to read. I loved learning. But I never thought as a kid that I would work at a college. I had no idea that there were jobs at colleges. I mean, I didn't even know if I would go to college. And it just happened. I mean, thanks, you know, there's a scholarship. I had people encourage me to apply to college. And I went and I got in. Scholarships helped. And that set it in motion. And you're not from Indiana, right? No, I grew up in North Dakota just outside of Fargo. And it was a great place to grow up. And we go back in summer still. And how did you find out about Purdue? What was your initial reaction of Purdue University? Well, I mean, probably like a lot of listeners. My first recollection of Purdue is Bob Greci playing in the Rose Bowl and things like that. So sports, and you heard the Purdue name. And, you know, Fargo's just outside of Minneapolis. So you hear the golfers and stuff like that playing the Boilermakers. Then when I was in grad school, you quickly heard about how great the agricultural economics department at Purdue was. And that's when I really became, oh, this is something. And so you came here as a professor, right? Yes. OK. What was it like moving your family, transitioning, you know, to West Lafayette in that community? That's a really good question. Because I know there's, every year, there's a lot of people who transition into Purdue. My daughters at the time were four and nine. To a certain extent, you're so excited because Purdue has such a great reputation. The people I was going to work with in AggieCon, I mean, that's what drew me here. It's people like names you've probably heard of Jay Ackridge, right? Of course. But Dave Downey, Mike Bulge, and a host of other people, just the opportunity to come that made it really, really exciting. But you're also nervous because you know how high the expectations are here. Oh, absolutely. Can you tell us, you know, you just mentioned some names. Are there any mentors that have really stuck out to you throughout your path and your journey coming up to Purdue, being at Purdue this many years? You know, there's lots of people who've touched my life. And I mean, I have lived an incredibly blessed life. And I think as I go through life, different points in time, there's different people who influence you. When I was in high school, my best friend's dad was the head of English in the Fargo Public Schools. His name was Delis Sharrock. And Delis, he treated Mike and I like we're adults. And he said, you guys need to read this book. What do you think of that? He challenged us on the issues of the day. He challenged us to be responsible. But he also gave us an incredible amount of support and freedom. And he probably set the tone for people. And I probably have sought people like that out over the years. And there's almost too many to mention. But I just, Wally Tiner was the first department head when I came here. Wally passed a couple of years ago. But Wally was the best leader I've ever seen. What made him such a good leader? I think Wally was what I'm going to call a Purdue leader. And a Purdue leader in my mind has two characteristics. They tend to be personally humble, but they have an iron will. And Wally always knew the direction that we're trying to go. Wally believed that you build off of strength. And the other thing I loved about Wally as a leader, he always made decisions, very informed. But it didn't take him a long time to make decisions. And it allowed you to move forward. That's awesome. That's great. As I said, you were with Purdue for years as a professor. And then you helped. You were in the provost office. And you helped integrate this Purdue global initiative. What was that like? Take us through that. Yeah, I spent a decade almost in the provost office. Most of my work is with undergrad programs on campus. In 2017, it was in early May, they came to me, President Daniels and a couple others. And they had already announced that they have bought Kaplan University and were going to pull it in to Purdue. And they needed me in the first year to really focus on one thing. We had to get a bunch of approvals. Department of Education, the Higher Learning Commission, who was our creditor, and then the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. That was part of my job. The second part of my job was to socialize what this meant for Purdue, West Lafayette. And those are the two things that I started with in that year. And it was a crazy year. But we got it all done. Why do you think President Daniels came to you and asked you to do it? Well, there's a couple reasons. The provost at the time was Debba Dutta. And he left on June 1 to go become the chancellor at Rutgers. So it might have been his job had he stayed. But the other thing is I think there was a recognition that I got things done. And I think that this was a very, very big initiative. And they were looking for somebody who had a track record of being able to pull stuff through. And when you look back at that time, what, you know, why was this pursuit so important to you? And what did it mean to you that President Daniels came to and task you with this huge initiative? That's a really good question. And I mean, I think about that a lot. I think part of it, it's personal in a way. So I'm a first gen student. And you go back and you're asking about my first impressions of college. You know, my first impressions of college, I didn't know much about college. And there were, I go back to Dela Sharok. He talked to me probably when I was 15 and 16, it's not, are you going to go to college? He says, when you go to college, it becomes this mindset. And one of the things, so I studied an awful lot about Purdue Global as we help make the case to the Indiana Commission Friar Ed, et cetera. And when you study it and then you start to get to know the people, you go, oh my goodness, this is really important work that you're doing. And I think that's what made it relevant to me. And then the ability to explain it to others. And if they pick up on my enthusiasm for it, then it says, okay, they get it too? All right, so maybe I'm on to something here. Sure, and explain to our listeners who might not be as familiar with Purdue Global, where does this Purdue-ness come into play with Purdue Global? Well, I don't know that the Purdue-ness came on day one. Sure. I think Purdue-ness is probably something that we're really developing now. Day one, I think the important part, if you went back, President Daniels made a presentation to the Senate like the day after this was announced or a couple days after, and basically said three things. Why did we do it? And that was a quick, why are you doing this? Well, number one, President Daniels says, there are 35 million Americans working adults, some college, no degree, and we feel an obligation that Purdue needs to serve this population of students. That was one. Number two, Purdue had studied, how do we get into online? And there had been a couple commissions or study committees that looked at this, one about 2014 and other, I think 2016. They both came back and made reports to the board. And in both cases, the board says, that's a pretty modest proposal. And if you notice anything about Purdue and what we do right now, we're really doing stuff big at scale, making large impacts. And I think the board says, it's not that what you didn't present isn't important, but we don't think it's of a scale that is what we want to accomplish. And then the third real reason that they acquired Kaplan University instead of building it, it allowed us to get to a large scale size overnight. You were named Chancellor in May, 2020. Yes. What was that like? You know, I'm sure you were honored. Were you a little nervous to take over that role? Well, if you weren't nervous, you shouldn't be in the job, right? Right. I think, keep in mind, you go back May, 2020, you're about two months into COVID. And moreover, in the provost office, the night before those 60, 70 days, we had been working probably from about 6 a.m. to about 11 every day, just trying to help the campus. What can we do? How can we do this? How are we gonna do finals? Went from that, and May won. Oh, I have a new job. And normally, I think when you have a new job, you have some time to transition. And I just kind of literally went from one to another. I, just like Hmong is going to do, incoming as our president, I took the first few months to listen. I listened to an awful lot. I listened to people from Purdue, people who knew what global was, what it meant. I listened to people who worked at Purdue Global, my new team, my new faculty, people I didn't know. I listened to other people in higher education just to try to find out, so what does this mean to ACE? Or what does this mean, you know? And then I started to formulate, where do we wanna go? What do we wanna be? How do we wanna do it? And what were your initial goals coming in? You took those first couple months to kind of settle in, listen. Well, I can come back to your Purdueness. Okay. Okay. I think out of the gate, the way this had been set up is Purdue Global had been set up as a separate entity owned and controlled by Purdue Westloff yet. Okay. And we have others. I mean, athletics technically is a separate entity. PRF, I mean, it goes on and on. And so that's not unusual on campus. But to a certain extent, when we started, we said, well, Purdue Global has their own accreditation, their own degrees, their own faculty. They're over here, Westloff yet's over here. As I started to look at it and started to understand it, one of the things in the first few months that I looked at the separation and it didn't make much sense to me. Sure. And I working with President Daniels and the board, I says, I really think that if the name Purdue is on this, we need to infuse Purdue Global with more of what it means to be Purdue. Yeah, I love that. And so what were some of those things? Well, I think by far what we've done, and President Daniels has mentioned this in several of the recent board members, the reason we're here is to serve students. The reason we're here is to help these individuals that much of higher ed is overlooking, help them get meaningful degrees that are gonna help them in their degree. By far, that is our driving mission. So students access and do a better job with that. And that was a lot what I did in the Provost Office when I was there. So that in ways just easily transferred over. And it goes on and on and on. I mean, Purdue, as you know, is just this, it's sometimes really hard to put it into words. But when you use the word, it means something to you if you understand it. Absolutely. And some of these students are, well, a lot of the students are a bit more non-traditional. Well, virtually all of the students are, you know, and let's just say traditional means you're typically starting at age 18 and gonna go through and just like you did and my daughters did, right? And that's great. And West Lafayette is a magnificent place for students like that. My students are just the opposite. Most of them started but didn't finish. For one reason or another, you know, you probably had friends who started and didn't finish and sometimes it was they didn't see irrelevance. They didn't know what they wanted to study. Sometimes it might have been financial. Sometimes it might be life got in the way is the way that people talk about it. I have about 30% of my students are military, 5,000 active duty. Wow. The 18 year olds went into the Army. And guess what? They're in the Army and they're also taking courses with me because the Army's saying we need smart soldiers. So they're getting a degree while they're going through their progression of specializations within the Army. But the students to me, you use the word traditional and that's really an important word because higher education in many respects is a very tradition bound institution across society, right? And but yet I think the world has changed. And the world we live in, this thing called the Internet of Things, it means that people are in their 30s and 40s need a level of data literacy and sophistication and working with technology that wasn't there even 10 years ago. Right. Even when I was in school. Exactly. Some of these things. I never learned. I don't know how to do some of these things. So how were you supposed to have a meaningful career if you don't have that opportunity? Right. And let me go back to my students. This is a fairly typical student. About 60% of them are coming from what we call, I call an A to B partnership, academic to business partnership. So they're working somewhere. You're working and someone says, hey Kate, you are a great worker. You do a great job. But you know what? I can't give you a promotion because you don't have a degree. But I have so much faith in you and I see so much potential in you. I'm willing to pay for you to go back to school. Okay. Now, when you come back and let's say you're 30 and you might have kids or you know, you have a job, you might have kids, you might have other things in life, you're coming to school with a very different mindset than people coming in at 18. Right. And so it means my education is built a little bit different. My education model. And a lot of people are familiar with what it means to come as 18 and go, et cetera. For me, almost all my students are part-time. They're taking one or two. But on the other hand, most of them go year-round. They don't take summer off, they just go, they just go, they just go. Another real difference about, my students get about 50% of their credits because they were in school before. Okay. And that's their life experience. And let me give you an example. We have a bunch of students with us from Walmart who've done Walmart store manager training. And you start looking at the training and guess what, you know, a lot about HR, you know, a lot about giving annually about. And we look at that. We take our faculty, we look at training programs. We say, oh, they did seven hours of this training. Well, that's exactly what we would cover in this particular course. And wherever we can find that you've already learned something. And moreover, if an employer like Walmart says, and we think this training's pretty good, I mean, we give people promotions because of this. We're saying, okay, we're gonna give you credit for it. And that allows people to speed through a little bit. And so when these students are going part-time, how quickly can they finish? Is there a? No, that's, because you're going year-round, most of them get done in two years or a little over two years. Okay, so that's appealing to a lot of people who have a lot going on. Well, they want, and also they want to get on with life. Sure. So they come to us incredibly focused. They talk about, there's two models. One is you're gonna be the full-time parent, help your children do their homework, except put them to bed, and then you stay up till 1 a.m. or whatever, getting, or you get up early. There's other cases that where parents talk about doing homework at the same table with their kids, trying to be this role model for them. Right, that's really special. How does Purdue Global promote Purdue's land-grant mission to extend education to everyone you talked about, President Daniels, presenting in front of the Senate, and we want all of these millions of people to have the same access? Another great question. And actually it doesn't extend it to everyone, all right? So, but it does extend it, okay? And you can think about the land-grant mission in Purdue and places like Ohio State, a lot of Big Ten schools talk about being land-grants. What land-grant means is you're an institution whose mission is to provide opportunity, okay? And you go back to the origins of the Morrill Act, 1862, middle of the Civil War, and here's Congress and President Lincoln said, you know where society is today, we need more people who have been taught in agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts along with the rest of a classical education. Now, why were they doing that in the 1860s? We're at the start of the Industrial Revolution and Mechanization. And people coming from a pure liberal arts program really weren't equipped to fill in society's roles, all right? Now, let's fast forward 150, 160 years. What do we need today in society? And we have that already talked about how do you work today if you're not data literate, technology literate? The world has changed the expectations of opportunity. I say it is an extension. As a land grant, Purdue's responsibility is to provide educational opportunity to those seeking to work, to meet what society needs. And that's what we're doing. That's what we're serving. And so I would say that I don't serve, I have about 34,000 students. There's only about 100 of them who are like 18 or under traditional, okay? Okay. And I can tell your passion about these students. Not at all. No, yeah, yeah. I'm sure everyone can tell. What do you want them to see with you as their chancellor? Like what do you stand for and want your students to know about Purdue Global? How you care for them? How you're passionate about them? Well, you just answered your own question in many ways. I mean, all the things that you said, I think at the core, for people who may start a college at 18, 19, didn't finish, now you're, let's say close to 30, sometimes you think life got by you. And you're looking at what you need to move your life forward. This notion about getting another opportunity is really important, but a lot of them come, especially the first term, incredibly nervous. I don't know if I can, I didn't do it before, can I do it now? So out of the gate, I think the most important thing we can show them is we really care about their success. And how do I care about supporting you with tutoring programs and coaching and things like that to help you move through? I think once they see that and once they experience it, then they start to take it on themselves and pay it forward kind of a mentality. And you've gone over a lot of different things that make Purdue Global unique. Are there any other things you wanna discuss? Like how is it different from these other, we're kind of almost getting blasted with all of these different online accreditations lately, right? Yeah, well, I mean, I think part of that might be because of COVID, right? A lot of schools overnight became online institutions. I think, and some of them are really fine institutions, okay? I think there's one difference that with Purdue Global relative to most of the other, Purdue Global can say it's part of Purdue. And I can give you one good example is we're in conversations right now with a company who is here to hire Purdue engineers, yay, all right? But when we were in the conversation, they talked about some of their other needs and guess what it is? They have a whole bunch of people who support the engineers who also need to have their skill set improved. And when we started talking about some of the programs we had at Purdue Global, they got more excited about that or as excited because they said, we can build teams of both the engineer along with the tech support team that's gonna go with them. And they said, we can't find that anywhere else. I think that's what's gonna set Purdue apart from everybody else in the space at this time. Absolutely, that Purdue brand. Yes. So have you been at Purdue 20-ish? Came in 98, so this is like my 25th year this month. Okay, so 25 years. What does this Purdue community mean to you? Your daughters went to Purdue, you've been ingrained in this West Lafayette community. There's a spirit at Purdue of number one, you know, just like I said, one of the things that President Daniels had with Purdue Global, it's like go big or go home, all right? But that's true as you go across campus on the work that faculty do and their research teams and their projects and things like Discovery Park would be a good example. And I worked with some of the most incredible people in the world, so you're with these brilliant people, great grad students, wonderful staff, but you're also working on some of the most meaningful problems of the day. And to me, part of the appeal of Purdue is we've always been here trying to solve the problems facing us. And so there's a relevance, I guess, to me that allows me to get excited, especially when you start to see that you're answering the questions. What about a favorite memory or story throughout your time? It can be before Purdue Global pops up on your radar, it could be during your time as chancellor at Purdue Global. Oh, well, at that Global, I think my favorite stories are probably all around graduation and two reasons. I mean, number one, it's graduation's always a time to celebrate and it's easy to have great memories about celebrations, right? But number two, that's one of the few times we actually convene and have people together. Most of my time, you know, fully online, most of my time's looking at people in a little box. I had, we did our first live graduation a year ago, August, and two great memories of that one. One is we use students to be the speakers or recent alum, like they might have graduated the term before. They come to us and they can speak to our other student body with an authenticity that no one else could. Right. Christopher Fairbank was the speaker last August and he talked about some of the challenges in his life. He had a lot of challenges in his life, but throughout his whole life, the thing his dad kept saying to Christopher, what are you gonna do about it? I walked away from that and I look at the challenges, our students have challenges and one of the things we're now asking ourselves as a university, what are we gonna do about it? So when you, and guess what? When you challenge people, they respond to it. So that is a fabulous memory of that. And the other one was the emotion of graduation. And I've told this story in a number of settings. Some of you heard it, but there was a woman coming up on the stage and I didn't know if she was going to faint and fall out. She was just trembling. And finally she inches her way towards me and I said, are you okay? And because I thought she might pass out or something. She says, very, you know, she was just trembling and the words is I never thought I would graduate from college. And then I said to her, because we're in DC and the auditorium says, so you have anyone here with you? She says, my sister, my mother and my daughter and I says, point them to me and she points up and then you just heard this tiny little voice that's my mama and then there were tears cascading and I mean, but her emotion all came. But you know, so many of my students are parents like 65% have kids and over and over again they tell me it's so important. One of the reasons they're doing it, I wanna be a role model for my children. I wanna set an example. So those stories, they touch ya. They're, oh man. Yeah, you're almost crying like they're, yeah. Oh man, I don't have any kids yet but I can only imagine how that would feel to hear your little girl yelling that. So there's a lot of resiliency with these students, right? I mean, they overcome so much and then you talked about that emotion. That's really special. Yeah, it really is. Is there anything else I missed about kind of the curriculum, the courses that you wanna touch on with Pretty Global? Well, I'll just give you one factoid, right? I mean, it's always nice to have at least one factoid to walk away with. So at West Lafayette, in a typical year, students, the undergrad students take about a million credit hours, all right? And they also get credit for about 150,000 hours of transfer credit, but almost all of that is AP, okay? So, you know, million to 150,000. My students take 1.2 million credit hours, about the same, they get a million hours of transfer credit. And of that, about a fourth of it is for those, you know, the folks at Walmart who did managerial training and things like that and were awarding credit for life experience. So it's a different. My students aren't looking to take free electives. They know what they wanna do. Well, but they're also, they're 30 instead of 18. You know, a big part of being 18 is you have many options and you kinda need to narrow it to pick a major. I bet you had to go through that, right? Sure, discovering what you like. Yeah, discovering. My people have discovered they're very purpose driven. They know I wanna get a degree in nursing and I wanna be able to move into this position in 18 months. So I think it's having that drive really allows them to move forward. I'll just give you a couple other stats. There's a measure of being poor and we don't like to call it that, but that's really what, it's called Pell. And Pell is given to low income people. Purdue and most of the big 10, it's about 17, 18% of the students. I'm 60%, okay? You know, another measure is first generation. Purdue, West Lafayette, it's about 20%. I'm 58%. So a lot of my students come to school, they don't have that guide that mentored. They don't know how to navigate. And that's why it's so important for us to do all these things that we're starting to do to help them understand directionally. You need to do this if you wanna get here. They're certainly smart enough and bright enough to get there. What they really need is a guide to help them understand the path. That makes sense. What are you really excited about in the next year or so? In the next year? Well, the next year. I don't know if you've been following, but the board has done some great things for Purdue Global. Yes. We just talked to Sean Taylor. Oh yeah? Oh, yeah. And I mean, here are some of the things I'm most excited about. The board is really positioning global to be a greater part of Purdue. And I can give you three quick examples. Purdue Online, led by Gary Bertolini, we're working, we meet all the time on things we can do together, all right? The Office of Industry Partnerships is led by a person by the name of Nathan Utz. The Office of OIP is the part of Purdue that makes contracts with different companies and the government. And historically, they've done a lot around research contracts. Well, now, one of the things companies say, what do you guys have educationally online? Nathan is supporting me there. So are those like those Walmart examples that you used? Exactly, yeah, yeah. And then third is there's this office led by a guy by the name of Ethan Braden. I know him. I think I know him. So Ethan, Purdue Marketing, Ethan is my chief marketing officer at this point. And Ethan comes to the room with an energy and an enthusiasm and a belief in Purdue. So when you're at global and my staff and my faculty, my leadership team, all of a sudden we've seen how much Purdue is coming to us and saying, hey, we can help you with this, we can help you with this. It is just opening eyes and we are so excited about that. And then not put on top of that, come January one, we're gonna have a new president. So there's lots coming in the next few months. Lots to be excited about. Absolutely. What role would you say Purdue has played in your life? Well, I've been here 25 years. I think it might go both ways. I think Purdue attracts a certain type of person. And I go back earlier, I talked about the work you got to do with these incredibly smart people. I found with Purdue a place that allowed me to push myself that supported me when I did that, believe it or not, is open to failing at some things, right, but was still supportive. And the other thing is that Purdue, as a faculty member and academic, when you said you were from Purdue, you could always get important doors open to you because we have that much respect around the world. And then finally it just, it never felt like work. Because it was just so much fun. No it is, it was just so much fun to be with the people we were with. That's special. Who do you think of when you think of Purdue? Is there any person that sticks out? Oh, I don't know that there's any one person. I think it's actually people. It's, and I would start with students, the love that students have for this place, you quickly see, I would say it's staff, like the people, their advisors, success coaches, I mean that, and then the faculty. You know, the faculty care deeply about this place as well and can you forget the alum, it just goes on and on. So, but it's not any one person. I think that, if it was only one person, it'd feel a little shallow, wouldn't it? Right. Or it'd feel like you had a secret and you weren't letting people in on it. This place doesn't need to be a secret. This is a place we need to be telling everyone what we're doing. That was the first time I've ever asked that question and I don't think anyone will answer it better than that. Well, I don't know about that. I would hope, but I gave it a shot. How was that? I love it. No, it's a great answer to that community and that spirit that you've talked about. Is there anything else that you wanna tell our listeners? I'm gonna make you tear up again, if I can do that. Usually it's me making other people tear up. Really? Well, I'm really pretty tough to tear up. There was one other person who deserves a lot of credit for Purdue Global and that was Morgan Burke. And so a lot of your listeners are gonna recognize Morgan as the former athletic director. Morgan, what some people don't know, before he came back to be the AD at Purdue, ran HR at Inland Steel for a number of years. When Morgan started at Inland Steel, they had 30-some thousand employees. When he left, they had about 8,000. And what Morgan said, doing HR at Inland at that time basically meant every week you're giving out another 100 pink slips. Morgan worked a lot with me that first year. He wanted this because Morgan said, my job at Inland Steel would have been so much better if I could have gone. He says, Kate, you don't have a job with Inland Steel, but we're gonna pay for your college to go to a place like Purdue Global. Morgan is one of the people who really persuaded me that I should take the chancellor role and do that. And Morgan and I talked every day about what it is, what we should be doing, how do you support people, how you build teams. And he always ended the call. A lot of his phone calls goes to COVID at this time. He'd say, I'm always here for you. And then unfortunately on June 15th of 2020, I'd been here for six weeks. His wife, Kate, calls me. Morgan died this morning. And if there's anything that drives me, is serving his memory as well. And it's people like that who just give their entirety to a cause is why we're gonna be a great success. What do you think he'd say to you today? I'm always here for you. Then you know where he'd end? Boiler up, hammer down. I love it. Yeah. Is there anything else? I think that was wonderful. I don't know how you can do better than boiler up, hammer down, help or do. We gotta end it with that. Well, thank you so much. We had a blast. Awesome.