 Hi, I'm Kate Young, and you're listening to This Is Purdue, the official podcast for Purdue University. As a Purdue alum and Indiana native, I know firsthand about the family of students and professors who are in it together, persistently pursuing and relentlessly rethinking. Who are the next game changers, difference makers, ceiling breakers, innovators? Who are these boiler makers? Join me as we feature students, faculty and alumni taking small steps toward their giant leaps and inspiring others to do the same. We've always been proud, and I think that's part of it. I've talked to so many people, and it starts the same. For me, it started at Purdue. I owe it to Purdue, if not for Purdue. It's the thing I love the very most about this place, as you can see from my sniffles. And I hope the last year added a layer on top of that. This week on This Is Purdue, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels joins us for the first time. We discussed his decision, which some called brave and others called risky, to fully open Purdue amid a pandemic and communicate this to the world, something few other university presidents were doing at the time. I thought it would be a default of responsibility to just throw up our hands and say, this might not work so, all 35,000 of you figure it out. We talked about what he missed most during the past school year. Oh, contact with the students. We all have our own way of doing things, but mine for all these years has been be out a lot, and fun and around, going to events, the gym. A huge change for me. We even got his take for who would be the next Indianapolis 500 winner. Do you have any favorites for drivers? Are you betting on anyone? Oh, well, those are two different questions. I won't have any bets down now. But let's start at the beginning. Let's rewind back to March of 2020. It's a difficult time to look back on, that's for sure. Uncertainty cladded our every thought. There were serious thoughts like, when will it be safe to see my parents or grandparents again? When will I be able to hug my friends? And more trivial thoughts like, when can I go to a concert again? Will I ever get to travel and take that trip I had planned? You probably missed your coworkers and were adjusting to abruptly shifting to working from home, maybe even out of makeshift desk at your kitchen table. Here's President Daniels more than a year ago. I'm talking to you without any script today. And I guess that's fitting because there's no script for any of us in the changed environment that Purdue and this nation, the whole world finds itself in after the events of the last few months. When I watched this video, student leadership made Protect Purdue a success, which you can check out on our Purdue YouTube channel. And I saw the desolate streets of campus, memories came flooding back. It made me emotional. I think it makes anyone emotional when you really think about that time, seeing your favorite local stores and restaurants closing their doors, being holed up inside just as the weather was getting nice again in Indiana. President Daniels knew he had to act. He had to lean into the information and data from the experts and make a decision quickly. And keep in mind, this was a peak time of uncertainty. Everything around the world was closing. He explains what was going through his mind when he made the decision to keep Purdue University fully open and conduct in-person classes for the fall 2020 semester. What was it like and how did you feel telling the world last April, Purdue is going to be fully opened and have in-person classes and activities? Apprehensive. I felt very much it was the right thing to do if we could bring it off. I'll say it the other way around. I thought it would be a default of responsibility to just throw up our hands and say, this might not work so, all 35,000 of you figure it out, take a year off. But that's the essence of difficult decisions that you don't know and you can't know. And if you try to wait till you think you know everything, it's usually way too late for whatever call that was to succeed. What do you think you were most worried about leading up to the 2020 to 21 school year? The factors that would have caused us to call a halt or make a U-turn were three in Disha that I think I worried about or thought about the most. First and foremost was severity. I don't know why others didn't do this, but early on I asked our medical advisors, construct for us a simple measure of how ill people are because if any significant number of either students or staff were getting really dangerously ill, that would have been a trigger. And so there was a one to six little simple system. They created one asymptomatic all the way up to six. You better go to the hospital. Only 2% of all the cases we had all year ever got past level three or something like that. So that was one thing that we watched very carefully and happily we had just a tiny number even of hospitalizations and those resolved. So then the second thing would have been if we'd run out of quarantine space because we knew it was essential when someone had it so transmissible to move them to a place till they weren't going to infect someone else. We never got close to that either. We, again, we turned out we had many more beds for that than we thought we might. And the third thing would have been if the local hospitals, intensive care units were overwhelmed and we had anything to do with it. It was our staff or our students. Happily that didn't happen either. Those were the three, maybe not the only three, but those were the three indicators that I probably watched the most closely. The one thing I hear over and over from Purdue's leaders is how the students really stepped up over the past year. College is such a special time. I have so many fond memories from that time in my life. It's part of why I'm so honored to work on this podcast and tell these stories. But add in masks covering everyone's faces, plexiglass in classrooms and social distancing from your friends and remove the roar of the crowd at Macchi Arena during a big game and grilling out at football tailgates. That is hard. That isn't a normal college experience. But these Boilermakers students met all of the safety expectations and more. Through persistence, patience, and perseverance, Purdue weathered the many unique obstacles at the COVID-19 pandemic placed on institutions. President Daniels reflects on the past school year and the lessons learned. Well, we've all learned so much. We could fill another podcast with what we've learned about how to mix online instruction with in-person about work that does pretty darn well on a remote basis or partially remote. There are all sorts of lessons like that that I hope we learn and adapt. It'll make people's work family lives better. It'll be environmentally better if fewer people are driving and parking and so forth. To me, it was not a surprise that this university, and I'm gonna go back to the students first and foremost, did come together and achieve what it did. Not a big surprise, but certainly gratifying to see one's impressions or positive suspicions borne out. Yeah, and I talked to Dr. Ramirez and he just had so much praise for the students. And I know I've heard you speak as well on that. Is there anything that, looking back, maybe you would have done differently? Maybe the dollars we spent, the effort we spent, could have been directed at something else. I hope we won't have to go through it again, but there's quite a playbook, and we've tried to be very honest with ourselves and others about things that were valuable, others that weren't. I think the one thing I would emphasize is we probably should have been more attentive, maybe aggressive than we were. Too many courses were started on in-person or were listed as in-person, and then somehow changed to online. And too many students were disappointed that that had happened. And I'd heard from some students to whom it happened, maybe three or four courses. And that wasn't a good thing. If we ever had to go through it again, I think we'd be much more alert to that, try to prevent that happening wherever possible. Purdue has a strong sense of community. There's just something special you feel when you see someone walking by with a Purdue hat on or hearing a boiler up when someone tells you that they too are a Purdue alum. That being said, Purdue isn't the only school in Indiana. And who doesn't love a good rivalry? You may remember this commercial from the Purdue men's basketball game against a certain rival in Southern Indiana. I must have been asked a hundred times how it was that we were able to operate Purdue to keep it open. The Boilermakers keep going video. I remember watching that during the IU Purdue game. I turned to my husband who's an IU graduate and I was like, did you just see that? He was like, that was good, I'll admit it. I just remember feeling so proud to be a Boilermaker. Was there a certain moment that you can look back on and think of that you were the most proud of this Purdue community? Oh, I was proud throughout that. I was proud of our folks for making that video. I had said to them before, an unrelated really to the pandemic, we get these slots on the Big Ten Network and occasionally somewhere else where you're able to put your institution on display for 60 seconds. I said, ours looked just like everybody else's. People standing around with beakers and huddled over a computer screen or something. I said, now there's some things that are unique about Purdue. And we should emphasize those. Well, came this last year and we really did have something that was different. So many of our peers didn't go to school at all or everybody was stuck in their room all the time or that, you know, no in-person classes and so. And so I was, I thought they did a really great job of showing others what, if you were here, you saw our students, our faculty, this institution coming together to achieve. I'll also use this opportunity to plug that Purdue won its ninth straight game against that school from down south, the night that commercial aired. Anyways, when you look at the number of things President Daniels has done for Purdue, well, we could do a whole different podcast series on that. Tuition Freezes, he's downright famous for that. Food service and room and board cost cuts, a first of its kind partnership with Amazon to save students money on textbooks. Plus Purdue's student teacher ratio is 13 to one compared with the big 10 average of more than 15 to one. I read an article by the Atlantic where they referred to President Daniels as a rock star. The author described the president snaking through crowds at a Purdue football tailgate, pre-COVID of course, where people young and old shouted his name and students exclaimed how much money he had saved them. It's no surprise the president is often referred to as a man of the students. What did you miss the most about the school year last year? Oh, contact with the students. Now, we all have our own way of doing things, but mine for all these years been be out a lot and fun and around, going to events, the gym. A huge change for me. I used to go three and four times a week and to the co-rec, couldn't do that, had to swap for something much more limited. Did you get a Peloton? No, I've borrowed a couple of aerobic machines, not a Peloton and some weights, but I'll say the range and variety of the workout has shrunk some, but I'm still sort of in routine maintenance at this point. As a man of the students, you didn't think President Daniels would just walk into this year's commencement ceremony, did you? After everything the Purdue faculty, staff, and students have been through this year? Oh, no. The couch that Ethan and Nathan put together was such a boiler maker thing to do, first of all. You know, inventive, innovative, a little fun, and as long as the school's been here, we've had great tinkerers and inventors. And so, as I think you know, it's a gold card engine with a garden cart they bought at the Menards or somewhere, and a couch that was exactly what I'll say, male students, college couch probably should look like. I remember those kind holes in them and springs almost coming out of them, actually quite a comfortable ride. You know, I told people it doesn't corner very well, but it has a good straight line acceleration. Along with this unforgettable entrance into Rossade Stadium, an unforgettable commencement speech, which President Daniels admits was a bit different to write this year versus previous years. What was it like writing your commencement speech this year? I always do it or try to have a first draft done over Christmas vacation. It's my big homework assignment of the year. You know, I personally, although it is always a worry item for me, I think it's a good tradition at Purdue that whoever has this job, give that speech. For one thing, it simplifies the problem of who you invite, will somebody not like the choice? Probably ensures that we keep the, at least while I'm doing it, that we keep the ceremony a little bit concise and tight. But I worry over it because every student sitting there has worked awfully hard, and I feel like I should also try to say something that is meaningful. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, we've all heard commencement speeches where somebody pulled out of Bartlett's quotations and strung together a bunch of cliches, and I try to do something that fits the times in the moment. Now this year, as I wrote it, and it really didn't change much after New Year's, I was very conscious that this whole thing could be rendered obsolete because COVID is still evolving, and it certainly was back then. So I thought, you know, this might be something I have to start over on, but I didn't. And it seemed to be very well received. I've gotten lots and lots of nice comments and people elsewhere. I was interviewed on national television yesterday by somebody who saw it and thought it had some value to it. So as I say, it's always my number one assignment of the year, and I think it came off reasonably well. I agree. Did you feel differently writing it this year versus past years, though, because of all of the different challenges and adversity that Purdue has a whole face this year? I think so, because while I always try to think about those messages from a Purdue standpoint and a student standpoint, this year was, to me, you couldn't give a talk at the end of this year and not center it somehow on the experience that we just went through. But I just thought that, especially what our students did, the way they conducted themselves, the character that they showed, which as I've said over and over, was the indispensable element. Yes, we did a hundred other things so that everyone's education could keep moving unimpeded, but would have all gone for naught had we not had the kind of students that we did. And so to that extent, I thought it wrote itself and then I tried to put it in the larger context that, in my opinion, too many other places, too many other people and institutions did not live up to their responsibilities and we expect our graduates, wherever they go, to do so. Sure, and you talked a lot about taking risks and the importance of making these big decisions and looking back, do you ever second guess your decision to fully open Purdue? Well, it ended well, so you don't have to now. I wouldn't use the word second guess, but I would say, I mean, on a daily basis, we questioned what we were doing. First thing, every morning of last semester, in the second semester, we were able to feather it back to three and then two times a week because I don't believe in meetings for the meeting's sake. But last semester, every morning, first thing, we were looking at the data, looking at where the cases were, were any of them severe? So of course, we were fretting about that on a constant basis, knowing that, however, under control things seem to be today, we could get up tomorrow and have a different situation. And we learned a lot, I mean, you say second guess, I mean, now we can look back and I pointed out, we did a number of things that we thought might help. Now we know much more and probably didn't need two miles of plexiglass, didn't need to spend all the time we did rearranging dorm rooms and the beds. We probably cleaned and sanitized surfaces more obsessively than made any real difference, but we weren't gonna leave anything to chance. And so to that extent, I'm glad we did, we did even though some of it was probably not too important. Purdue University recently lifted the mandate to wear masks outdoors on campus and the Protect Purdue Initiative, which we highlighted in episode 29 of This Is Purdue with Dr. Esteban Ramirez has now vaccinated more than 17,000 students. While leading the big 10 in the number of students in a classroom, there were zero COVID-19 cases traced back to a Purdue classroom this past year. But we're not out of the woods yet, as President Daniels explains. You recently released a video encouraging students to get their vaccines. What do you think needs to change in order for things to open up even more in the fall? It'll depend more than anything else on the rate of vaccination of particular students, but also our staff. And as you know, we've opted for a, I'll call it a free choice approach. People have the option to stay with testing, regular testing, which we all went through this last year, but we are strongly encouraging. We think all the evidence supports, hopefully as close to universal vaccination as we can get to on this campus. And the higher that rate is, the closer to the world we knew, we can approach and still know that we're not endangering anybody. What about higher ed as a whole? What could it look like after we emerge from this pandemic? Higher ed will be different whenever we're past this. Because first of all, it has caused even more people to question its value. Now, we've talked here at Purdue now for about a decade about higher education at the highest proven value. Such an obvious thing to emphasize, I think, because we search for value everywhere else, by a house, by a car, by your groceries, pick choice of restaurants. And now people are already asking, I think, the right questions. How much education will I, or my child, garner at institution A versus B per dollar spent? And now I think that's all become much more important. Clearly we will be asked to and need to respond to the interest of students in a more flexible education. And so we were already headed this direction, but we better hit there fast if we wanna succeed in the new environment. So that means even more opportunities for work experience, internships, and study abroad. And we're already offering a lot of three-year degrees, which I think may become more popular with students who wanna get on with it more affordably, get out and start earning their way in the world. So we're gonna have to be open to these kind of ideas and I hope a step ahead of other schools in providing them. President Daniels highlights what he's looking forward to in the next year and no pressure, Coach Painter. You've already touched on this a little bit about how you enjoy being out on the campus, interacting with students. What else are you looking forward to come fall 2021? How about a national basketball championship? I'd love to hear that. We're gonna be good. I'm looking forward to seeing and I hope discovering that Purdue at record size is still maintaining its quality, its rigor. A good personal individual experience for students, even though we're gonna have more than by far than we've ever had. Most of your viewers, I hope, will know that for the fourth year out of the last five, it's record attendance, first 10,000-person class, it appears in Purdue history and that's probably anything I've seen, the biggest in the Big 10. Now that's wonderful that this university is attracting students from everywhere, great students, but it imposes a great responsibility on us to maintain and keep enhancing it, the quality. Each person's experience gets harder as the scale gets bigger. A lot of our faculty and others here talk about excellence at scale. Got the biggest engineering school in the world's top five or 10. And I don't wanna say it's easy. It's a lot easier to have excellence in a very small, if you're dealing with small numbers. So I'm looking forward to that, seeing us meet that very positive challenge as a community. And you mentioned, obviously, the planning for next year is in full swing and you recently relaunched your presidential lecture series. Is there anyone that you'd love to see come to Purdue and speak in that? I don't think we're quite ready to announce the series yet, but I've already recruited two or three and that's probably what we'll have in a given semester. I'll just say that in any job, a person should ask herself, himself, where can I add some values? There's something I can do that is in any way different or additive to what's already going on. Well, one of those things seemed to me was that because of past lives I'd lived, I might be able to, I sometimes say, increase the intellectual traffic flow through campus and recruit people to come here who might not otherwise. So I hope we can do that again. I think it could be a real part of our students and faculty and our neighboring community, positive experience. And so yeah, I look forward to getting that rolling again and I hope in person as we were accustomed to before. Before becoming Purdue's president, Mitch Daniels of course had other roles. The most famous probably was serving as the governor of Indiana. He was our man, Mitch. But before that, he worked at Eli Lilly & Company, headquartered in Indianapolis, serving as president of North American pharmaceutical operations and later senior vice president of corporate strategy and policy. Lilly has partnered with several Purdue related programs. And once you're finished listening to this episode, I highly recommend going back and listening to our Datamine and Purdue Polytechnic High School episodes, which highlight these relationships further. President Daniels goes on to explain what it means to him to see his past and current world intertwine. Anything involving Lilly has special, I have special affection for, I frankly, I've told a lot of students here who asked about career planning. I laugh and talk about what a lousy career planner I was and just life planned me. I thought I would finish my working days at Eli Lilly & Company. I believed in our mission with saving lives, improving lives, advancing science. The people there were invariably of great character and mutually supportive of each other. It was just a wonderful place to work. And that corporation was a great community. So of course, I'm very interested in any time we interact with them. They're year in, year out, let's face it, we're good for Lilly because for decades now and still the case, they're one of our top, they hire more graduates here than almost any company. But no, it's no surprise. They've been great, as we say, corporate citizens for as long as that company's been there. And so the only surprise would be if they weren't directly involved in helping us with our high schools or programs here on campus. And meanwhile, now the whole world has learned how fortunate we are to have great pharmaceutical companies, great science that goes on there. They've just saved who knows how many lives. Yeah, absolutely. And you said on the business and beyond podcast recently that there's a piece of you that's glad that you didn't run for president because you would have never ended up here at Purdue. What have the past eight years meant to you? Well, not a piece of me, all of me. True, you're all here. I've told some of our folks with people when they bring that up, I say things like, at this point in life, I'm not taking the demotion. I wouldn't have missed this for the world. I didn't see it coming. As I said, I thought I'd finish my working days at that great company we just discussed. The life changed not once, but three times since. And this change was my favorite in many respects. No, I mean, it's been a huge learning experience for me and hope we've contributed some things to advancing the university's interest. But I can't imagine anything else I might have done being more fulfilling than the time we've been able to spend at Purdue. It's not hard to hear how much admiration President Daniels holds for Purdue. And that being said, I thought it was important to get to know the personal side of President Daniels. So let's get into some fun things. Well, this has been fun. You mean we would have more fun than that? So it wouldn't be Indiana if we didn't talk about the Indianapolis 500. Do you plan on going to the race? Oh, yeah. So you have seats, sir. Well, I've been to a lot of... Well, full disclosure, I have been involved with previously the Holman Corporation and now Penske Entertainment, which is this marvelous development of this great, great person, Roger Penske. Now I've gotten to know a little bit. He's everything that he was reported to be. Dynamo in his 80s and just done great things there and everywhere else he's been in business. So yes, I'll be there as I have been over and over. I've... On that shelf over there, you can see a picture of me. I've been... I was a big booster of auto racing, especially in my last job in particular and even before that. And as far as I know, I'm the only person from elected office who's ever been the official starter of the race. It was 2012, your graduation year. Scary, by the way. Because you were in the car. Well, I've done that. No, I mean, I was, I waved a green flag. And those cars are roaring fast too. And a lot of wind up there. And when I say scary, I say, you know, I don't know if anybody's gonna see this flag, but I'll tell you what's not gonna happen. It's not gonna wind up in the first turn because I've never lived it down. That was a fabulous opportunity. And you know, I don't know when anyone will see this conversation we're having, but the this year's race, it's always one of the biggest sporting events in the year. That's always the biggest spectator event of any kind in the world. But this year, it's not just a sporting event. If it goes off, well, let's hope and pray it does. I mean, it is a big, it's a worldwide event on the way back to normalcy. This will be the most people in one place for any reason, I think, since the pandemic started. And so it's, in a way, it's a medical event as well as the greatest spectacle in racing. Right. Do you have any favorites for drivers? Are you betting on anyone? Oh, well, those are two different questions. I won't have any bets there. Ed Carpenter, if you just make me pick somebody, he's a great person and he's homegrown, got a route for the home team. We've got a number of teams and drivers from Indiana, but Ed is one. So yeah, I'll be watching the 20 car with special interest. But if there's anything I want you to take away from this episode, between serving as the governor of Indiana, working as a senior leader at Eli Lilly, and being part of U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush's administrations, President Daniels holds a very special place in his heart for Purdue University. I don't need to tell you this, though. You can hear it for yourself. Boilermakers have always had a special affinity and pride for this place. And that's not, that would be a natural thing. I'm sure people at every school feel that way, but this has been measured. And there is a statistically significant difference has been people's sense of loyalty and so forth. I've always assigned a lot of that to the fact that this is a place of upward mobility while land grant schools were created. I think in Purdue's case, it's especially pronounced. I say all the time, I've now had a chance for a decade to meet so many tremendous Purdue alums. Almost none of them came from privilege. This is the place where the young woman or man from the farm or the small town or the inner city came from. And then over and over by the now hundreds of thousands were launched on great lives. And so we've always been proud. And I think that's part of it. I've talked to so many people and it starts the same. For me, it started at Purdue. I owe it to Purdue, if not for Purdue. It's the thing I love the very most about this place as you can see from my sniffles. And I hope the last year added a layer on top of that for all the reasons we just discussed. Absolutely. It's like the couch. Somebody said, well, that's a Purdue thing. You know, tinkering around and bending something that works. And I'd like to think that our navigating through this difficult circumstance expressed something that's always been there about this place. You can check out our full video interview with President Daniels on YouTube. Just head over to youtube.com slash Purdue. Thanks for listening to This is Purdue. For more information on this episode, visit our website at purdue.edu slash podcast. There you can head over to your favorite podcast app to subscribe and leave us a review. And as always, boiler up.