These days, most higher-education leaders are insufferable leftist virtue-signalers, intent on making their institutions as “woke” as possible. That’s the way they climb the ladder to better jobs at more prestigious schools.
There are, however, a few exceptions. The best-known is, I would say, Mitch Daniels. The former Indiana governor took the helm at Purdue a decade ago and has improved the university. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Rich Vedder discusses Daniels and his accomplishments.
For one thing, Purdue didn’t increase tuition. Vedder writes, “President Daniels is probably best known for freezing the tuition fees of Purdue for 11 years, through the next academic year. Since the Consumer Price Index over the same period will have risen far more than 20 percent, in an inflation-adjusted sense Mitch (which is what everyone calls him) has probably presided over the sharpest prolonged real reduction in major American university tuition fees in modern American history.”
Most college presidents are intent on squeezing as much money as they can from students and taxpayers to fund their empires. Not Daniels.
Also, he concentrated on educational programs that graduated students with skills that were in demand, not on churning out grads whose heads were stuffed with all sorts of progressive theories and a disdain for American values.
Vedder concludes, “Good leadership that can restore higher education’s positive role is desperately needed within universities, as well as in the organizations, especially governments, that help finance and increasingly regulate them.”