Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, is worth watching. His changes as governor of Indiana helped position the state for strong economic growth, and he takes his new job (which he’s held for a bit more than two years) just as seriously. He has imposed a combination of cost-cutting measures and qualitative reforms, as I described more than a year ago.

At the time, I noted that he had avoided some tough issues such as faculty workloads, curriculum, and tenure.

Today, Inside Higher Ed discusses Purdue’s latest reform, which is a surprising alternative to any of those—and it’s still rankling faculty!

Purdue’s provost, Debba Dutta, has announced that a faculty member’s success in mentoring students, particularly “at-risk” students, will count in his or her tenure review. Dutta told IHE that the change is “putting the student experience and student success at a higher level than most universities do.” Other new criteria will give credit for undergraduate research and “pedagogical innovation,” but mentoring is the most important.

The idea immediately elicited a negative reaction from David A. Sanders, vice chair of the Faculty Senate. He is not opposed to mentoring (he does a lot of it) but he didn’t like the fact that a major change in tenure review should stem from the newly developed Gallup-Purdue survey of alumni. He told IHE that the survey was flawed, and relying on it to change policies was a “travesty.”

Let’s see what happens.