Higher Ed Under Fire: Gov. Mitch Daniels on Reform, Accountability & Trump

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Mitch Daniels, welcome back to the show.

 

MITCH DANIELS: Glad to be here.

 

ISAACSON: You have a piece in the Washington Post, an op-ed piece that, “Universities Lament Trump’s Attacks. How About Doing Some Atoning, Too?” What do you mean by the atoning?

 

DANIELS: I mean that I think that the damage higher ed has suffered in terms of public confidence is largely self-inflicted. And I’m rooting for the sector really to repair its relationships with students, with their families, and with the public at large. And so I think acknowledging that some mistakes have been made over time is the great place to start.

 

ISAACSON: Well, like what?

 

DANIELS: That they’ve been too inattentive to value, charged more because they could for so very long. Been more and more lax about rigor and standards and quality, and therefore if in the basic equation of life, which is quality over price, I think has gotten very badly outta whack. And the American public has caught onto that. I think also the well reported difficulties with regard to free speech enforced conformity of thought, lack of anything resembling diversity of viewpoint, these errors really have caught up to the sector. And as a fan of American higher ed, who believes it’s one of the great assets our country has always had, I, I’m just eager to see remedial action.

 

ISAACSON: Well, it’s not just verbal attacks by President Trump and others. It’s cutting funding for basic research. Now, I can understand saying that maybe not fighting antisemitism enough, or maybe some ways of doing affirmative action violate the constitution, but why go after the basic research foundations that have made for 80 years the United States a fountain of innovation?

 

DANIELS: I don’t agree with that, with at least most of those cuts, just as I don’t agree with the notion of stripping tax exemption from educational institutions that we have. I will say that I think that American science, not limited to our academic institutions, but basically centered there, has some correction, corrective action of its own to take. We’ve had this I think shameless notion of consensus. Consensus is a very enemy of science. The idea that the dissenters should be silenced or suppressed, some of those dissenters turned out to be right, and the so-called experts wrong. So sure, there’s been some schlock science that really didn’t deserve the taxpayers support. There’s been the problems of non replicability, some apparently shoddy work going on that nobody corrected. But we want the American public to have great confidence in our science, just as in these institutions you’re asking about. And they have a role to play in restoring that confidence.

 

ISAACSON: But 99% of the funding, say in the life sciences, wasn’t about debating or not debating Covid mandates. It was things like using gene therapies. You know, I was up there in Indiana with you at one point people using gene therapies for in the children’s hospital there. How is that gonna help the country if we make that the target rather than trying to use a bully pulpit to get universities to be more open?

 

DANIELS: I’m against using that as the target. In fact, that, you know, I, we have a baby in bathwater risk here. And that this is the, this is maybe the most precious baby that a high, to which higher ed gives birth. So, yes, I wanna see universities rebuild, as I say, a rapport and trust with the American public specifically so we don’t make mistakes like the cancellation of vital research about the health sciences or national security and other things which are plainly important to us all.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about indoctrination that may be many universities you say have engaged in. But we have a pretty free market system of universities. If you don’t like one, you can go to the other. They’re all independent. Why is it not that the best way to do it, to let each university decide how it’s gonna teach and let students and parents figure out which one to go to?

 

DANIELS: Well, there’s, first of all, the student doesn’t always know on the way in what’s awaiting them there. They don’t necessarily know that virtually a hundred percent of faculty at many institutions hold exactly the same views. You know, Walter, the single biggest problem with the homogenous, homogenous nature of ideologically on college campuses is that it strikes at the very heart of the academic enterprise. As I was saying about science a minute ago, knowledge only advances through the collision of ideas. And when everybody thinks exactly the same thing and spouts exactly the same line, it’s not advancing and it’s not being transmitted to the next generation in a way that will encourage them to be critical thinkers.

 

ISAACSON: What did you do as President Purdue to encourage more confrontational thinking, more open thinking?

 

DANIELS: We certainly, from the very outset, established a free speech code that made it very, very plain that, that all viewpoints were welcome and that we would not tolerate any attempts to quash or stifle viewpoints as long as they didn’t cross the line between speech and action. And so we had to enforce that a time or two. And I have to say that it was well received and that at least among our faculty and our student body, they quickly I think agreed that this was the only way, really for an academic institution to conduct itself.

 

ISAACSON: And would talk about free speech and how Purdue under you made sure that all different viewpoints could be more respectfully heard. But now, do you see or fear that it’s coming from the other direction a bit, as a student who gives a pro-Palestinian graduation speak, gets a diploma, withhold, or there’s ways to suppress free speech coming from the other side?

 

DANIELS: Both are inexcusable, of course. And you know, again, I think in some of the more recent incidents, the line between speech and action was crossed. In other words, I think it’s entirely appropriate that this time around one of our great institutions has suspended and apparently intends to sanction students who took over a library, disrupted the study of others, did some damage while they were there. So I think we have to make sure to keep that distinction in mind. But no, when it’s simply the expression of a point of view, our college campuses should be laboratories, should be training grounds for self-government. And instead in too many cases, they have been as I say sort of monolithic in the viewpoints that were permitted to be expressed.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about monolithic viewpoints, indoctrination, and indeed evidence that at many universities there’s a conformity of political thought, one side of the spectrum. But do you think it should be government’s role to try to stop that? And is it a problem having government tell universities what they should be teaching?

 

DANIELS: I think there is a, there is a difference between public and private universities. I think private universities, whatever their errors probably should be left as you suggested to the marketplace to be disciplined if it, if they can be. A public university is a little different thing when the taxpayers dollars are being used to provide that education. Some guardrails are not inappropriate in my, in my judgment. But no, as a general rule, I much prefer that as I say, the marketplace govern this. And you’re starting to see this. There’s a shakeout. It took longer than many people predicted, including me, to start. But you read the higher ed press as I do. Every day now, somebody’s closing, somebody’s consolidating, somebody’s shrinking. That’s too darn bad. And but again, I think the, many of the wounds were self-inflicted.

 

ISAACSON: What do you think might be some of the upsides of the attacks on universities? What do you see happening that you would like versus the downsides of trying to tell them what to do?

 

DANIELS: We’re seeing some I’ll call ’em foxhole conversions by a lot of, at a lot of places, who suddenly have rediscovered the importance of free speech and clear rules to protect it and promote it. We’re seeing people rediscover the advantages and the propriety of institutional neutrality. Again, our universities should be an arenas where ideas can compete, not participants in the debate themselves, where their own interests and business is not directly involved. So you know, I think this, it was belated, but I think it’s coming. And I guess that little somewhat whimsical piece that I wrote is just encouraging the sector to reform itself so that we don’t have a government and it’s typically clumsy and sometimes over, overstated way trying to do it to them.

 

ISAACSON: One of the real problems for higher education has been the cost. I mean, I wrote about something where 40 years ago, somebody could go to a state college for $38, maybe as a semester tuition. Now in the past 20 years, even state schools have gone up more than 140%, private universities, much more than that. Why, for, let’s start with why. Why has the cost inflated so much?

 

DANIELS: They raised the price of education because they could, Walter. I have sometimes said to people, now, here’s, here’s a business you should have gone into. You’re selling what is was, what was deemed at least to be a necessity. There’s questions around it now, but the bachelor’s degree was seen as an essential passport to a better life and career. There no, there’s been no measurement of quality. Nobody really knew if a sociology degree from school A was better or worse than one from school B. And so they raised prices because they could. And it went on for longer than 20 years. I’d say at least twice that long. So I was wrong. As I said, I thought the marketplace would push back much sooner than it did. But finally, you’re seeing it. Forgive me for inserting a commercial, but it doesn’t have to be this way. At Purdue University, the tuition and fees for all students is exactly the same now as it was in 2012, and will be for at least the next couple years. So if you prioritize affordability, accessibility and therefore the quality per dollar that a student’s family spends, it’s not impossible to do.

 

ISAACSON: Well, as you’ve said, you froze tuition when you were president of Purdue, and now for the past 13, 14 years, it stayed frozen. What did you have to do to get cost down? Where was the waste in the budgets?

 

DANIELS: I would love to tell you there was some stroke of managerial brilliance. I really can’t make that claim. We simply, I think I used to say, well, we will solve the equation for zero instead of asking, as higher ed was able to do for a very long time, how much money would it take this – how much more money would it take this year to keep everybody happy? Because it was very easy to extract for so very long. We asked the question, what would we have to do to avoid raising prices on our students? And you know, there were, there were some elements. We had an antiquated health insurance system, which we were able to make more consumer oriented. That saved a lot of money. Capital expenditures, if you’re really careful about the way you build things and how many things you build in the first place, we saved hundreds of millions of dollars on, in that area. But it really wasn’t very hard and honestly most of your viewing audience could have, could have done the same thing.

 

ISAACSON: As somebody who’s a Republican governor and president of Purdue, president of a university, if you were president now of Purdue or another university, and you saw the Trump’s attacks coming at you telling you that you needed to have more oversight on who got to get tenure, what was taught, what type of courses taught, how would you push back?

 

DANIELS: I would say that’s really not an appropriate role. Certainly not for the national government. Again, I might, I might see some role for states when they are funding state universities. But leaving that exception aside, I don’t think it’s appropriate. And again, the answer should be no. We will reform ourselves. We hear that some, not all, of these criticisms have validity, and we’re mo, we’re moving, we’re working on it. And it’s our job to do it, not yours.

 

ISAACSON: You know, what would you say, and what do you think your fellow Republicans, those who are more supportive of Trump’s attacks on the university, would say, if it were Kamala Harris doing this and saying, here’s what needs to be taught more in universities?

 

DANIELS: First, if you’ll permit me, I haven’t had any partisan affiliation since the day I accepted the Purdue job, and that’s now 13 years ago. So if you’ll take my answer as coming from a nonpartisan direction. No, I think there would’ve been a large, large scale negative reaction to that. I am however, moved to say that higher ed in terms of what was being taught and the way it was being taught and the general rules of the road I’m not sure that a President Harris would’ve had much to complain about. It fit, it fit I think her worldview and the, and that of people generally associated with her. The way things were was more or less the way they and folks like them had wanted them to be.

 

ISAACSON: Let me ask you one big philosophical question, which is in the age of AI, and in an age when a lot of people are saying, you know, a college degree, that actually doesn’t help me get ahead as much as it used to. What is the value of higher education, and in particular, higher education in which both the arts and sciences are taught?

 

DANIELS: I wish I was totally confident in an answer here, Walter. I don’t pretend to know where AI is taking. I take constellation only in the fact that people creating it don’t seem to know either <laugh>. But I have to believe that that assuming that the machines don’t take over and kick us to the curb, that there will be a role, maybe even a bigger role for people who undertake higher education as we have known it, who learned to, the wide variety of, of views and and philosophies that humans have developed over time, who can compare and contrast them themselves, who can discuss them intelligently with others, and who can therefore continue to grow as this as AI and other developments change our world daily.

 

ISAACSON: Mitch Daniels, thank you for joining this.

 

DANIELS: Appreciate it. Thank you.