Country. See victory and concession speeches from candidates on cspan, the cspan now free mobile app, and cspan. Org campaign2022. Live now on cspan, a discussion on Higher Education with purdue president Mitch Daniels. You are watching live coverage on cspan. [indiscernible chatter] good afternoon, everyone. I am robert, president of the American Enterprise institute, and i am very happy to welcome you to this conversation with Purdue University president Mitch Daniels on leadership in Higher Education. I want to say it is really on behalf of everyone at aia, not only myself but all of our scholars and friends, that we welcome governor daniel is today. He is one of our great heroes and someone we really have followed and respected and loved for a long time. I am also very happy we have our chairman to show the same sort of affection and respect for a Great American leader. I should also point out that ai scholars host events like these and only let me come down to introduce our guests, not someone really important. At omb, the governors office, and purdue, Mitch Daniels has really set an example on how to be a great thinker, a man of action, a public man, so we are very pleased to have him. I also want to point out that i have been following him for a long time. When i was a young up and coming administrator in social Services Agency in new york state, we were doing some things that we thought were pretty innovative and important in welfare policy. I noticed there was an article in which mitch was quoted when he was at omb in the Bush Administration about the importance of doing things like we were doing in new york, and i felt i wanted to write him and let him know some statistics of what we have achieved in new york. I sent him a letter and within a week and a half, i got a handwritten note back. It said, robert, we are very aware of what is going on in new york. [laughter] i assure you. To help us in this conversation, i also want to introduce, and she will come up later after governor daniels speak, beth akers, who has been an outstanding scholar on important issues for us. And i just want to say that i believe that when you look at the scholars and critics and commentators who talk about Higher Education financing in the united states, there is no one better than that. So we will have a big presentation. We will start with you, governor daniel, and then we will have a conversation. Thank you. [applause] thank you, robert. Thank you all. Not by a longshot, my first opportunity to visit with the brilliant people of aei, but the first time in this facility with all the history here and the history that i know is being made here by each of you. Every day. I will say that everything i knew about Higher Education or i thought i did when i arrived there now 10 years ago never having lived in that world, after i learned from an aei paper somewhere, and it has continued to be a source of information and insight to me ever since. Thanks for all you do on that and every other front. Please know that i am among your most applicants. I want to get rather quickly to the important part of the conversation, which will be beths questions and yours. Let me try to get us there in this summary way. I was being interviewed fairly early in my current job and somebody said what our objectives were, what our hopes were for the institution that i serve. Offthecuff really, i said, well i would sum it up by saying we are out to deliver Higher Education at the highest proven value. And for eight or nine years or however long it has been since then, i have not been able to fashion a formulation that i like any better, certainly it is any more concise. What was i thinking about . Well, value is the most important word in the aphorism. And as i have explained on our campus and elsewhere ever since, that has to do with that is the most common equation of life really, value. Meaning quality over price. A lot of attention paid in our case to the denominator because we have taken pains to keep the cost of a Purdue Education within reach. Many people dont know this, and sometimes i dont want them to know this, but we are a public landgrant university. I go a lot of places, and especially asia, they think we are a private elite university. Some of them think we are an ivy league university. I dont dispel that impression. But in fact, we are deeply imbued with the landgrant ethic, which we were placed there of course by Abraham Lincoln and his allies. We and all our counterpart schools to throw open the doors to private education, and we work very hard on that. Part of that is we believe being is affordable and accessible as we can be. And i can sum that up for you by reporting that by holding tuition unchanged for 10 years, next year will be the 11th, and it is already in the books, and also reducing slightly the cost for room come aboard, and books. It is much less excessive in nominal dollars to attend our university now that it was in 2012. That is unusual to say the least in higher ed and it gets a lot of attention, but i try never to let that conversation happened without equally emphasizing the numerator. That is to say quality. If anybody is curious about this subject, i will go into it later, but just to simply assure you we have invested very heavily in the quality. We have grown the faculty in lockstep with the growth of the student body. The student body has grown 30 over that time. And we have invested likewise in facilities and so forth. The second most important word in the little answer i gave is proven. Here, i suggest there is a lot of work for somebody to do. Maybe somebody at this outstanding institution. When people ask, why the heck was tuition brought up as it did . Everyone here i am sure knows the only three aspects in the Consumer Price index that went faster than health care over the last 20, 30 years are college tuition, college room and board, and college books. How that happened, a lot of explanations, but this to me, the essence of it as there was no quality measure. People did not know whether an english major at school a had really mastered the language and the facility more than someone who studied at school b, whether an engineer from school c really can build a better, safer bridge more affordably then a counterpart from some other place. Therefore, it is pretty wellestablished now, people associate Sticker Price with quality. If it costs more, it must be better. Along with many other factors. Of course, the biggest one being the ever increasing amount of subsidy the federal government and sometimes State Governments were applying to lubricate the whole process. It began to run on its own motor. So i would say we have taken steps on our school at our school to try to identify to ourselves and we are sharing it with our fellow citizens, with applicants, and the world. What we hope will be and what the data now tells us his intellectual growth of our students. This is not easy to get at. Been a lot of different instruments attempted. We tried three before we got one that we thought was reliable, but this is the measure of socalled critical learning, critical thinking. But i am happy that there has been a lot more concentration on value in recent years, that more and more scholars as well as lay press and others have begun to look more closely at for instance what salaries our graduates of one school earning compared to people studying the same subject in other schools. It is interesting, too. But higher ed will begin to deliver better for this country if and when accountability comes through better, more reliable measurements of its performance. So i just submit that to this particular audience because some of the finest people who could be and have in some ways addressed that in the past are here. So i want to start the questioning, but i will just leave you with the thought that no question you are about to ask about shortcomings in the system is likely to come as a surprise, nor is it likely to be something i will quarrel with. The system has very serious flaws, which many of you have chronicled over the course of time. All that said, i think we have a very Strong National interest in maintaining or in some cases rebuilding what is still considered, i think fairly, the finest network of Higher Education institutions. I dont disagree with those, and i know many people of this kind who have thrown up their hands about the whole enterprise. And want to walk away. I think that would be a great mistake. I appreciate the chance to be here. I never have a problem eliciting questions from an audience on a subject that everybody is an expert on. And i know in this room, many of you actually are, so beth, lets start the show. [applause] beth of course, all of our name badges here. Ok. Thank you so much for your remarks, and thank you especially for being here today. When we received news of your pending departure from purdue, we reached out immediately to be here today, and our plan is to celebrate your tenure as president of purdue and also to learn from you. Gov. Daniels to make sure i was really leaving. Beth we had to make sure. But those other things as well. Thank you for being here and accepting our invitation to celebrate you today. Just a couple business details here. So we know that people are eager to ask you questions. The building was buzzing today with excitement over your visit. We will be taking questions from people who are not in the room today as well as those of you who are here. If you are wanting virtually and have a question, there are two ways you can submit those. First, by tweeting mitchdanielsataei. Or alternatively, you can email caitlin, who will email those to me. Her name is caitlyn. Either of those approaches, and we would get to the last 10 minutes and questions as well. Gov. Daniels it is already a success. I dont ever think i have been a hashtag before. [laughter] beth you finally made it, i would say. So in reflecting, i want to talk about i recall you and i first crossed paths several years ago and relatively early in your tenure, in your presidency. I had the privilege of working with you and your team with an effort you had to kick off an innovative Financing Mechanism at purdue. Now, for context, this was an idea that had largely been relegated to academic tests and the dreams of people like myself. And then you came to town and make this thing happen. So i very quickly learned about your leadership style, what would become a touristic of your presidency, which was that you were going to embrace innovation and also make things happen. These are not characteristics i generally use to describe Higher Education very broadly or even education leaders, so i wanted to ask you, given that this is your style and your existence as a leader, how did you end up in education . What brought you to want to lead purdue and get into this game . Gov. Daniels gov. Daniels it was not my idea. I said no to it two or three times. I thought it was as unlikely as you. No, i mean, i will explain it from a personal standpoint. I finally decided that on the third or fourth overture that i couldnt i stopped and asked myself, i could not think of another job other than the one i was leaving where if a person did a good job, he or she could add more value to the state i care about, the state where i wanted to live, continue living, and perhaps beyond. By that, i meant things like in a knowledge economy, in which the biggest nonmilitary challenge i think to our National Success is going to be our ability or not to educate, innovate, and continue to lead the world technologically. We have always been what we now call a stem centric school, but we have become more so. I thought i saw on opportunity to do more of that. The commission recently issued this report. Everybody remembers the most important thing a nation can do to maintain its strength and competitiveness was to produce 10,000 more engineers a year. The university has gone from 40 stem graduates to 68 . We now graduate more engineers or stem majors that any school in the country. I thought that was a Mission Worth undertaking. Now we dont short any other disciplines. There are others i am proud of, liberal arts for instance, that we can talk about. That was i guess the short answer. And that hope i think the opportunity has lived up to it on my and. I hope i have lived up to the expectations of purdue. Beth so when you were invited to be the president of purdue, i dont think it was a surprise to anybody you were going to be a changemaker there, but i wonder if there were barriers you ran into, given just that Higher Education is not a space that has really embraced innovation, and yet that is really a defining characteristic of your leadership. Gov. Daniels a true fan of ironing. Higher ed is the place to be. You touched on i think one of the most obvious ones. A sector which fancies itself and in many respects can view itself as very innovative and progressive and so forth. In many ways, certainly in the best of our institutions scientifically, technically. Another world of ideas. In terms of how it runs its own business, it is completely reactionary. So you are right. Change is not as easy as you might hope, but i think we have discovered at purdue you can make things different, and it does begin to feed on itself. I can give you bigger examples, but i will just give you one that comes first to mind. Because the sector is so static, a place that does things that are even a few steps off the track quickly attracts the next idea. They think what was that commercial . He will try anything. We are like that, for instance. Because we have done a couple offbeat things. It is a great Little Company called starship. They brought these robots, little white guy about the size. Has a little flag that sticks up. A geo map of the campus. There are scores of them running around our campus all the time. Students can order anything from Starbucks Coffee to a full meal, hot, cold. On the phone, it pumps up the lid, like that. They brought it to us because we had a reputation of people who are willing to look at things differently. Maybe it is not as hard once you get started. Beth not everyone likes that. The challenges in bringing all of that. Gov. Daniels sure. Higher ed may be a little more change averse because of human tendency. We dealt with it on a daily basis for eight years. Robert kennedy said all progress depends on change. We just learned to try to smile and move our way through it. You have to be prepared. I listened to some of the criticism, accepted the legitimacy of some, tried to reason. With what is not legitimate, you have to let it roll off. Beth right. The list of things you were able to accomplish during your time there was long. What do you feel most proud of . Gov. Daniels i think the growth of our university that i talked about without sacrificing quality. As a matter of fact, another virtuous circle was having it was thought when i got there, and i have thought, it would be an inexorable tradeoff. Graduation rates are still not as high as we would like them to be, even in a place like ours. There was a concern that if you let the place grow, you would be admitting more students who would struggle and might not finish. That has not been our experience. The academic readiness of the incoming classes have gone up and up and up even as they have gotten bigger. We know that repetition, the affordability became more and more evident. It was a factor. I run into students all the time now from other states, and now more than half of our students come from a different state. They tell me it was less expensive to come here than to stay home. This will get me to one other part of the answer. Something else i will always remember with gratitude and pride is we stayed open during the pandemic, and we stayed open with more than half of our classes in person. It was an astonishing experience to go through. It had all the elements you talked about, fear of change, lots of understandable criticism. People were convinced that we were going to harm people, harm adults, faculty, staff. That we are only doing it for the money. A lot of harsh judgments. A spectacular collective effort. It literally had to involve every corner of the campus and every student. We made it. And that has contributed, we know, to the record. We are going to set another record this year. It seems pretty obvious, for applications. 30,010 years ago. We will have 70,000 this year. Beth wonderful. One of the muslim internet accompaniments is a one of the most interesting accomplishments. For the other leaders who are watching us today, how did that happen . How did you manage to pull that off . Gov. Daniels yeah, i know. This is the must be a trick question. [laughter] gov. Daniels it is a natural thing to be skeptical of or inquisitive. I will state what we did not do because these are quite reasonable suspicions for people to have. We did not diminish quality. I talked about that. We hired 213 new faculty this year alone. We did not downshift to cheaper faculty. We have 70 plus percent tenuretrack at our university, the highest in the country. We did not get more money from the state. It has been astonishingly flat due to the vagaries of the formula that is used there. That has been ok, too. We reduced the number, and this is a whole other story, number and percentage, dramatically of International Students on campus. There are two or three threads to that. That was the way some schools made ends meet. Beth revenue generated. Gov. Daniels our reserves are much higher, 50 higher than they were. So the simple answer is, i believe, we were able to achieve alignment around the subjective. I would love to say that on a campus that thank goodness has every stripe of opinion on almost any subject you can mention, the one thing i dont find any disagreement about his we would like purdue to remain affordable and accessible to young people, to families of all stations of life. And so, if you do that i get emails regularly from families. 25,000 last year. We have done a few big things, but it is an acute relation of small expenses, and i explained the way i wish those two things are somewhat related. Beth right. It spreads on campus as you speak further. Gov. Daniels we have to be dictatorial about it once in a while. [laughter] gov. Daniels it is certainly i thought in the beginning let me tell a story. The first year, i have not been there very long, and it was time for the annual tuition request or actually announcement to the legislature. I said, you know, what would happen . It has been 36 straight years of increases, and please everybody snicker because your school does the same thing. I said, what would happen . I penetrated your purposely opec books. It looks like we can skip a year. Just to send a signal. It was very telling. A very talented woman who was the head of the admissions, if we do that, people will think we dont have confidence in our product. I am back to that point i made about the Sticker Price, that of all of our competitors were going up and we didnt, there must be something wrong. Beth something fishy here. Yep. Gov. Daniels i remember saying, pam, i just landed you on mars. But back on earth, i dont think that is what they are saying. Back there, they are saying, why the heck does it cost so much . Why do they do it every year . So anyway, i did not imagine at the time we could do more than a year. Beth sure. Gov. Daniels but we did one and the next year i looked at it and it did not look any tougher. It has been, you know it has become ingrained now in our culture. It is something that every boilermaker feels good about. I promise you our alumni are very proud of it. And i think they feel better about supporting the university knowing the money is not going to be wasted. Beth sure. I would think so. Lets pull back a little bit and not talk about just purdue but experiences at purdue. Something is happening that i am asked a lot about in higher ed now, declining enrollment. Enrollment has declined by 9 . This is striking when we would have anticipated increases in enrollment over the period. I wondered if this declining enrollment is something you have to drop with. At purdue, applications are at record highs now. What do you think about this trend globally, not just your campus . Gov. Daniels great question. It has two or three angles and each deserves some comment. First of all, you are absolutely right, the decline is not a reason. The latest one was just reported and it had been going on for a decade or more. It is important to notice there is a compositional difference here. Study of humanities has dropped by half. There is much greater interest in the technological disciplines i mentioned earlier. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It should not either be surprising or necessarily distressing that more young people today are drawn to Computer Science and to engineering and the Life Sciences and so forth. Those have increased, even sometimes masked by the overall decline. Beth right. Gov. Daniels i think that a significant. Secondly, there is a perfectly appropriate questioning of whether we were pushing too many young people in the direction of fouryear Residential College the most expensive form. And i think it is entirely sensible that state, federal governments, and people at large are thinking harder than they were about alternatives, alternative certifications. Now, i will also say that we are taking part, another thing we did that stirred a lot of people up, is enter the Adult Education space. This is a very wellinformed room so it will not surprise you. It surprises most audiences i talked to what i tell them there are twice as many adults out there who started college and did not finish, not even talking about those who never attended or dropped out of high school, as there are all of fouryear colleges that we pay so much attention to. So what i have been characterizing it as the 21st century landgrant mission. A concentric circle after the original one named the g. I. Bill, now this one, of our social assignment. We have 35000 and growing working adults for whom moving to a campus for four years or anytime is just not an option, but they are achieving that, they are achieving that College Degree in a different way. I think that it is not necessarily alarming that the total is going down as long as we are doing new things, finding new ways to help people grow after high school, and frankly, beyond that. You also mentioned the male problem, and that is not a new thing. You and i know and too many people either did not notice or turned a blind eye to the fact that for quite some time now, the percentage of young men on our campuses have been in the 40s. Nationally, 42 , 43 range. Not a good thing. We are an outlier by virtue of our heavy stem emphasis in particular. We are one of the few schools when there are some more women. Nationally, there are not. I think that the social the concerns about the societal effects of shiftless or unrooted men frankly go beyond the percentage not going to college. Beth right. Gov. Daniels i think there are some problems beyond that. My friend and others have tried to get the nations attention on this a long time. Beth thats right. Right. You talk about one of the potential forces, the people are seeking other pathways to career, and i am hopeful that the future of education is a bit that it faces more innovative models. You have purdue global, which erases Online Education model. What is exciting to you in the space outside of traditional, maybe even beyond, or speaking more deeply about what online space looks like . I ask that with the back on that i recently had the privilege of sitting here with a representative to talk about education, and one of the things she remarked and shared with me is in the 1970s talking about Higher Education, she was talking about the same things we are talking about with Higher Education today. I am curious what you think is exciting and what has the potential to change the landscape. Gov. Daniels one change we are seeing now, and i dont think it will either be shortterm or cyclical, which it had been before, is businesses encouraging and sponsoring and funding education beyond high school. Beth yeah. Gov. Daniels not brandnew, but it is big now. In the labor shortage, and maybe one of the people in the audience will correct me, but it does not look like that is a shortterm issue. And if it is not, then what has been as i said and upanddown pattern in the past, offer this as a fringe benefit during the good times, the first thing you cut when the top line goes down. But we are seeing a lot more of that. But this has always been, as you know, less visible, but a huge part of continuing education. Not just measuring it in dollars. I think it is more visible because of what is going on in the marketplace. And it takes all kinds of forms. Sometimes, the business is happy to pay for a bachelors degree, may be a masters degree, but what we see is they are helping to help an electrical engineer touch up or catch up her or his professional skills, so we are active on all of those friends. We offer Online Education. And everything from that associate degree to the 35 euros single mom trying to get to a different job all the way up to somebody who is pursuing a professional doctorate to help them in the workplace. Beth i know that at purdue there is a lot of relationships with employers, and that is a core part of the educational experience for your students. In my observation of what works in innovative models, it is often the relationships with employers that generates the outcome. Can you talk about how that worked for students, the types of relationships you have . Gov. Daniels i think it is generally agreed across the whole sector that experiential learning, which needs to be more and more ubiquitous, we certainly think so. We are doing to our three things i will not take your time with, but to be broad, one of the opportunity is for every student to have at least an internship if not a longerterm job assignment in the area of study. I think it is more and more understood that that is not a nice to have but a mere essential item. We will be announcing soon something i wanted to do for a while. And that is a very major business, and we think they are just the first of several. I have said to them, you know, if you want, you can look at our incoming students. You come to the job fairs when they are juniors and seniors and so forth, but there is a lot of these young people that you dont have to wait two years to know. You need to look at their records and their abilities now, what kind of talent they are. Why dont you link up with them on their way in the door and fund their education or a big enough part of it that they will agree to spend their summers and take their first job with you . Beth right. Gov. Daniels we got our first taker on that. When i described it to other businesses, they are ready. Sort of pulling that relationship back to the educational experience, i hope it will work out. Especially for the young people involved and for our business partners. Beth that is very exciting. I look forward to learning and studying that. Onto something that keeps me up at night. Gov. Daniels we dont want that. Beth it is not my children, even though they are keeping me up at night, but lets talk about Student Loans and lets talk specifically about the very recent policy effort by the white house to cancel Student Loans. You have said publicly that you dont agree with this president s efforts to cancel Student Loans. I hope you can give us a summary of that argument of why you dont agree. Gov. Daniels let me count the ways. None of which is lost on i am sure anybody here. First of all, it is regressive, which is a bad idea. They twisted into pretzels trying to find a formula that wasnt, that didnt put benefits on people who clearly dont need them and are not going to need them in their lives. They never did, so there is that. It is to me grotesquely unfair to those who honored their commitments. We do this very acutely at our university. Our graduates pay back their loans historically at a 99 plus rate. I am not sure how to explain to them that suddenly a court has come along that will not be asked to live up to the obligation they took freely. I think, by the way, this is at the bottom of the hierarchy but it is important to me. It is a lesson to send to people, those who are not even involved or have a stake in it. The moral hazard question has been well developed by others. The base problem, if you dont want folks to be so indebted, dont charge so much in the first place. It seems not to have occurred to some people. But since that is, as our friends of a slightly different persuasion like to say, a root cause, ok, then this is likely to make it worse, as has been described. This was said in 1987 or so and has been validated over and over again that the infusion of more subsidies, maybe two thirds happen captured by schools at higher prices and will happen again. Now students may have the sense that, why wouldnt they be excused . So i think all of those things. There is this minor matter of it violates the constitution. Beth there is that, yes. Gov. Daniels we started this year civics requirement at every university, starting for the freshman class. It is optional for the underclassmen because they did not get a chance. For newcomers, it is anytime in four years. They can meet it two or three different ways. Attend a certain number of events is one of them. Take a test, which is fundamental in civics. Somewhere in the test is likely to be a question, an article one question about who has the power of the purse, and it is not the White House Acting unilaterally. So, no, i just think it is one of the most unfortunate Public Policy moves in any area that we have seen. Lastly, it is another several hundred billion dollars. I said earlier, the biggest nonmilitary threat to the country. I almost qualified that by saying it has accumulated before the recent set of nine and 10 digit splurges. That is not enough digits, is it . [laughter] gov. Daniels and so of course it is exacerbating that problem. Beth yeah. Ok, that is enough wrong with it. Another gov. Daniels a problem . Beth i do. One of the things i am concerned about is the constitutionality of it, the unfairness of it. These are issues i cannot speak enough about, but i am worried about the fed going forward. One of the things i often predict is it will allow institutions to raise prices further. That is met with skepticism. Say, how do you know what institutions are going to do with this . Gov. Daniels we know what they did. You got several decades now of evidence. It has been documented. Scholars, the Federal Reserve of philadelphia, one of the Federal Reserve banks did a study, and it found between 60 to 70 of the existing were captured in higher prices. A perfectly reasonable conjecture. Lets just say it is not going to get any better. Beth yeah. That is a good way of putting that. I want to talk more broadly about accountability in Higher Education. So the idea of accountability seems essential to your leadership style. I recently learned that at the dmv that you get your receipt and it has on it that time you stand in line, which i think is remarkable and kind of reflects a commitment to accountability and Holding Institutions to a standard. Gov. Daniels the average time was 12 minutes, by the way. I have said to friends in indiana that my tombstone, if there is one, will say, he raised four dollars and fixed the dmv. [laughter] beth it seems like more than enough. [laughter] gov. Daniels it is a good example on accountability. If you dont mind, i will expand on that a little bit. Beth sure. Gov. Daniels we came to office as a new crowd. Our team had been in our state for a very long time. I said to them, we will fix everything in sight if we can. But the first two things we are going to start on are the department of revenue and the department of motor vehicles. Why . Because they touch every citizen. The disregard for government here, it is a mess. It will take us a long time to turn all that around, but if we can make those two noticeably, provably, visibly better, people would listen may be a little more tentatively to the next idea and the next idea and then exchange. So we really went to work on that very hard. Within a few years, it was winning all of these international awards. To this day, people bring it up. Newcomers to our state are astonished that they have to go. We register things. And when it is easy and someone is friendly, you are right, there is a greeter at the door, you know . Oh, beth, welcome, what do you need . Commercial license, line three. When he or she received a receipt, it tells you how long you were there. I always thought it was really important to try to build confidence in government. I always thought for all of our differences and polarity and so forth, one thing everyone should agree on, whatever is the right size, scope, sphere of government activity and action is, it ought to be well done. If you have more expensive government if you think a more expensive government is a good idea,. If you believe in a much more limited government, you ought to really want that government to work with. We spent a lot of time and effort on that. It is about accountability. When i look back on those eight years, a lot i am happy about i guess, but nothing more gratifying than i think it was the manhattan institute, where you once resided, did a national study. How much confidence do you have in your State Government . All 50 states, we were second at Something Like 77 to south dakota or somewhere. [laughter] gov. Daniels it is a great state. [laughter] gov. Daniels sorry for the long answer, but you sent me down a trail that i think it is very relevant. The struggle for accountability in k12 education, how long have we been talking about it . How long have people of goodwill been working on it . Look at the recent catastrophic act results. Beth absent cloning you are finding leaders who believe in accountability and putting them in place and institutions across the country, how do we stand the emphasis and a politician of accountability on College Campuses . Gov. Daniels when i get the chance, i do try to appeal to peoples selfinterest, mainly back to the theme i just mentioned that if you can deliver on those things that either you have pledged or that are just inherent in the job, if you can deliver unreasonable confidence, you position yourself better for the next thing you want to do. Beth right. Gov. Daniels but i just think it is too often overlooked by people. Too many people are just thinking about the next zinger tweet or the next, you know, splashy initiative. Whether it ever happens or not. Beth right. Is there a role for government to intervene here to place an incentive for leaders to behave in that way . Gov. Daniels sure. I think whether it is performance formulas in the higher ed that reward performance, pick your objective, higher graduation rates, whatever you think is important, you certainly do that. The system i think will move in that direction. The performance pay in k12 has been a longtime fight. Usually these things are countered by folks say that it is hard to measure. It is, but that is not an argument for not trying. Beth sure. Yes. You are a Smaller Government guy but a bigger government in terms of regulation. Gov. Daniels it does not take an army of bureaucrats. What it takes is something that should be reclaimed by the legislative branches. That is where policy standards and things like that should be set. Beth i want to ask one more question before i turn to audience questions. I am not sure i can ask lasted anyway because you are in the hot seat. What can you do, right . I want to know what is next. We were fortunate enough to have your skills and the Higher Education space for over a decade now. Who is blessed with your leadership in the next phase . Gov. Daniels if there were an answer, i would tell you. I honestly have not made a plan. You know, life has taken care of itself in the past and maybe it will again. I have never been a planner. I thought that our students, i love our students. They are purposeful. Someone has given them the impression they are supposed to have their life planned at 21. When i get that question, i say you have to ask the next person because i never planned anything. I used to give an example that is dated now, but until that night of december something in 2000 when the last child fell and the election was settled, i said if you would have asked me right up to that moment what you would be doing in april of 2015, 2016, i would have said, oh, i will be retiring from eli lilly and company. That has been the longest stretch of my work. I was involved at the top of that company and enjoying it and completely absorbed in it. And my life changed completely three times since then. I tell the students, sure, have a plan, but life will bring you. Given your talents and your purdue degree, life will bring you opportunities you did not think about. Some of them might be the right ones. So how is that for ducking your question . Beth perfect. We will look forward to following your work wherever you go next, but i think at this point i can turn to the audience. We have a lot of folks eager to ask you questions. Ok. See if we can bring a microphone in here. My name is donald and i am a retired corporate lawyer, and i hear a lot about threat to democracies around the world and perhaps in this country, so i am wondering about how your students learn about our democracy. You answered my question by saying that you introduced a civics course for freshmen recently. Gov. Daniels yes, donald. My question is, why did you do that . Gov. Daniels because i had encountered so many students. The way i like to approach this job and other jobs for that matter, is to spend a lot of time on what i think is the ground level. Thousands of our students over the years. And i taught a course. Honors college most years. I was just struck by how many brilliant young people just had huge gaps in their education. Not their fault necessarily. Whatever k12 system they came through did not teach them, did not teach them the basics of our freedom. There have been so many studies that depict this. By the way, not just young people anymore. It is their elders, too. So that is what led to our determination, to make sure at least a modicum of this happens. As i say, in the end, the student at some point has to pass this fairly basic test. The first idea was to give a citizenship test. You know, if you are not a vietnamese immigrant, maybe it is ok to ask someone blessed to be born in this country. Something more than that and a little more extensive, but they can either take one of a series of foundational courses or they can attend a prescribed number of public events. I have sponsored a series of immigrant people coming through campus. Many of them in the area of public affairs. Not all, but many. There is one other pathway. So i hope as i say, i would like them to leave civics certified so they at least have a rudimentary preparation for citizenship we are supposed to turn something out in addition to the best Civil Engineers in the country. We are supposed to be turning out people who are productive citizens. Beth ok, i will turn to a twitter question now. You have maintained a strong relationship with your board. Other places, the relationship is the president and the board is fraught. Do you have advice for president s in the context of especially those pushing the envelope with innovation . Gov. Daniels this is really a great question, so thanks whoever sent it. I have been very fortunate to have a board and a board relationship. It has been very productive, constructive, and conducive to moving forward. And i do appreciate that that is not the case in many, many other places. I probably should have mentioned it when i entered one of your earlier questions. Certainly been an enabler. Our board is reasonably sized. Nine appointed members. We do not elect them. That causes some problems in other states i am aware of. Nine members, plus a student. The caliber of those folks, the sincerity of their purpose in being in it, serving the institution, and the chemistry among them has been terrific for 10 years. I want to say this. I am a strong believer that much of the difficulty in Higher Education traces to boards who abdicated their right for responsibility. I never have been in a single institution, public, private, large, small, that did not make claim that the board of trustees is the ultimate authority over everything, including curriculum. And all policies and so forth. And many of them decades ago , at started decades ago, began delay getting that, delegating that they had too much authority. I think that was a mistake. I will say that here. Because there are leaders in many pieces i go that are very influential in many schools, maybe some trustees. I always say they are not prepared to go ask challenging questions along the lines we have been discussing. Why are we charging what we are charging . Do we have free inquiry on this campus . Or are people reluctant to express their thoughts or express their views . Prove to us that students are actually learning and advancing intellectually here. And if we dont know, what are we doing to find out . Questions like that. All that said, i really believe our board has been fundamental to somebody changes because i dont want to do it on my own. I want a board who understands what we are trying to do, trying to distinguish our university, and putting their job on it. Until some future Board Changes it. I think that is good governance, and the answer, but i do appreciate that there are many faces where the boards are divided among themselves for would be reluctant to support changes or vice versa, pushing for changes i think that is a good note for us to end on, we are out of time, but please join me in thanking president daniels. [applause] [applause] democratic governor kathy hochul road flip test debates republican lee in new yorks governor race. Watch tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan and on our free mobile video