Purdue University president Mitch Daniels is retiring at the end of the year. Consistent with his maverick ways over the last 10 years, his successor was announced concurrently with his retirement announcement. There was no public Presidential search, and we will doubtless be treated to days of complaints, petty and serious, about that.
His successor will be the professor and Dean, Dr. Mung Chiang, who served as his Executive Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, of which Purdue has formed a great many over the last 10 years, with some of the biggest corporate names in the world.
I’m very proud of Purdue, my neighbor just across the Wabash, but I would prefer that my loved ones not attend there.
First, like most major universities today, the streets of the campus flow with alcohol, which endangers students of both sexes with the ambiguities of sexual interactions between drunks.
Second, I prefer undergraduate liberal arts education to enlisting in the Technocracy fresh out of high school.
But it seems to me that Mitch Daniels has been a tremendously successful Ginormous Research University President, and I wish him well.