Is there life after politics?

Mitch Daniels succeeded as a budget-cutter in Washington and as governor of Indiana, and many wanted him to run against Barack Obama in 2012, but he declined. After turning down his shot at the presidency of the United States he became a university president and has continued to be hawkish on expenses: After more than three decades of annual tuition increases, Purdue University in 2015-2016 is freezing tuition for the third consecutive year.

Daniels is also proposing other innovations and using his political savvy by being accessible to students and other university constituents. Here’s an account of his move from politics to academia. —Marvin Olasky

Patrick Mangan was sitting in the back of a Purdue University class of about 400 students when a short, slightly balding middle-aged man asked if he could take the seat next to him.

Mangan said, “Sure, help yourself.” Then he looked again and realized that the new university president, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, was joining him in the big lecture hall.

“You don’t expect the university president to come to class just to listen and learn,” Mangan recalled. “He just sat in the back next to me and never said anything to the whole class. There were no trumpets blowing or pomp and circumstance.”

Daniels even took a quiz with the rest of the class and got some right answers, explaining to Mangan that he remembered some anatomy from his 1990s work as a top executive at Eli Lilly Co., the pharmaceutical firm based in Indianapolis.

The presidency of a Big Ten university might not seem like the most natural job fit for a conservative governor who almost ran for president against Barack Obama.

Known as “The Blade” for cutting expenses when he ran the Office of Management and Budget for President George W. Bush, Daniels cut taxes and sharply reduced the state employee count during his two terms as governor of Indiana. He launched an ambitious education reform agenda that included the nation’s largest voucher system for helping low-income parents send their children to private schools. He leased the state’s toll road and came back with more than $3 billion worth of road and infrastructure improvements.

His background as governor turns out to be good preparation for Purdue. Daniels, beginning his third full year as president of the 30,000-student land-grant school in West Lafayette, Ind., has kept a sharp eye on bottom line matters. He wants to reduce the booming levels of debt that students carry after school. He wants more workplace internships to help students be better prepared for that first job, or to boost their chances of getting a good job.

Daniels, now 66, has challenged the generally unquestioned assumption that tuition increases are an inevitable feature of higher education. At Purdue he’s instituted a popular tuition freeze since he took the job, reminding listeners that the school had one every year for 35 years. He’s also offered what he calls “Purdue Moves,” or initiatives that emphasize accountability for results. He led the way for the Gallup-Purdue Index, an attempt to measure what college grads earn financially as well their quality of life after college.

He has up to 30 percent of his compensation tied to his performance as president. (His flat salary is $420,000 and he received 88 percent of his most recent bonus, for a total compensation of $538,061 in 2014.)

Daniels, as he was winding up his second term as governor, knew he had some potential handicaps in taking the Purdue job. He came from the world of politics and business, not the academic world, which leans strongly to left of center in terms of faculty. Daniels is right of center on the political spectrum, especially in fiscal matters. So he spent his first year getting to know students and faculty, asking many questions and showing a servant-leader mindset.

By mingling with students much more than the average university president, he has become a popular and familiar fixture on campus, working out in the gyms around students, eating in cafeterias, going to tailgate parties, riding his motorcycle around campus, asking questions, and remembering many students’ names, often to their surprise. Freshman finance major Jeffery Cardwell sees Daniels on campus frequently. “He walks around like he’s normal, everyday guy,” Cardwell said. “He’s very approachable, humble, very down to earth.”

Junior biochemistry major Emory York never expected to meet the university president, so she was a little intimidated when she was playing the violin and he showed up for a Christmas tree lighting on campus: “Why would he talk to just me, one student?” She was even more surprised when he remembered her name a month later at an alumni gathering in Arizona, where she was playing the violin again. “He seems stubborn and tenacious with his goals for the school,” York said, “yet the way he talks is warm and friendly.”

Senior dietetics major Melanie Sturm was also surprised by the chance to know Daniels better, as a student in his small World War I history class that meets at the presidential home that Daniels shares with his wife Cheri. “I was really nervous at first,” Sturm said, but adding, “He’s chill. He’s relaxed. He’s approachable.” Sturm also ranked him as a good history teacher: “He doesn’t drone on. He welcomes questions and interruptions.”

Outside the classroom Daniels can plunge into the fun and games of campus life. He’ll join in pre-game festivities by riding his motorcycle onto the football field with the band and cheerleaders. When he comes to dinner at a student house or fraternity or sorority, the discussion can turn serious. Yet asked for something personal about his life that most people don’t know, he’ll show how he can whistle without moving his lips—a nice device for getting fellow students in trouble when he was younger.

Anatomy and physiology professor David Bridges thinks Daniels has approached the Purdue presidency the way he was governor—total immersion. Bridges was pleasantly surprised at how quickly Daniels was answering his emails early in his administration. “I’m just a professor,” Bridges said.

Daniels likes to note that, with reductions in room and board and textbook costs, the actual cost of attending Purdue has declined for the past couple of years. After two years, he’s also pleased with some other objective measures. The graduation rate is going up, along with retention of students. The school has an interesting partnership, a Purdue Student Store on Amazon.com that offers a 30 percent savings on textbooks.

For a research institution, Daniels has found a way to introduce what looks like a free market emphasis. Faculty and students have more freedom to invent and retain their intellectual property rights without so much red tape. They keep some of the profits, which otherwise might wind up back in the university budget.

Daniels wants to find some way to measure students’ intellectual growth over their four years at Purdue, and he wants all students to have some kind of internship. He has introduced a three-year degree program in the school of communication, through an incentive grant that Daniels offered to the first department that could figure out how to squeeze four years into three. Some of his fiscal prudence has been simple, but the savings via volume purchasing, selling some university vehicles, and moving rainy-day funds out of low-interest accounts, has added up.

As an alternative to student debt, Daniels advocates investments on student tuition. An investor would reap a return through a percentage of the student’s income over a fixed number of years. Sometimes called “income-sharing agreements,” this idea has caught some attention in Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio, who is running for the Republican nomination for president, has expressed interest in this idea, which Daniels credits to the late free market economist Milton Friedman. “Bet on a Boilermaker” is one slogan Daniels thinks he might attach to a Purdue version of this idea.

Daniels often puts these innovations in the context of a crisis in higher education. He thinks colleges and universities are pricing themselves out of business, especially in light of huge student debt loads that can be harder to pay off as job markets and salaries shift so quickly in a dynamic economy. Too many graduates can’t get jobs in their field and live back home with parents. The perceived value of a college degree has dropped sharply in public surveys. Some colleges have closed their doors. Others are in crisis from borrowing too much.

Daniels has brought a Christian faith to his Purdue assignment, but with a traditional Presbyterian reticence about talking about it much in secular settings. He can give an eloquent plea to fathers to take their responsibilities seriously, citing the new secular academic research that verifies old biblical principles about fatherhood.

He has, of course, faced criticism at Purdue from the left side of the political spectrum.

But in a move that principled liberals or conservatives could endorse, he encouraged the Purdue board of trustees to adopt a statement of principles for free speech, originally drafted at the University of Chicago. In other times the proposal would seem unnecessary or taken for granted, but the idea is to head off censorship of unpopular ideas and speakers, usually on the conservative side of the spectrum.

As governor, Daniels had been critical of Howard Zinn, the late author of The People’s History of the United States, and a revelation of some of his emails came after he took the Purdue job. Daniels also garnered criticism for speaking to a conservative free market organization in Minnesota. He later apologized for what appeared to some critics of a violation of his pledge to stay out of politics while he was running Purdue. He said the honorarium would go to student scholarships and he’d avoid partisan appearances going forward.

Purdue is a good spot for Daniels because the big national political debates do not have much impact on campus. “I have not seen much left-right divide on campus,” said aerospace engineer major and student body president Mike Young. “As students we tend to be more concerned about doing things effectively, because many of us are engineers.”

Giovanni Malloy, a sophomore industrial engineer major, has been president of the College Republicans. Elected to the school Senate, he thinks the student body comes closer to the middle of the political spectrum, even the conservative side, because of the large percentage of majors in engineering, math, computer science, and agriculture. “Typically engineering students don’t take a lot more humanities classes than they need to,” Malloy said. “So we don’t get exposed so much to the typical left-wing bias you could run into in political science, history, and English.”

Daniels has been an innovator before. Before he was governor, he helped start an inner-city private school in Indianapolis, Oaks Academy. With an unusual 50-50 racial balance, the school has a classical curriculum and Christian foundation and has become an anchor in a larger neighborhood transformation in what had been one of the worst areas of the city in terms of crime, drugs, and abandoned housing. Indirectly, the school offered a real-life example that gave credibility to the education reforms—more charter schools and vouchers for low-income families to use in private schools—Daniels promoted as governor.

Now, if Daniels keeps piling up one small success after another at Purdue, he could prompt other universities to look outside the box for non-traditional leadership.