West Lafayette, Ind.

Mitch Daniels teaches a course on World War I at Purdue University, where he is president, and loves to talk about Woodrow Wilson. Wilson left the presidency of Princeton in 1910 and was elected governor of New Jersey the next year—“sort of the opposite of the thing I did,” says Mr. Daniels, who served two terms as Indiana’s governor (2005-13) before taking his current job on campus: “Explaining his decision to abandon the academy for a statehouse, Wilson said, ‘I can’t take the politics anymore.’ ”

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