Bangert: Purdue’s $1M+ plan to keep Daniels

Last Monday, Brian Lamb, C-SPAN founder and namesake of Purdue University’s school of communication, asked Mitch Daniels to name the best job he’s ever had.

“Well, when you ask that question in a few years, I hope I’ll say president of Purdue University,” Daniels said during a public session in Fowler Hall. “It’s too soon to say. It all depends on whether you can say you did something useful or not.”

Purdue trustees, now promising a $2 billion fundraising campaign that will finish in 2019, clearly weren’t taking any chances on the “too soon” part of the Daniels equation this week. Trustees locked up their governor-turned-president until June 2020 — an extra two years put on his current five-year contract.

The deal, in the works since this summer, comes with some sweet cash for Daniels. The bigger perk, though, to hear him and the Purdue trustees talk, is the chance to finish projects he’s started that won’t be done until 2019. That’s Purdue’s 150th anniversary and a year after his current contract ends.

“Don’t underestimate that part,” Daniels said Friday, the day the trustees approved the contract extension.

The deal was greeted by the usual mixed bag of reaction that goes with any news about Daniels since he arrived on campus in January 2013. Mike Young, Purdue student body president, said, “Students are pretty happy.” Skeptical professors and staff might have privately groused about how trustees didn’t feel out the faculty about whether two more years with Daniels was a good idea, but Kirk Alter, University Senate chairman, wasn’t fazed.

“I think that’s good,” Alter said. “I think he’s just the guy to lead us into the 150th year. And his heart and his energy’s in it, and I don’t think I would have expected anything less … I think most people in the know knew that was coming.”

The trustees seemed overjoyed by the prospects of keeping a president who comes with a built-in knack for drawing attention to the university, not to mention himself. (This is, after all, a guy that Trustee Tom Spurgeon once said, “Excuse me, we're talking about Mitch Daniels. And I think sometimes he walks on water.”)

Mike Berghoff, Board of Trustees chairman, talked not about miracles but what trustees have come to expect in the way of big ideas from Daniels. And he talked about continuity — not only through initiatives that stretched into 2018 and beyond, but also on work due before Daniels’ original contract is up.

“It’s been a really good year for Purdue, with a lot of initiatives drawing attention to Mitch,” Berghoff said. “While I can’t point to a specific example that somebody was going to poach him, we didn’t think it was a stretch. … Commitment, I think, of him agreeing to a new contract would weigh heavily in any consideration he might have for moving someplace else.”

If Daniels keeps saying money isn’t what drives him — he repeated that in several different ways on Friday after the contract terms were approved — why add so much cash to the original contract, with an escalating amount through 2020?

Daniels’ original contract was set up with a base salary of $420,000, with the potential to earn another $124,000 in “at-risk pay,” designed to force the president to meet a host of performance goals on fundraising, student success and more. (For the past fiscal year, Daniels was given 90 percent of that.) Under the revised deal, Daniels’ base salary stays the same, with the at-risk portion growing to $210,000 — for a possible total of $630,000. (If he hit that same 90 percent evaluation next year, he’d make $609,000, compared to $533,400 this year.)

On top of that, he’ll get retention bonus for every year he stays until June 30. He’ll get $100,000 in 2016, $150,000 in 2017, $200,000 in 2018, $250,000 in 2019 and $300,000 in 2020. That’s a cool million extra, just in retention bonuses, for making it to the end.

“We thought it important to acknowledge his performance with some increase in opportunity to earn some extra money,” Berghoff said. “We don’t like that he’s near the bottom of Big Ten pay (for presidents), but at the same time, we’re proud of it. We tried to take an intermediate step.”

Question is: Will Daniels actually be here until 2020?

At first, he took the question as one about age — he’ll be 71 in June 2020, six years beyond the standard mandatory retirement age for Purdue administrators — and his fitness. (“Who knows?” Daniels asked. “I’ve always been healthy as a horse, but that can change in one day.”) That, and job performance.

“Look around the world of higher ed,” Daniels said. “Everything can go really great and you can make one big mistake or some event happens not even in your control. I recognize that you could step on a landmine any day.”

But what about his own ambition and where that might take him between now and 2020? Is Purdue going to be his best job ever or a stepping stone to something else?

“If I had any intention of going elsewhere, I wouldn’t have done this,” Daniels said. “I get calls now and then. They’re easy to say no to. I don’t think that’ll change for me.”

Instead, he was talking about fundraising goals, a start-up new polytechnic charter high school in Indianapolis, work on developing Purdue’s new aviation research park, living beyond the final two years of a current four-year tuition freeze and …

“So much of that is aimed for that year after 2018,” Daniels said. “If you sort of walked off the premises with a year or a year-and-a-half to go, you probably did a disservice to everyone. Then some interim comes in and the place has to scramble. My point is, before the board came around this time (with the contract extension offer), I’d thought about it.”

On Friday, he pointed to the back of the trustees’ meeting room in Stewart Center, to the line of 8-by-10 portraits of the 12 presidents in Purdue’s history. He already had it figured out that at 7½ years, if he makes it to the end of this contract, he’ll pass the longevity of his immediate predecessors: France Córdova and Martin Jischke, the first president to utter the B-word – as in billion – when fundraising for Purdue 15 years ago.

“My point is that, even though it is only 7½ (year), it might just get me to the median for Purdue presidents,” Daniels said.

Berghoff said others might disagree, but trustees are convinced: “Purdue’s getting a good deal with that.”

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.