Mitch Daniels, faculty clash again as Purdue-Kaplan deal's final approval looms

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Just days ahead of what might be final approval for Purdue President Mitch Daniels’ landmark deal to add Kaplan University programs to Purdue’s portfolio, faculty members made it clear that they intended to protest the move until the end.

As Daniels sat a few feet away, Alberto Rodriguez, University Senate chairman, told the faculty representatives in the Deans Auditorium in Pfendler Hall that a contingent will go to Chicago for Thursday’s Higher Learning Commission hearing.

The Higher Learning Commission, which accredits universities in 19 states, including in Indiana, is Purdue’s final regulatory stop before finalizing the deal to buy the online education giant and launching the rebranded Purdue University-Global.

It’s where Purdue will need to make its case and then wait two to three weeks for an answer, according to a timeline provided at Monday’s University Senate meeting.

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It’s also faculty’s last ditch effort to derail a deal that has rubbed them the wrong way from the start.

Rodriguez said he would be there to deliver paperwork, including petitions from the Indiana Conference of the American Association of University Professors, signed by more than 1,500 people as of Monday evening. (How many of those signatures belonged to faculty members at Purdue or other universities in Indiana wasn't immediately available Monday.) Rodriguez also said his goal in Chicago was “to speak, if they will allow it.”

“Our main goal is just to encourage the commission to consider sending this deal back to the board of trustees and to include proper faculty and student input,” Rodriguez said.

Daniels was clearly frustrated by the ongoing protest among professors about a deal he says he believes is so good for Purdue’s mission.

“A lot of time has been taken hashing and rehashing and re-rehashing the very same questions,” Daniels said, deriding a petition that raises claims about Kaplan University practices in the past.

“Anyone who has signed that letter has been misled. By now, I don’t know how. These things have been refuted,” Daniels said, specifically addressing a claim that Kaplan is the subject of government investigations. “If that had been turned in on a term paper, you’d have given it an F.”

Daniels wasn’t impressed with Rodriguez’s boast that faculty from a handful of other Big Ten universities – Michigan State and Nebraska, among them – had shown solidarity with the internal Purdue faculty protest.

“Maybe some of you are impressed that people who work for other universities are suddenly so interested in giving us advice,” Daniels said. “I’m not particularly moved by that.”

The tension Monday was the latest example that 10 months won’t be enough to smooth over strained relations between Daniels’ administration and faculty over the Purdue-Kaplan deal.

According to the deal, first announced publicly in late April 2017, Purdue plans to pay $1 to Kaplan Higher Education, the parent company of Kaplan University, to create Purdue Global. The online arm of Purdue would turn Kaplan into a public benefit corporation – basically a nonprofit business that meets state guidelines by meeting a need for low-income or underserved communities in education.

The for-profit Kaplan University has 32,000 students, 2,462 faculty members and 15 campuses. The terms call for Kaplan to provide expertise to run the online university in exchange for a percentage of the revenue.

Daniels has pushed the idea on two fronts.

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First, Daniels contends Purdue’s reach shouldn’t quit with traditional undergraduates, under age 22 and in a position to get to the university’s flagship campus. Daniels sees Purdue Global as an extension of the university’s land grant mission to educate the masses.

Second, Daniels looks at Kaplan’s extensive online infrastructure and sees an opportunity to leapfrog past competition to develop web versions of existing Purdue programs and coursework. He’s said Purdue was woefully behind other universities on that account.

The most vocal portion of the faculty on the West Lafayette campus has been skeptical of the deal since Purdue gave professors a one-hour heads up before going public with the deal in late April. Purdue trustees and Kaplan University officials said they’d worked five months in secret on the deal, protected by non-disclosure agreements to stay in bounds of federal securities laws.

In the week that followed, the University Senate rushed through a resolution during the spring semester’s finals week, taking offense that faculty members weren’t consulted during negotiations. The resolution took Daniels and trustees to task for unanswered questions about whether the impact on academic quality at Purdue had been taken into account, the potential effect on academic freedom and a watering down of the Purdue name and a Purdue degree. Faculty called on trustees to rescind the Kaplan deal.

In November, faculty members started an online petition drive to protest the Purdue-Kaplan deal and ask the Higher Learning Commission to reject Purdue Global. The petition largely repeated the University Senate line, raising concerns about academic freedom or faculty oversight of curriculum at Kaplan; that “standards at Kaplan University are not consistent with the emphasis on academic integrity and academic rigor that Purdue University maintains;” and the fact that Kaplan faculty aren’t required to “have the credentials that would be expected for faculty members at one of the Purdue University campuses.”

Daniels has marginalized those concerns, saying on a number of occasions that University Senate doesn’t necessarily represent a majority of faculty thought on Purdue Global or the university’s opportunity to tap into a more robust online presence.

“Typically,” Daniels wrote in January in an annual letter to the Purdue faculty, staff, students and alumni, “voices of criticism have received vastly disproportionate attention compared to the many, highly credible statements of support for our ‘NewU’ move.”

Among those, Daniels said: Arne Duncan, former secretary of Education under Barack Obama; Arthur Levine of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; and Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School.

“There’s a huge opportunity – there’s a huge duty – for someone to provide higher education to people who didn’t have the money, who didn’t have the opportunity the first time – who didn’t get the job the first time,” Daniels told the University Senate Monday. “There are tens of millions of them. And we’re going to do that. We’re going to do that proudly at Purdue University, just as we’ve taught other populations.”

Purdue already has the necessary OKs from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and the U.S. Department of Education.

Frank Dooley, a vice provost who has been running point on the academic side of the Kaplan deal, said a timetable is still in the works for if and when the Higher Learning Commission gives its blessing.

“We’re preparing as if we’ll have a positive result,” Dooley said. “We’ll move as quickly as we can from there.”

Rodriguez didn’t predict what would happen Thursday in Chicago. He said if the Higher Learning Commission sided with faculty and sent the plan back for more work, professors would be ready to work with Daniels to fix concerns – “as it should have been from the start.” If Purdue Global is a go, he said, faculty would need to figure out how they fit into the expanded Purdue.

“Whether it is sent back or approved,” Rodriguez said, “our work is just beginning.”

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.