More than 50 people packed into a basement room of the Library-Student-Faculty Building on the Westville campus of Purdue North Central on Friday morning for the Purdue board of trustees meeting.
It’s a tradition of the board to move at least one meeting per year away from the main Purdue campus in West Lafayette and visit one of the university’s various regional campuses.
“We have the practice of moving the trustees around at least once a year,” said Mitch Daniels, the former Governor of Indiana who now serves as the president of Purdue University. “It’s my favorite meeting of the year. It’s all too easy for these folks, if they only come to West Lafayette, to miss a lot of the great things that are going on at our regional campuses.
“Each time we make a visit, they go back more enthused.”
While the majority of the business concerns at the meeting focused on the main campus in West Lafayette and the student body hosted there, Daniels said the board must keep in mind the complex and varied students attending Purdue North Central and other regional campuses.
“We are serving a slightly different category of students on the regional campus, but to me it’s our most inspiring students,” Daniels said. “It’s such an important part of our mission and having these meetings here is a good way to remind everybody.”
The former governor said he believes interaction with regional campuses and the students who study there rejuvenate the board members thanks to the students’ dedication and sacrifice.
“These are serious-minded folks,” Daniels said of the students at PNC. “We’ve got a growing number of what you’d call ‘traditional’ students [straight out of high school and attending classes full-time], but still so many students here who are juggling work and family. You’ve got to admire what they’re doing.”
Daniels said that Friday’s board meeting was “probably my third visit in the last eight or nine months” to the PNC campus and that he’s always impressed by the work done by Chancellor James B. Dworkin and his faculty and staff.
The university president added that Dworkin and his team’s body of work gave the board the necessary assurance to combine the administrations of Purdue North Central and Purdue Calumet into one office. The merger, which was decided upon in February, will combine the administrations of the two regional campuses – which are about 35 miles apart – and the money saved will be reinvested in ways aimed at helping students.
“This is a very well-run campus,” Daniels said. “That’s one reason that gave us the confidence to apply a lot of those lessons, to consolidate the administration of two campuses, free up some resources to plow back into the faculty or other programs to help students succeed.”