WEST LAFAYETTE – No pressure, Gerry McCartney.
“Tell me about it,” McCartney laughed, caught in a Stewart Center hallway Friday afternoon.
Purdue’s chief information officers was quietly disappearing from a never-ending trustees meeting where he’d been handed the massive task of reworking the university’s approach to digital offerings ahead of Purdue’s landmark – not to mention controversial – acquisition of online for-profit giant Kaplan University.
Purdue President Mitch Daniels and the trustees gave McCartney a promotion and a touch over six months to organize and establish online metrics for Purdue’s main and regional campuses, as well as Purdue’s anticipated role in a digital university called NewU.
“As a respected colleague of mine coyly remarked,” McCartney had just told trustees, “‘The entire future and survival of Purdue University will rest on your shoulders in this assignment. Best of luck.’”
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That line isn’t too far removed from Daniels’ talking points about the pending Purdue-Kaplan deal – one The Chronicle of Higher Education called “the most talked-about business move on the higher-education landscape in 2017” and that last week landed the Purdue president on the publication’s “2017 Influence List.”
But the way McCartney put it in an acceptance speech that amounted to a mission statement for the NewU deal itself?
About how the current university system is based on being “in the specific place and the specific time, repeated over a long period, in order to participate?” About how “these requirements alone exclude large numbers of our citizens?” About how the “winnowing is already underway” for universities that aren’t figuring out their place in a digital market? About how NewU – that’s what it’s called until the university settles on a Purdue-branded name – can find ground on a new digital landscape and still meet the rigor of an education bearing Purdue’s name?