Alumni Day honors Daniels ’71

Former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels ’71 was presented with the Woodrow Wilson Award, the highest honor given to an undergraduate alumnus, on Saturday during the University’s 2013 Alumni Day in Richardson Auditorium.

Daniels, who became president of Purdue University in January after finishing his second term as Indiana governor, gave a speech titled “Do Princeton Graduates Match the Moment?” in which he questioned the empathy and respect Ivy League graduates who enter public service have for the broader American public.

Daniels said the United States ought to be governed by those who have “respect [for] the personhood and capacity of their fellow Americans,” not those who act as disconnected and “benevolent betters.”

“Princeton grads and those like them have increasingly less in common with those less intellectually gifted,” Daniels said.

In order to make clear the social consequences of this widening gap between well-educated and ordinary Americans, Daniels read a short passage from sociologist Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.”

“It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors,” Daniels read. “It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.”

Daniels called this disconnect a worrying trend, because “economic stagnation,” “a Himalayan of debt” and decreased social mobility are putting Americans at a dangerous point in their national life.

Explaining why democracies sometimes disintegrate, Daniels argued that they usually flounder in one of two situations: first, the situation in which democracies spend themselves “destitute” after politicians demonstrate that citizens can vote to spend money from the national treasury on themselves, and second, the situation in which character traits like “liberty,” “self-reliance” and “discipline” erode as a result of unchecked societal affluence, traits which made that affluence possible to obtain in the first place.

Throughout the history of the United States, Daniels said, two competing views of democratic organization, both proposed by Princetonians, have existed, representing competing options for modern society.

Daniels traced the first view, which argues that American society ought to be governed by a team of experts because ordinary Americans are unable to govern themselves well, to former University President Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. He explained that the second view, proposed by James Madison, Class of 1771, “trusts in the personal autonomy” and common sense of ordinary Americans to sustain their republic.

Daniels argued that while Wilson’s view is “fully ascendant” today, the federal government ought to reflect Madison’s view instead. He cited numerous interactions with Indiana residents during his tenure as governor to support this assertion.

In light of his condemnation of the Wilsonian view, Daniels joked that he accepted the award in Wilson’s name “with deep gratitude” but also with “a sense of irony.”

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At the end of his speech, Daniels listed a series of criteria to determine the preparedness of Princeton graduates for public service: whether graduates notice that self-government “is not the natural order of things,” whether they understand the consequences nations will face as a result of overspending, whether they believe in the importance of a private economy and whether they respect ordinary Americans.

Daniels last visited the University on Oct. 25, when he gave a lecture about public sector efficiency titled “The Indiana Story.” The University announced he would be honored at Alumni Day last November.

Daniels majored in the Wilson School and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University in 1971. His thesis was titled “The Politics of Metropolitanization: City-County Consolidation in Indianapolis, Indiana.”

Active in College Republicans and a member of Charter Club, Daniels was arrested for drug possession in May of his junior year after police found LSD, prescription drugs and enough marijuana to fill two size-12 shoeboxes in his room in Cuyler Hall. After plea bargaining, he was given a $350 fine for “maintaining a common nuisance.”