Mitch Daniels

Mitchell Elias Daniels Jr. (born April 7, 1949) is an American former academic administrator, businessman, author, and retired politician. A Republican, he served as the 49th governor of Indiana from January 2005 to January 2013 and as the 12th president of Purdue University from January 2013 to December 2022.

Daniels began his career as an assistant to senator Richard Lugar, working as his chief of staff in the Senate from 1977 to 1982. He was appointed executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Lugar was chairman from 1983 to 1984. He worked as a chief political advisor and as a liaison to President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He then moved back to Indiana to become president of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. He later joined Eli Lilly and Company where he served as president of North American Pharmaceutical Operations from 1993 to 1997 and as senior vice president of corporate strategy and policy from 1997 to 2001. In January 2001, Daniels was appointed by President George W. Bush as the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he served until June 2003.

Daniels ran in Indiana's 2004 gubernatorial election after leaving the Bush administration. He won the Republican primary with 67% of the vote and defeated Democratic incumbent Governor Joe Kernan in the general election. In 2008, Daniels was reelected to a second term, defeating Jill Long Thompson. During his tenure, Daniels cut the state government workforce by 18%, cut and capped state property taxes, balanced the state budget through austerity measures and increasing spending by less than the inflation rate. In his second term, Daniels saw protest by labor unions and Democrats in the state legislature over Indiana's school voucher program, privatization of public highways, and the attempt to pass 'right to work' legislation, leading to the 2011 Indiana legislative walkouts. During the legislature's last session under Daniels, he signed a 'right-to-work law', with Indiana becoming the 23rd state in the nation to pass such legislation.

It was widely speculated that Daniels would be a candidate in the 2012 presidential election, but he chose not to run. Shortly after, a search committee, composed mostly of Purdue faculty and administrators recommended Daniels to become the university's 12th president after his term as governor ended on January 14, 2013. Ultimately, the hiring decision was made by the Trustees of the Board of Purdue University, all of whom Daniels appointed or re-appointed while Governor. He retired as Purdue president on January 1, 2023.

Mitchell Elias Daniels Jr. was born on April 7, 1949, in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, the son of Dorothy Mae (née Wilkes) and Mitchell Elias Daniels. His father's parents were Syrian immigrants from Qalatiyah, Syria, of Antiochian Greek Orthodox descent. Daniels has been honored by the Arab-American Institute with the 2011 Najeeb Halaby Award for Public Service. His mother's ancestry was mostly English (where three of his great-grandparents were born). Daniels spent his early childhood years in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Georgia.

The Daniels family moved to Indiana from Tennessee in 1959 when his father accepted a job at the Indianapolis headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Pitman-Moore. The 10-year-old Daniels was accustomed to the mountains, and he at first disliked the flatland of central Indiana. He was still in grade school at the time of the move and first attended Delaware Trail Elementary, Westlane Junior High School, and North Central High School. In high school he was student body president. After graduation in 1967, Daniels was named one of Indiana's Presidential Scholars—the state's top male high school graduate that year—by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1971, Daniels earned a Bachelor's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University after completing a senior thesis titled "The Politics of Metropolitanization: City-County Consolidation in Indianapolis, Indiana". While at Princeton, he was a member of the American Whig–Cliosophic Society, where he overlapped with future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was a year below. He initially studied law at the Indiana McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. After accepting a job with newly elected Senator Richard Lugar, he transferred to the Georgetown University Law Center, from which he earned a Juris Doctor.

In 1970, while an undergraduate at Princeton, Daniels and three roommates were a part of a several months long drug investigation that began on Saturday, March 7, 1970, when one of Daniels's roommates was arrested for possessing "large quantities" of marijuana and other drugs. Two months later police raided the same residence hall, finding enough marijuana to fill two size 12 shoeboxes and arresting five additional individuals, including Daniels. Daniels and a roommate were charged with possession of marijuana, LSD and other drugs, along with "maintaining a common nuisance" for allowing the room to be used for the sale and use of drugs. In a plea agreement, the prosecutor dropped the charges in exchange for Daniels agreeing to pay a fine of $350 for using marijuana.