George Will Says Mitch Daniels is the President America Needs [View all]

[DonViejo]

Purdue has the president America needs

By George F. Will Opinion writer June 15 at 7:29 PM

Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University, knows that no one in the audience is there to hear a commencement speaker. When, however, he addressed his institution’s class of 2016, it heard him distill into a few lapidary paragraphs a stance toward life that illuminates this political season.

A rite of spring in America is, Daniels noted, the dispensing of diplomas that are similar in what they announce but dissimilar in what they actually denote. They all pronounce the recipient to be a bachelor of this or a master of that. There is, however, evidence, as abundant as it is depressing, that there are enormous differences between the seriousness of the curriculums students study and the rigor with which their mastery of them is measured: “As employers have come to learn, many diplomas tell little or nothing about the holder’s readiness for work or for life.”

This matters, because diplomas often are credentials that are not credible, and because ample studies of happiness demonstrate that the most important predictor of it is, Daniels said, “earned success.” This involves sustained, difficult effort to surmount setbacks. And yet, said Daniels, perhaps the most dangerous of today’s many pernicious ideas is that “life is more or less a lottery. That we are less masters of our fate than corks floating in a sea of luck.”

Daniels spoke six days after Barack Obama told Howard University’s class of 2016: “Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: people who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t nothing you did.”

Nothing. Hence the progressive agenda: Government must comprehensively regulate, redistribute and generally fine-tune society in order to engineer “fairness” to counter life’s pervasive and pernicious randomness (“luck”). Obama’s words at Howard were, of course, congruent with his 2012 campaign statement that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” So society did, with you contributing a bit.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitch-danielss-one-lesson-for-success-work/2016/06/15/1167597e-3245-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html