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The presidents of Indiana and Purdue universities encouraged local business leaders to be a part of the new vision for the colleges’ separate identities in Indianapolis now that the joint venture long known as IUPUI has dissolved.
Indiana University’s Pamela Whitten and Purdue University’s Mung Chiang emphasized Thursday how the diverging paths of their respective Indianapolis outposts are targeted toward workforce development and retention, and they need business buy-in to make significant progress.
“It’s all about one thing: economic growth,” Chiang said. “But we cannot do that alone.
The university leaders laid out their priorities at the Indy Chamber’s Meet the Presidents event at the Madam Walker Legacy Center. Around 300 attendees from business, government and academia were brought up to speed up on each university’s Indianapolis vision and were pitched ideas of how they can get involved.
Whitten asked attendees to “push your way to the front of the line” to work with students through internships, campus visits and scholarships. IU is also looking to pair faculty members with comparable industry partners for research, she said.
Chiang called the workforce development the “most important supply chain” and named over half a dozen companies the university is working with locally to develop its students’ hands-on skills.
They both encouraged business leaders to tell the schools what kind of help they are looking for.
“Purdue team’s job is to listen to you,” Chiang said. “What worries you? What do you want? What do you want to see from our students, our faculty, our researchers? How can we use and help your business growth?”
Whitten said university programs can introduce students to employers where they can build a career. But she and Chiang agreed that retaining students in Indiana requires a collaborative effort from universities and employers to channel students into enticing and promising jobs.
They also intend for their respective campuses to be a gathering place. Whitten said she wants business leaders to host events on campus and take advantage of the space they are preparing. Purdue’s 248,000-square-foot Academic Success Building project will also be open to the community, including all public high school students, Chiang said.
Since the schools announced their plans to dissolve IUPUI nearly two years ago, they approached universities the transition differently.
IU took its share of IUPUI’s programs and established an Indianapolis campus. Inaugural chancellor Latha Ramchand told IBJ previously the campus will focus in part on research, commercialization and student opportunity in the life sciences and biotech sectors.
The utmost focus of the Indianapolis campus, Whitten said, is to become a top U.S. urban research university that is a magnet for faculty and industry research. They are doing that through building facilities, creating industry partnerships and targeting growing industries, she said.
“This city deserves that academic anchor,” she said. “That academic hub that will play such a pivotal role in all the other aspects of enabling and facilitating greatness to come from our city and from our state.”
Purdue did not establish a new satellite campus. Instead, its Indianapolis programs will exist as extensions of the West Lafayette campus. Purdue’s plan is driven in large part by a desire to draw more students interested in engineering and business to the university, including through new degree programs such as motorsports engineering and executive education.
Chiang focused his remarks on how the Indianapolis extension will build out the state’s “hard tech” corridor from West Lafayette to the state’s capital city. He said the campus extension will feature many of the hallmark programs of the West Lafayette campus but strengthened with industry partnerships with companies such as Dallara, Elanco and High Alpha.
The university’s extension in Indianapolis will spread across the city, Chiang said. This year, Purdue is starting with eight locations in Indianapolis where students can study, research and work with industry partners.
Over the next few years, he said, the school plans to grow that number and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve a city-wide presence.
Fall classes start Aug. 19 for Purdue and Aug. 26 for IU.
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