At the Seat at The Table event “Searching for Amelia,” Steve Schultz, senior vice president and general counsel at Purdue University, told the room how a national conference in the middle of the Great Depression turned into a hire that changed the university and shaped generations of women in aviation and engineering.
A Panel Built for a National Crisis
The conference brought together an unusual group: Eleanor Roosevelt, the head of the Girl Scouts of America, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Amelia Earhart, and Purdue President Edward Elliott, who was invited to represent the land-grant universities.
The theme was blunt for the era. How, in the world, was the country finally going to get out of the Great Depression?
Elliott’s answer was what you would expect from a Purdue president. Create accessibility so more people could reach higher education.
He also had a specific institutional motive. He wanted more women to enroll at Purdue, and he wanted the women already there to finish. At the time, plenty of women enrolled and did not persist through a four-year degree.
Amelia Redirected the Conversation
Then Amelia spoke, and she did not hedge.
With no disrespect to the Girl Scouts, whose leader had focused on women becoming skilled home economists and homemakers, Earhart’s message was different. Women should be doctors. Lawyers. Pilots.
Elliott recognized what he was hearing. And he had something almost no one else could offer.
Purdue was the first university in the country — and at that time the only one — with its own airport.
“The head of the Girl Scouts said we need women to be very good home economists and homemakers. Amelia was like, forget that. We need women to be doctors and lawyers and pilots.”
Steve Schultz · at Seat at the Table
The Offer That Brought Her to West Lafayette
Elliott approached her after her talk and told her they needed to chat. The offer had three parts:
- Career counselor for Purdue’s women students
- Involvement in a brand-new program, one Elliott admitted he barely understood at the time, called aeronautical engineering
- Access to Purdue’s airport, so she could keep flying in and out while continuing her flying career
For Earhart and her husband George Putnam, it was a match made in heaven. They both jumped on it.
She Was Not Slowing Down
The mid-1930s were not a quiet period for Earhart, which is part of why the appointment landed the way it did.
She became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland United States, Honolulu to Oakland. She was not content with that, and went on to complete a solo transcontinental flight from Mexico City to New York.
Every one of those flights put her name in headlines nationwide.
The Enrollment Number That Tells the Story
Here is the detail that makes the impact measurable.
Purdue’s women’s enrollment increased 50 percent before Amelia Earhart ever set foot on campus.
People wanted to be at the place where she would be. Reputation moved before she did — and once she arrived, Schultz noted, the impact was even bigger.
A Legacy Families Still Carry
The clearest evidence of that impact is not in an archive. It shows up in person.
Schultz described a moment at the event itself, when someone in the audience came up with a photograph a friend had asked him to share. It was his friend’s great-great aunt standing with Amelia outside Windsor Hall.
The message that came with it was simple: Amelia changed our family’s life because of the impact she had.
Schultz said the Purdue team hears versions of that story constantly now that people know they are working on this project. That is what a 90-year legacy actually looks like — not a plaque, but families still telling the story.
Why This Belongs in an Indiana Conversation
Amelia Earhart is a global figure, but the institutional decision that gave her a platform for advancing women in engineering and aviation was made in Indiana, by an Indiana university, for Indiana students.
That is why Purdue is not a footnote in the search for her aircraft. It is central to it.
A Seat at the Table for Stories Worth Telling
Seat at The Table brings Indiana leaders into direct conversation with the people carrying stories like this one forward. “Searching for Amelia” was a reminder of how much of that history is local.
To learn more about the series and how Sease Gerig builds conversations that matter, connect with our team.
