With VR labs, Hollywood creatives, a free freshman-year pathway open to anyone, and a 10 million-square-foot urban project that’s reshaping not just a campus but a city, Arizona State University is by no means traditional.
But neither is its President, Michael Crow. A former D-1 javelin thrower, Crow has long aimed to redefine what a public research university can be, and who it can serve. He has spent two decades challenging some of higher education’s most sacred cows: that excellence requires exclusivity, that research universities must choose between access and impact, that tradition and innovation can’t coexist. Under his leadership, ASU has become one of America’s most expansive institutions and its largest by enrollment.
Earlier this year, we had the privilege to speak with him to learn about his path towards building the “New American University.” For Crow, colleges aren’t just centers of learning; they’re bedrocks of American innovation, scientific breakthroughs, economic advancement and global competitiveness.
Watch the full video below, or read highlights from the interview, edited for clarity.
Wayee: You attended 17 schools before college — that’s not a typical journey! How has that experience shaped your view of education? What were the moments along the way that set you on the path toward transforming it?
Michael: My dad was in the Navy, so we ended up moving a lot. And when he was shipped overseas, we’d go live with our relatives. So there’s 17 schools that I can count. We moved 21 times where we stayed longer than two weeks, and so the longest place I ever ended up living by the time I was 18 was in my freshman dorm room in college.
What I learned along the way was that the education system was really unbelievably rigid, unbelievably merciless. I was highly adaptable, but my brother wasn’t. He didn’t finish high school, he couldn’t adapt, and the system just broke him down. It made me ask: Is this really the best that the system can be?
There was a second powerful moment: Growing up, I was an Eagle Scout. In 1968, a friend and I did a service project to collect enough food for one family for one year. We went to deliver that food on Christmas Eve. I was 13 years old. We were with a family that lived down a dirt road in southern Maryland, in the back of the woods, in a tar paper shack with a dirt floor, a potbelly stove, an outhouse, and no electricity.
That very night was the night that Apollo 8 circled the moon, and live pictures came back from that spaceship, and something snapped in me that began percolating. Later on, when I was at Columbia University, there was a faculty member named Richard Nelson who wrote a famous book called “The Moon in the Ghetto.” The premise is: How can you go to the moon and still have ghettos?
Of course you need to go to the moon to advance our species and science and so forth, but the results of all of that are so unevenly distributed because we sociologically haven’t figured out how to accept the full abundance of human beings as individuals. We’re still in a rigid, socially designed, socially structured, hierarchical, class-based society where we’re not, we’re not fully realizing abundance.
So five years after that, I’m trying to major in five things in college with one intent, which is to design different kinds of institutions to change the way that people can access this abundance.
Before ASU, you were a professor at Columbia where you then became vice provost. What lessons have you brought from that experience to your leadership at ASU?
Crow: When great faculty are brought together, and unencumbered by sociological constraints and academic bureaucracy, they can achieve many, many things.
I was working at the interstices of the disciplines, as the designer of a thing called the Columbia Earth Institute, and served as its first director. We brought together geologists, public health specialists, chemists, engineers, designers and others to think about the future of our relationship with the Earth. At times it was extremely challenging, as each discipline was its own culture, its own set of paradigms, its own way of doing things, and its own assessment of where it is in the intellectual hierarchy.
The lesson I learned is that those challenges are sociological constructs. But once you figure out that those are not laws of nature, you can then begin to affect them. They are changeable.
Another lesson that I learned was that you need to bring a bigger motivation to faculty beyond their own personal endeavors. Most faculty members are motivated to achieve within their discipline, but not so much in the broader league of their own university. How do you build a university that has a purpose in and of itself, as opposed to a university that is a shopping mall of different kinds of disciplines that are also present at all the other universities? That was a hard fought lesson that I learned at Columbia.
You have run this university more like a CEO than a traditional university president. What has allowed you to take that operational boldness, while still navigating traditional systems?
Crow: It’s really a function of the design of leadership. You have to recognize the power of the intellect in the faculty, in the departments, in the schools, and so forth, but also the limits of the historic design that they’re operating within.
Over the last 23 years I’ve been in this job, I’ve been building a North Star purpose. We call it our charter. For many universities, their status is achieved through being exclusive. Our charter is one of inclusion, as opposed to exclusion. Our success is based on our students’ research that benefits the public in a measurable way, and taking responsibility for the outcomes of the communities that we serve.
We need to empower the faculty to think of themselves as designers moving towards the North Star, to embrace the concept of continuous innovation, which is not typical in academia.
For example, we looked at our geology department. We asked them what they were, and they said they were explorers, and that that was their intellectual purpose. So, who are the other explorers at the university? Astrobiologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, a few of the engineers — so we brought them all together.
They built a new intellectual design called the School of Earth and Space Exploration. The charter is guiding them relative to the university, and the intellectual design of exploration is guiding them towards their objective. This has meant 10 times as many majors, 25 times the socioeconomic diversity of the students, 12 times the level of research that they were doing before. This group of scientists, engineers and thinkers and dreamers — they have at least one instrument on every object off of earth in the solar system in exploration. So the lunar reconnaissance, orbiters, the Mars Rovers… we’re on all of them.
How are you navigating the pullback in federal support for research and the broader attack on university funding?
Crow: This topic came up during a meeting at Rice University, so I picked up my iPhone and used it as an example.
Steve Jobs is a brilliant designer, assembler, conceptual dreamer, and unbelievable genius. But by my calculations, there were 40,000 academic papers, thousands of academic breakthroughs, and industrial patents that were all influenced by academic patents. It’s a function of 80 years of the most unbelievable focused commitment to academic research that’s ever existed in any civilization ever.
Now, all of that’s being thrown up in the air right now because people are questioning: Does America really need all this research? Are we spending too much?
Believe me: You can tweak the system and make it better. You can design it to have better outcomes. You can do all kinds of things, but academic research is the groundwater that has fed our systems of innovation, of technology and our economy. So I’m hopeful that somebody from industry is gonna step up and say: “Whoa, we probably shouldn’t eliminate the National Science Foundation.”
People want America to be the best. To stay the best, we have to keep investing in research and keep driving forward to solve every problem that we can.
