The Blue Collar Leader of America’s Most Innovative University

On this episode of Our American Stories, the remarkable story of Arizona State University and its President Michael Crow.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories and with someone
who's been named one of the world's fifty greatest leaders.
Michael Crowe is the president of Arizona State University and
has one of the most fascinating and unusual backgrounds for
an academic, although he thinks that he shouldn't be such
a rare bird. Here's Michael with his story. You know,

(00:31):
I had teenage parents who had runaway to get married
and ended up being a product of that early love,
I guess, And so my dad was in the Navy.
My mother just graduate from high school. My dad was nineteen,
my mother was eighteen. Lived in a public housing apartment building.
So we were what was called Section eight families, you know,

(00:52):
so we lived on public assistance, public housing because even
though my dad was in the Navy, you know, they
didn't pay people in the Navy very much. And so
was able as a kid to grow up in a loving,
caring family. But we moved constantly, lots of stresses and strains,
constant moving twenty one times before I graduated from high school.
When I was seventeen. We lived in Imperial Beach, California,

(01:16):
and my dad was at the time in Asia on
the USS constellation, and then she starts getting sick and
I come home from school in the third grade and
she has passed out. She's actually bled out on the
floor from her cancer that had cut some artery or something.
She wasn't dead, but she had stage four cancer that
you come to learn later. And so then eventually my

(01:37):
dad comes back from Japan. You know, my mother's in
the hospital. She's unconscious, she can't really talk to anybody.
There's just ladies in the neighborhood, these Mexican American families
that just took us in and a thing called Community Chest,
which is what the United Way became. They took care
of us, and eventually they flew my mother's sister out
from Chicago, and then she sort of organized everything, moved

(01:58):
my mother to Chicago, where she ultimately died in the
Russian Presbyterian Hospital from her cancer and an experimental treatment
that killed her. She would have died anyway, but it
killed her. Left behind four children. We got all split
up in that particular setting, got sent out to her
sisters lived in different places. And so then a few
months after that, my dad and I are on a

(02:20):
bench right on Lake Michigan and he's crying and upset
and doesn't know what to do, doesn't know how to
take care of us. We're all split up. I'm living
in Chicago, two siblings that are living in Long Beach.
Another sibling is living in Iowa. We're moving around. I'm
living in a Ukrainian Russian neighborhood in the city of Chicago,

(02:41):
going to Chicago Public schools, and my dad is sitting
here and he doesn't know what to do. I remember
vividly saying to myself, if you don't know what to do,
I sure don't know what to do. But apparently I'm
going to have to figure out what to do. And
of my dad, he's passed, you know, eighteen years ago.

(03:04):
But but I had never experienced anything like that. I
didn't know what that meant, and so I didn't have
any realization. I think at that age, I didn't have
a complete realization that I was this independent creature. And
so it was like a switch in my brain that
went off. Relative to now trying to find some way
to go ahead, trying to find some way to move
my my life ahead. There was even some chance that

(03:25):
we weren't even gonna be able to stay with my
aunt and that he was going to get shipped off
to sea. So he was he was uncertain about where
we were going. And so he did say, you're just
gonna have to figure this out. He used to call
me Bud, that was my name, Bud. He says, Budd,
You're just gonna figure this out. You're gonna figure this
out for yourself. There's just you. Basically it was a childhood,

(03:46):
you know, from my perspective, wherein I, you know, experienced
the country at lots of different levels in basically working
class neighborhoods. You know. So when we lived in San
Diego more than once several times, working class neighbor that
were largely Mexican American, North Chicago, Illinois, which was largely
African American, so very seldom were we the majority in

(04:08):
terms of white families. And so I experienced lots of
different things, lots of diversity, lots of arguments, lots of fighting,
lots of bias every direction that you could possibly imagine. Oh,
here's the new kid, So what are we gonna do
with him? All this just beat him into the ground
as we moved around. I was in this old fashioned organization.

(04:29):
I don't you know, I don't think they are what
they were in the past. But I was in this
thing called the Boy Scouts, and we were living in
Lexington Park, Maryland, which is in Saint Mary's County, Maryland,
a beautiful place. We learned how to crab for blue
crabs where we learned, you know, all the chesspeak bay stuff.
And I was working on my Eagle Scout project, which

(04:52):
turned out to be so we were working class family,
eligible for public assistance, eligible for food, not food stamps,
but eligible for actual food. The it would give you food.
So we got cheese, we got powdered milk, we got
cans of peanut butter that were green said property of the
the United States Government, Department of Agriculture on there, all
that kind of stuff everything, and that is just normal.
We just thought of that as normal. So I'm doing

(05:14):
this project with this other kid named Randy Rupp, and
I'm thirteen years old. I was a hard charger. I'd
gone through my badges, you know, really really quickly, so
I'm not very mature. And so Randy and I decided
that we were going to collect enough food for one
family for one year. So we went to the Saint
Mary's County, Maryland Welfare Department, and we got the name

(05:35):
of a family and then we were going to take
them the food on Christmas Eve. And so we started
this project in August and then we collected a twenty
four foot U haul truck filled with food. There were
several children in the family. We knew their ages, not
their names. I think there were four kids, two adults.
And so Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty eight, that's the year,

(05:56):
So in nineteen sixty eight. I turned thirteen in October
nineteen sixty eight, so in the middle of this project.
So you may not know that there was a simultaneous
event that day. And so one of the simultaneous events
that day was that was the day of the first
broadcast of the first humans that had flown over to
the Moon. They didn't land, but they were orbiting, orbiting
the Moon, sending back live messages. I knew that this

(06:20):
was going on, and I knew that that night, Christmas
Eve night, we were going to be able to see
all this stuff. And so Randy and my dad and
I and a bunch of other people, we have this address,
this map to go find this family. So we're driving
and I don't know if you've ever been to southern Maryland,
but it's not like DC, Maryland, and it's not like Baltimore, Maryland.
It's a very very old fashioned kind of place. So

(06:43):
we eventually weave our way down a paved road to
a dirt road, to a two lane track road to
a tar paper shack in the woods south of Lexington
Park towards Saint Mary's City, towards Point Lookout was the
name of this place where the Patuxent and the Potomac
River comes together going into the Chesapeake Bay. And here's
this family living in a tar paper shack that we

(07:04):
then later saw I had a dirt floor, no running water,
and a potbelly stove. And I remember being shocked that
one of the kids in the family was a kid
that I knew of. He was one of my classmates.
And I remember just being shocked that there was George,
you know, from school, and we didn't have that much,

(07:26):
but these guys had like nothing, and I remember how
happy they were. We gave him all this food and
it was really fantastic, and I felt good about that.
And then I go home and there was like this
lightning bolt. So for some reason, in my little thirteen
year old brain, I saw this tar paper shack, and
this is no joke. I saw this tar paper shack.
And then I watched Apollo eight orbiting the moon, sending

(07:47):
back live messages, and I said, I think I asked
my dad or my stepmother, I said, how is this?
How did these two things go on at the same time.
I didn't know anybody lived like that. I mean, you know,
we'd been around, we'd lived in every kind of neighborhood.
We never never had much property or anything. But we
had water, you know, we had we had heat. We

(08:08):
didn't have a dirt floor. And from that moment, that
very moment, December twenty fourth, nineteen sixty eight, I started
thinking a lot about this what later became manifested in me,
this this radical architect I became almost obsessed with all

(08:29):
notions of architecture and design. I don't mean physical design,
I mean institutional design. So the United States is a design.
It's a design that varies from all previous designs, and
it has strengths and weaknesses and flaws. But net net
is an unbelievably powerful design. I forgot who it was.
It might have been Buckminster, Fuller or somebody who said that.

(08:49):
Even Einstein had some quotes like this, which were, if
you don't change the design, you're not gonna change anything.
The machine will only do what the machine is designed
to do. So right now, we have terrible outcomes coming
from K twelve in general, on a national level, particularly
for students in lower half of family incomes, we have terrible.
More than half the kids that have ever gone to

(09:10):
college never graduated. Half the kids more than half that
have taken pelgrants have no degree. And so clearly we
have unbelievable design flaws, but people don't see them because
at the pinnacle of the design are these institutions which
are unbelievably high performing because they use selectivity as their

(09:31):
measure of success. You know, they take only the finest
students from high school and they call that a day.
And so that turns out not to be sufficient to
allow us to continue to evolve socially or culturally or economically.
And you're listening to Michael Crowe tell his life story
when we come back. More of this educator's story, more

(09:52):
of this disruptor's story, more of this innovator's story. Here
on our American Stories and we continue with our American
stories and with Arizona State University President Michael Crowe. Before

(10:16):
he gets to Arizona State University, Michael takes us back
to his time as a blue collar leader in an
Ivy League school, Columbia University. Let's return to Michael. Ultimately,
I designed this thing called the Earth Institute at Columbia University,
and then ultimately I needed somebody to run it after
I had started, and so we hired this guy named

(10:37):
Peter Eisenberger. And so Peter later was not going to
be the director any longer. And one of the things
that he was not very happy about was somehow me
being involved in him moving out of that job, and
did comment that he wasn't quite sure where us blue
collar PhD guys really came from him, and I said, well,

(11:01):
you know, Peter, they they come from libraries, public libraries
that were allowed to go in and read. And so,
so what I learned at Columbia, I mean, was that
there was this unbelievable intellectual powerhouse of an institution which
was only going to be available to a few people,

(11:22):
and that there was some bias even built into it.
And I don't mean religious bias, but class bias, and
that's probably true in almost every institution. And so so
you get into UVA. So UVA calls itself a public ivy. Well,
that to me is that's that's like an oxymorn. You know,

(11:42):
why why would you be a public ivy? A public
university is supposed to be an institution, and I'm not
I'm not going to you know, lambast the University of Virginia,
which is a fine university with fine faculty and fine
students and so forth. But the notion that somehow it's
better because it only lets in a plus students from
saying Ignatius in Chicago, or I think they're down now

(12:03):
to so many kids from Fairfax and so many kids
from Alexandria and so forth and so on. In the
minds of so many people, that's perceived to be well,
that's excellence, when in fact it's it's my view that
then that leads to this perversion in the rankings. And
so the rankings are almost all about inputs, and so

(12:24):
they're about how much money do you have per student? Well,
if we'd like to control the cost of a degree,
then you may want to have less money and do
more with less money and be more efficient and more
effective and produce more efficacious outcomes. It's how many students
did you admit versus how many applied? What's your percentage
of applicants admitted? And then it's also what's your graduation rate? Well,

(12:48):
graduation rate is heavily dependent on who you admit. So
if you admit only A plus students from high school,
guess what they all graduate. If you admit B students
and large numbers of B students from high school from
low income families, that's a harder pathway. And so what
you have now in the in the ranking system is
the ranking system is biased to selectivity and biased to

(13:11):
extra resources, and so that's that's not a good outcome.
I just felt that we needed to help create a
new kind of a design what I ultimately called the
new American university model. We should have a university that is,
at the same time in one egalitarian in its access
in the truly democratic way, admitting every student that's qualified,

(13:34):
and then unbelievably excellent, not suggesting that you could have
universities that were one or the other, only excellent or
only egalitarian, which is basically the system as it exists today.
So we started with a vision that then has later
become our charter. The charter has three core elements. One
element is that will measure our success based on who

(13:55):
we include versus who we exclude and how they succeed.
The second is that will do research benefits the public,
not just benefits the academy. And third is that will
take responsibility for the outcomes of our community. So a
lot of fact they are concerned about under performance in
K twelve Elements of Justice, and I say, well, that's
what we're here for. We're here to take responsibility for

(14:16):
these outcomes. So for us, it's been all about a
full recognition that a person qualified to do university level work,
which is who we admit. We have the admission standards
of the University of California from the summer of nineteen fifty.
So if you admit those students and you create an
environment for them to be successful, and you have tools

(14:39):
and assets and resources and a dedicated faculty, you don't
want a faculty that says, well, who's this riff raff
you're sending me B students from high school. I'm not
going to waste my life teaching B students from high school.
I'm here to teach people, students that are just like me.
I was always an a student, so I only want
to teach a students, and it's just so we don't
have that faculty. So what we found is that if
you're dedicated innovation, if you're dedicated to the student, if

(15:03):
you create a research in scholarly environment, if you have
tremendous resources, tremendous technologies, tremendous assets, tremendous advising, if you
have all those things, it's unbelievable what you can do.
So we have seventy five thousand students on campus with
US and we will probably grow that to around one
hundred thousand. We have an entire campus that we believe

(15:25):
can be very applied and very practical, what we call
the polytechnic campus. So we're going to be growing on
campus full immersion enrollment, but what we say technology enhanced,
so we're using technology everywhere. Then online, which is our
second realm of education. Online for US this year is
eighty three thousand discrete students over the year timeframe, and

(15:46):
it's accelerating rapidly. We think that there's lots of momentum
for growth. In that because it turns out that once
you have a high quality, university faculty led real degree,
that's you know, we don't say issue online degree. We
say ASUE History degree, Asue philosophy degree. You're with our
faculty taking our courses. So we see that growing robustling.

(16:10):
We now have a third learning realm that we call
ASU Sync. You know, we've taken all of our classrooms.
We'd zoomize them all. We spent millions of dollars allowing
anyone to zoom in and zoom out of everything. We
think there's whole degrees that could be taught that way
for people that can't be physically here with us. But
they don't want to do online. They want to talk
to the students live, they want to talk to the
faculty live. They want to be in the lab, they

(16:32):
want to work on different kinds of things. So that's
a new realm for us. We have Assue Prep Digital
with forty thousand high school students in it now, which
is a massive increase over even over the last semester.
So then now you have this much broader set of perspectives.
You've created a much more socially complex and therefore robust

(16:52):
sort this boolia base of a university, and then that
then begins to work to everybody's advantage because they're learning
from the other students there make things happen in ways
that are unique to a very diverse student body. And
it turns out that in the right setting, you can
make all that work and it becomes tremendous in terms
of all outcomes. So we have increased the number of

(17:13):
graduates by about a factor of four. We've increased our
research activity by a factor of five, So we now
do more non medical research than Stanford or USC, more
total research than Carnegie Mellon or Caltech or inny of
those schools. Yes, we have a big faculty, so we've
greatly expanded research, greatly expanded graduation. We've built the largest
engineering school in the country with twenty five thousand engineering students,

(17:36):
up from six thousand just a few years ago. We
have a socioeconomically diverse student body matching the socioeconomic diversity
of the state and the country. You know, we have
half of our student body coming into the university from
Arizona are not white. We have you know, forty percent
pell give or take, which is a very large percentage,
large numbers of first generation students, and we're almost do

(17:59):
an nine retention rate across all students, freshman retention rate,
first year retention rate, that's everybody. We've been able to
drive up all graduation rates across all groups. We've been
able to drive up everything associated with success and outcomes.
We've got tremendous Fulbright Awards, tremendous Martial Awards, tremendous Rhodes Scholarships,

(18:20):
Truman scholarships. So we are basically as competitive as any
other school in the country in all the things that
universities do, with as diverse and as broadly scoped and
as representative a student body as has ever been constructed.
And you're listening to Michael Crowe, the president of Arizona

(18:41):
State University, working on his plan to make a college
more egalitarian and also hold on to excellence. And these
were either or propositions at colleges before that was the paradigm.
But picking kids who aren't a students and teaching them
up and bringing up students who well, it's harder for

(19:02):
them to get through based on socioeconomics, based on class status.
Michael's working on all these things simultaneously, and when we
come back more of this remarkable story and education innovator.
In the end, what a thing they're building in Arizona
State University, a new way of thinking about college. Michael
Crowe's story continues. Arizona State University's story continues here on

(19:26):
our American story, and we continue with our American stories
and with the final portion of Michael Crowe's remarkable story.
The Arizona State President has led the university in almost

(19:47):
tripling enrollment. Let's return to Michael on how Arizona State
University used to be thought of. There's all kinds of jokes,
including in The Simpsons and all kinds of television shows
about a sue and so at one point we were,
you know, a very rapidly evolving, fast moving palm tree
laden swimming pool. Empowered, also known as being the world's

(20:08):
largest and best party school. Apparent is the one person
who is supposed to make their kids think they can
do anything. Says they're beautiful even when they're ugly, thinks
they're smart even when they go to Arizona State. But
the rest of the world tear your kid down. Your
job is to support him no matter what. But it's

(20:28):
a miracle. The Lord is drowned the wicked and spared
the righteous. Isn't that, Homer Senson? Looks like Heaven's easier
to get into than Arizona State. And so now we
are a palm tree laden, swimming pool, empowered, great university
that's no longer viewed as a party school because we're
serious and we have serious students. That doesn't mean we

(20:49):
don't have parties, but we have serious students and serious
programs and serious ambitions for our students. So we've done
away with the silly notion. I don't even know if
it was deserved at the time of quote unquote party school.
We're an empowering school, whatever you want to call it.
I could come up with all kinds of catchy little phrases.
We're We're not that anymore. And so I remember when

(21:10):
I first got here, there was a lot of rhetoric
about party schools, and I think Playboy magazine had called us,
you know, the best party school. And so I didn't
know the publisher of the Arizona Republic at the time,
but I got a meeting with her and I said,
are you kidding me? I don't know you. She later
became my friend. I said, I don't know you, but
you just ran an article that we were the number
one party school on the front page of your paper. One,

(21:33):
you don't even know what that means. Two, it's basically
by vote. Therefore, bigger schools do better than smaller schools.
And so it's a self assessment. There's no method to it.
There's there's no rigor to the analysis. And I worked
really hard to convince her to, you know, at least
take the time to learn a little bit about what
we had done, what we were doing, and what we

(21:53):
were going to do, and eventually we worked our way
out of that classification. The thing that I really like
about the innovation ranking, then we've been ranked the most
innovative in the country for six years in a row,
for whatever that's worth. But I was at the Stanford
football game a couple of years ago and there were
asu kids at the Stanford football game wearing white T
shirts with red letters that said number two in innovation Stanford,

(22:15):
and so I was I was just really impressed by
their creativity. We have to figure out this cost. You know,
you can't make colleges and universities cost more than anyone
can hope to pay, except the most rich families. I mean,
it's that's just not going to work. I was in

(22:37):
a conference years ago with the former president of Harvard,
the former president of Princeton at the time, the sitting
president of Tulane, and we got into this conversation about
the cost of education, and Derek Back, the former president
of Harvard, told me that people that talk about cost
containment in higher education don't really understand the importance of

(22:59):
higher education. I'm like, I don't think so. And so
we've worked on making our institution accessible. You know, we're
producing four times the graduates, doing five times the research,
have twenty times the learners. Our faculties about the same size.
So we've also greatly changed the economic efficiency and effectiveness

(23:24):
of the institution. We kept our out of state and
international student tuition at sort of the average level, and
we basically say for in state students, we'll make it
work for you, and we have massive financial aid to
help people to be able to attend the institution. So
our net tuition after grants, no loans for in state
students is under four thousand dollars for a year, and

(23:45):
we think that is you know, to use a phrase
common here in Arizona, as close to free as possible.
And so we've worked really hard at that to make
that work. And then if you come from a family
with no income, you have no way to pay to
go to college. Where we're going to find a way
for you to go to college. So forty percent of
our undergraduates graduate with no debt. Our average debt is
less than the cost of a Honda Civic. Than the

(24:08):
Honda Civic is not an investment the way that a
degree from a SU as an investment. We get a
lot of I don't know what to call them, other
than you know, skeptics or naysayers, and they say, well,
you can't be any good if you're big, Like, okay,
how do you know that? So our graduates in the
marketplace have no market outcome differentiation from UCLA, Texas, University

(24:29):
of Washington, and USC, any of the big research universities. None,
there's no there's no there's no income difference, there's no
lifespan difference. You know, we participated in the big survey
that was done of the Gallop Produce survey of students.
We participated in that, so we did you know, thousands
and thousands and thousands of our graduates and compared it
against their graduates, and we know life outcomes and so

(24:50):
forth and so on. We also know the financial outcomes
of our students. So we've done elaborate ROI return on
investment studies of our graduates who have unbelievable returns on
the investment twelve percent average return on investment year per year,
year over year over year. We've also done learning outcome assessments.
We also have the income tax returns, not by name,

(25:12):
but we have all the income tax returns of every
graduate that's in Arizona, and we also have them everybody
in the US. And what we know then is life outcomes,
So we have a lot of information and income tax
return When does somebody die, what's their philanthropy? How you know?
Are people more philanthropic, less philanthropic? Do they have higher
wages lower wages? And so what we have found is
that not only are our graduates doing extremely well in

(25:35):
the market, which is proof a substantial proof of our concept,
but also in rankings by companies hiring our graduates, we
do unbelievably well. In fact, it's where we are like
off the charts, people love our graduates. They love the
team experience and the transdisciplinary experience, and the and the
grit and the drive and the pluck and the ambition

(25:59):
that a lot of our graduates come with. So we're
seeing great outcomes. So a lot of the kids, by
the way, that aren't employed within just a few months
of graduation, well they're off to graduate school. So we're
also a huge producer of graduate school outcomes, you know,
medical school, law school, science school, other kinds of things,
and so on the product side of the institution. We're
exceedingly proud to be a part of helping, you know,

(26:22):
these lives to be empowered. So one day, I'm with
a group of students and we're over at the union
student union. We're having lunch, and we're talking about these students,
and I'm talking to this one young woman and she says,
I got a four point zero average. I'm double majoring
in nursing and biochemistry. That's great, and she says, and
I'm a I've got a full scholarship and so forth

(26:44):
and so on, but it's really hard for me. I
also work forty hours a week, Like, well, why do
you work forty hours a week? He says, well, I'm
the main breadwinner for my mother's family, got and so
and so. I have been floored over and over and
over and over by all these kids that are at

(27:06):
this school and where they come from and where they're going.
And it's not just about kids that come from families
of meager means. It's just that it's just that we
have become so wrecked by thinking that all the smart
kids are at these other schools and everybody else they're
just you know, lesser humans. It may be human nature

(27:29):
to think that way, but it's one of the most
destructive things imaginable. There's nothing lesser about anything here. There's
nothing lesser about the students that are here. I was
a factory member tenure in factory member at Columbia University.
There's nothing lesser about the faculty here. There's nothing lesser
at all, except that we're a public university serving this
broad demographic of students, and that in our present system,

(27:52):
in the eyes of some, makes us lesser. I think
my background makes me more determined to not be defeated.
I think that. I think that's the main thing that
comes out of my background. I think the main drive
for me relative to our focus on diversity and our
focus on completion, is that our society is not fulfilling

(28:12):
its potential. Our democracy is not rising to its potential.
We have all these problems, and we think that what
we see is the problem. It's not the problem. The
problem is we got millions of high school dropouts who
are unprepared for the economy in which we're living. The
problem is that we've got all these people that went
to college and got disappointed and now are angry. The

(28:33):
problem is that we've got lots and lots of really
upset and angry people who want to be a part
of the new economy as it's evolving and feel that
they're being left behind. The problem is we've got all
these people who feel that they're being disadvantaged or that
others are getting advantage over them. The problem that we
have is we've got educated people who are snobs who
are looking down their noses at other people. And my

(28:55):
background won't allow me to look down my nose at
somebody else, because because I know, I know what it's
like to be a normal, regular human being and a
regular job doing regular things, and and I hate academic elitism,
and so that's one thing my background I think empowers
me with I think my background allows me to understand

(29:24):
what it's like to feel that you just want a
little bit of help. It just a little bit of help.
Just let me have access to that class at a
time when I can take it. You know, my stepmother
had like two jobs, my father had three jobs. We
all worked. Every kid in the family worked multiple jobs

(29:44):
all the time, paid for everything. I didn't get one
penny to go to college from anyone, no one, not
one cent. And so being able to be flexible and
adaptable and engageable, I mean, I think that's what my
background helps me to to see. And great job to
Alex and Gregg for bringing us that piece the story
of Michael Crowe. His family's story deeply embedded in his

(30:08):
and Arizona State University's story. Here on our American Stories