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Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big with Dr. Michael Crow: Redesigning the American University
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- [00:00]
Dr. Michael Crow
There's tens of thousands of higher education institutions around the world. We have a faculty that's produced by all of these other culturally different kinds of institutions. And so, like Drucker said, not only does culture eat, eat your breakfast, it eats your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And so what we did was we focused intensely on changing the culture, empowering the culture, with the charter basically saying that we would not accept status quo as an explanation for anything. We would not accept, well, this is the way they do it everywhere else. Who cares? And so we basically, basically built in what we think of as the concept of continuous innovation. We can always be better. We can always do it in a new way. We can always find a way to do things in a more enhanced way. We have tens of thousands of double majors now. We have many triple majors. We've had kids graduate with four degrees in four years. We've built ways to go fast, ways to go slow, ways to do this, ways to do that. And so we just basically said that a part of our culture here, and you may not want to be a part of it, is going to be continuous innovation. Continuous innovation all the time. And it turns out that that is, in almost every case, unbelievably powerful.
- [01:05]
Kevin Gentry
Welcome to the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and this is the place where we celebrate bold moves and big ideas. Each week, I sit down with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, and change makers who are making a significant impact in their careers and in their communities. Whether you're looking to level up your leadership, pursue your passion, or just get inspired to take your next big leap, this is where those stories come to life. Now, if you're listening on iTunes, YouTube, or anywhere else you tune into podcasts, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's dive in to what it.
- [01:46]
Means to truly go big. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and. And our guest today, as you're about to see, is one of the most visionary, transformational, consequential leaders in America today. I would argue, certainly in the area of higher education. For more than two decades, Dr. Michael Crow has served as the president of Arizona State University. And as you're about to see, what he's doing is just totally rethinking how we see education. The role of it and what he's done at ASU is just extraordinary. So, Dr. Crow, it's great to have you. Thanks for joining us today on the Going Big Podcast.
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Dr. Michael Crow
Yeah, thanks, Kevin. It's great to have a chance to talk again.
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Kevin Gentry
Really looking forward to this and I know our, our listeners are as well. But just as how to set the stage for this, how would you answer the question in terms of what do you see as the role of higher education in America Today in 2026?
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Dr. Michael Crow
Well, I mean, I think the role is as it was articulated by some of the founding fathers. Adams, Washington, Franklin, all thought that was essential to the success of the country. And back in those days they just had a few colleges, they were very good, small. As the country grew, as the democracy expanded, the people have asked the universities to step up several times. The land grant universities that got built, the victory in World War II that was heavily influenced by the scientific discoveries, the ways that the medical schools and the medical research in the country has evolved, the way that the economy has been unbelievably accelerated by fundamental discoveries and so forth. And so, you know, I think that the fundamental role of the universities going forward is really twofold. How can we better serve the democracy and the success of the Republic in all things? And I think we've gotten a little bit off track in the last couple decades, few decades maybe in that regard. And then second, you know, we have this central role where we're the part of society which is heavily concentrated on enabling the future. So we're producing the new thinkers, the new designers, the new kinds of musical expressionists, the new whatever writers. We're laying down the track for new technologies, fusion power, quantum theory, quantum computing. We're doing all these things. New ways to fight cancer, new ways to beat cancer. So we're preparing for the future, but it has to be the future of a successful democracy. And so those are the two things I think are the most important assignments for the future. Now, higher education is complex. There's lots of different kinds of institutions. Private universities, for profit universities, for profit colleges, tech schools, community colleges, four year liberal arts colleges, state colleges, teachers colleges, universities, research universities. I mean there's everything that you can imagine because in the US we just built a massive system of unbelievable power and complexity.
- [04:49]
Kevin Gentry
Well, thank you, that's a great way to start. And we want to tap more of those insights, more of your experience, but even just to set the table further, to better understand how you develop this thinking, your approaches, how you've taken on risk and challenge. Tell us a little bit about yourself. My understanding is you grew up in San Diego in a Navy family. How did just your growing up begin to affect maybe how you see the world the role of education, how you just think about challenging the established order.
- [05:21]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, my. My parents were teenagers from the Midwest, and. And they ran off when my dad joined the Navy, had me as teenagers. And then we moved around a lot while my dad was in the Navy. We continued to move. I. I moved 21 or 22 times before I went to college. Went to 17 schools that we count lived in basically Navy housing or, you know, we were. We were on government support that didn't pay people in the Navy very much. There were five kids in the family. And so what I learned from all of that was that the United States is filled with unbelievable talent. A lot of the talent isn't operationalized. The schools are kind of older technologies, older systems. They're not very much built around the aspirations of individuals. And so I became deeply interested in finding ways, even when I was in middle school and high school, and then definitely when I got to college, finding ways to use discovery science technology tools to empower better outcomes for our country. And so that's. That's what I've really devoted my energy to all along, from, you know, the kinds of things that I've written to the kinds of institutions that I've been building to the kinds of things that I've helped to facilitate. So it's really been all about, you know, how do we. How do we. How do we find a way for our country to be the most successful in the world to, you know, really be aspirationally empowered on every level and, and, you know, creating new knowledge and educating people is a key part of that.
- [06:56]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, you went to Iowa State first.
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Dr. Michael Crow
Oh, yeah. I was a. I was a javelin thrower at Iowa State. I went there and I took two majors and three minors. Yep.
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Kevin Gentry
And then when did you decide. I mean, obviously you. You pursued your PhD at Syracuse. When did you decide that. That education was going to become more about? Was it your future? Was it guiding your future? How did you begin to see even further the role of education?
- [07:20]
Dr. Michael Crow
Yeah, the answer's kind of funny. I mean, it's really when I was in the eighth grade, and so we were living at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station at the time in Lexington Park, Maryland, rural St. Mary's county, about 70 miles south of Washington. And in the fall of 1968, me and this other kid were working on our Eagle Scout project to become Eagle Scouts. And so we decided to try to collect enough food for one family for one year. We got enough food. It was unbelievable. We got the name of this family and we ended up going out in this 24 foot u haul truck that my dad had rented. And we ended up in this, in this family way back in the woods, not too far from the base that was just a tar paper shack with a dirt floor and a potbelly stove. And that same day, December 24, 1968, that family was happy. You know, they were very happy that the scouts had come up with all this. That very same evening was when Apollo 8 circled the moon and sent back the first pictures from the moon. And you know, as a kid, you know, I was watching Star Trek at the time, 1966, 67, 68. We just went to this kid's house that, you know, this family, and they had a dirt floor. And all I said to myself is like, something's wrong here. And so I began sort of systematically beginning to think about and reading a lot about, about how you could use new kinds of knowledge production, new kinds of ways of teaching and learning. So four years later, when I'm going to college, that's all I was interested in, was finding a place to be able to do those kinds of things.
- [08:46]
Kevin Gentry
So fascinating. All right, so one part of what you've addressed is this notion in America that somehow prestige related to sort of the limited numbers of students at certain universities is very key. That's one of the big notions you've challenged, which we'll get into with respect to Arizona State. But how did, what, how did you begin to come up with some of these views? Was it just direct experiences? Was it reading? Were there particular mentors, exposure?
- [09:16]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, I mean, I think it was a comment. I think it was all it was reading. It was reading history. It was trying to understand how the country was built. We spent a lot of time in, when my dad was moving around to different places, you know, going to Civil War battlefields. And I would always study what was going on and go to revolutionary sites and I would study was going on. So I became this sort of my hobby, if you will, was history, to try to understand how did we get here, how did we grow up, where did we come from? And what I found was that we had these colleges where it just seemed to be that the colleges that were the most important or the most valued in the country were those that measured their success based on how many applicants they got and how few they admitted. So it's success through selectivity. In fact, if you, if you look at supposedly the highest ranked colleges in the country, they are those that have, quote, unquote, the highest level of Selectivity. And so there's nothing wrong with selectivity, except for one thing. If every college operates that way and every university operates that way, we basically have then replicated the British system of social hierarchy. And I was relatively convinced by the time I was a teenager that I thought we overthrew that. You know, I thought that this was a country where your parents and your family income wasn't going to be the determiner of your success. And so, and so along the way, I started learning and studying and looking at institutions. And, you know, we got lots of institutions here. And so I began to sense and to understand all kinds of things. There was a book that was written, I mean, obviously all the stuff you read normally, but there was a book I read as a. A younger person called the Moon and the Ghetto, by a guy, an economist, named Richard Nelson. It was like, how can you put people on the moon? And we still have ghettos. Well, there's lots of explanations for that, but some of them are that we haven't found a way to build a system of pure merit, an egalitarian system, where your merit is the mechanism by which you advance. Now, I'm not suggesting that the system hasn't tried to do this or that it can't do this. I'm just saying that, you know, at a big research university like asu, it turns out that you're going to be one of two things. You're going to be either highly selective, admitting only a handful of students, or you're going to admit lots of students, and they're not going to do very well because the university is not going to be empowered with the top faculty or top researchers or what have you. And so the basic model along the way was we should be able to build institutions in America that are unbelievably innovative, unbelievably creative, research capable, and then unbelievably egalitarian. And I mean by egalitarian, I mean the purest sense of that word, it is that, you know, you are admitted. Like we admit every single student qualified to attend the university. And we will adjust to that. And that's just a very different model. Our admission standards are those of the of Michigan or Berkeley from 1950. And that is, you know, did you have a B average in high school? Did you take the right courses? If you did, you're in. And if you don't have resources, we'll help you find resources or a job. We'll find some way for you to get through the institution.
- [12:23]
Kevin Gentry
Ladies and gentlemen, I think you now understand why I wanted to have President Crow on the Going Big podcast. He's perfect for the theme and objectives of these conversations. So, one more question about your professional journey before we get to what has happened at Arizona State. You then went into some senior academic and administrative roles at Iowa State University of Kentucky at Columbia. What was going on there that then continued to either prepare you for or influence how you would ultimately lead when you go to Arizona State, which we'll come to next?
- [12:56]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, so at Iowa State, which is where I went as an undergraduate and then went back as a faculty member and as a. An academic executive there, you know, that was a land grant school in an unbelievably rich agricultural region of the planet in which you learned how universities could be a frontline enabler of the success of. Of a region. So, you know, we have the richest, most powerful agricultural economy in the world. We have unbelievable agricultural and engineering assets out of our land grants. And so I really learned about the connection or the connectability of the university to the people and to the industry and to the future at Iowa State. And I was part of building more than 30 new research centers there to help that part of the country and for the country to be more successful. And then at the University of Kentucky, also a land grant school there, in a much more complicated state with areas of the state that are more impoverished than other parts of the country and mining industries and all kinds of other things, you know, you get down on the ground and you're trying to figure out how to make the institution more powerfully impactful for the success of what the people there called the Commonwealth of Kentucky. And so you learn how to do that then in New York City at Columbia University, I was invited there to lead basically elements of transformation of that institution that was, you know, started before the Revolution as King's College in 1754, Alexander Hamilton went to that school. Dwight Eisenhower was the president of that school before he was President of the United States. You know, a powerful, dynamic institution, deeply committed in some ways to the future of the city of New York and the region and the country and so forth. But there, what I learned about was how to build academic excellence to the highest possible level. But then how do you take that commitment, like a land grant school and that academic excellence thing and bring those two things together? So these institutions that I was able to be at were like training grounds for me in terms of enabling me to find a way to build a school equal to an Ivy League university. Faculty that then had a mission, though, of Commitment to the general population and the communities themselves. And so those three experiences then gave me the design experience, the on the ground managerial experience. And then along the way, you know, I had to also prove myself as a. You know, it's kind of like, you know, you have to be an academic also. So I had to prove myself as an academic at a place like Columbia with a ultra high bar for achievement. And so I was able to find a way to do that also.
- [15:26]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. A lot of hats you wear and have worn. So now in 2002, you go to Arizona State University. You've been there now almost 25 years. Tell us about sort of that moment that maybe initial thoughts, vision that you had objectives that you had just, just kind of again set the stage for us at the beginning.
- [15:46]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, so Arizona as a place compared to other states, and I've lived all over the country. I mean, it's like wild territory. So there's nothing, there's nothing about the rules of the rest of the country that really apply in Arizona. Arizona people come from everywhere to be here. There's no, there's no, well, this is what a university is, or this is what a government is, or this is how government should work, or this is how we should do things. I mean, this is still a wild, open, highly innovative place in which everybody gets to be able to come here. And so the folks that were here that were looking for a new university president, they said that they were looking for an entrepreneurial university leader. They were looking for someone to design a new kind of model. And they picked me in, in doing that. And then they basically said, well, here's what you have to do. You have to figure out how to build a university in which the government's not going to be the principal funder of the university. The principal funder of the university is going to be your entrepreneurial skill, the building of the university to be an enterprise which is agile and flexible and adaptive and driven by market demand and driven by all kinds of things. And so, so I ended up here in 2002 with that license, inherited an institution that was a solid regional university, emerging as a research university, but still predominantly funded by the government and still predominantly operating as a government agency. I took a lot of the ideas, you're going to laugh at this, of Margaret Thatcher when she was building public enterprises in England while she was prime minister there. So she was able to find ways to take public purpose and then find entrepreneurial energies to build public enterprises to make these things work. So we studied very closely these models that she had. And then I made a proposal when I first got here, in my first few months that I was here, that included three fundamental changes to the university. One was the definition of a purpose, through a charter of what's become our charter, which has three elements. We'll measure the success of the university based on who we include versus who we exclude and how they succeed. So we're not going to count up how many we don't admit. It's who did we, you know, who did we bring to the university and how did they succeed? If you can't do that, then you're not serving the public. The second thing is that we're going to become research masters and research intensive. But our measurement of success would be what value did we return to the taxpayers? What value did we return to the, to the, to the people of the country? What, what public value did we add? And then the last part of this charter that was proposed, that now has become our charter and become our cultural driver, the last part was that we would take responsibility for outcomes. So universities never want to take responsibility. So if we have a K12 system that's underperforming and we graduated, all of the teachers trained all the principals and trained all of the school board members and it's not working well, that's our fault. That's not someone else's fault. If we have a healthcare system which is unaffordable and we train all the doctors, train all the hospital administrators, train all the economists and health economists and so forth, and it's not working well, that's our fault. If we graduate most of the members of Congress and they can't figure out how to make a better healthcare system, well, that's also our fault. You know, we haven't given people the skills. And so we said in the last part of our charter that we would take responsibility for the health outcomes, the economic outcomes, the competitiveness outcomes, the national security outcomes, you know, not sole responsibility, but the second that you say to a university that they're responsible for something, the second that you say that you have to measure the public value of their research, and the second that you say that it's going to be measuring the outcomes of their students, it changes everything. So in Arizona, there was openness to that, there was openness to this new kind of model, openness to being entrepreneurial, openness to building this kind of public enterprise model. And these are not easy things. I mean, these institutions, some of them are a thousand years old, Harvard's almost 400 years old. The University of Bologna in Italy is a thousand years old. You know, Oxford and Cambridge are hundreds of years old. And so there's cultural issues and cultural design things. And so here, what was empowered was, let's build a new kind of university. So I'll just give you a sense of what that means. So I'll just pick two things. So. So one, we've been able to find a way to graduate many more students and lower the cost for them to be graduates and enhance their quality in the market. So we're producing 40,000 graduates now, and we used to produce 8,000 graduates. Their value in the market is higher than it's ever been. The country needs more engineers. The President says we need more engineers, more American engineers. So the majority of our engineering students are American, Vast majority. But we used to produce about 900 engineers a year with 6,000 engineering students. This year, we'll graduate 7,500 engineers with 33,000 engineering students and 25,000 on campus, 8,000 online. We've taken hundreds of technologies from the private sector and advanced learning technologies. We've brought those together and built a mechanism by which now we have about 200,000 students all together, about 80,000 on campus pursuing degrees and 120,000 online pursuing degrees. So of the 40 million Americans that went to college and didn't finish, we now have a way for them to finish with a high quality research university grade university in engineering, in biochemistry, in English, in digital photography, in philosophy, across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of subjects. And so we've also been able to become innovative in the way that some American universities needed to be able to do well.
- [21:27]
Kevin Gentry
President Crow, if people who are listening right now are hearing this from you for the first time, I envision a lot of heads exploding. I've had the advantage of knowing about what you've been doing for a while, but it truly is extraordinary. And I want to get in more to the lessons learned from this. But just again, to paint that picture, when you started, There were what, 55,000 students? How many students today, roughly are being searched?
- [21:52]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, degree seeking students, we have 200,000. And then we have another 500,000 learners who are taking courses, who are not in degree programs. And we didn't have any of those before for. So the same materials can now be made available to the worker or the mom or the grandpa, the grandma that wants to take a course in this or that, that for either a job reason or a training reason or a something that they just want to know or they want to learn. And then We've also opened up our system to 25 million other learners who come and visit our system to take advantage of the learning assets that we have. So we have about 800,000 registered learners and about 25 million people that are learning from our learning assets.
- [22:34]
Kevin Gentry
Well, okay, so clearly, as you even hinted at earlier, that the conventional wisdom was that exclusivity equaled excellence and that somehow if you're going to lower, if you're going to increase acceptance, you're going to somehow lower excellence, but you will continue to receive higher marks in a number of areas of achievement. Speak to that, and then I've got a lot of questions about it.
- [22:58]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, so the one thing we had to prove was that our faculty, while teaching all these students using advanced technologies that we're also developing and acquiring and partnering to attain, could also be a world class research university. So five universities in the United States without medical schools. We're just opening a medical school this year, an advanced medical school in medical engineering, in fact. But our 2024 numbers, which were just made official by the National Science foundation, show that we're the, the fourth of five universities in the history of the country to break a billion dollars of research expenditures without a medical school. So mit, Georgia Tech, UC Berkeley, US And Purdue, those are the, those are the five. And we were fourth in that quest. And so the reason I say that is that we figured out how to increase the number of graduates by a factor of five while increasing the level of research that we're doing to benefit the economy of the future of the country by a factor of 10, while reducing our public investment from the state of Arizona dramatically, while finding a way to fund the university in new kinds of ways with partnerships and alliances and private sector investment and so forth. And so we have found a way to sort of build, as we call it, a highly entrepreneurial, public enterprise university. We don't seek a profit. We seek, in a sense, we seek a community profit, you know, an impact in the community. We don't seek a financial profit, but we operate in a way where we can leverage entrepreneurial energy investment partners, investment capital, public private partnerships, billions of dollars in public private partnerships, you know, all these kinds of things and all this, I mean, if you looked at the way that they built Heathrow Airport in London or other public enterprises, I mean, we just found a way to use everything. All right, so I don't know if you're, I don't know if you heard the announcement just the last couple days. So Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is going to increase their investment from $160 billion in new microchip foundries here in Phoenix to between 300 and 500 billion dollars. And we are there. We are their, their teaching, learning and discovery partner in the pursuit of that meaning, we have found a way to help facilitate the largest foreign direct investment in the history of the United States here in Arizona, because we built the largest business school in the country, the largest engineering school in the country, the largest design and art school in the country under this, you know, fighting against the notion that, well, if you're so big, you can't be any good. Are you kidding me? I mean, we found whole new ways to teach. We have 11,000 biology majors, we have thousands of English majors, thousands of English majors. I mean, the hottest thing in the market right now is an English major who can code the most valuable majors that we're producing right now. That is, those that are instantaneously snapped up by the market are music majors. Music majors are master planners, master organizers. Unbelievably disciplined, creative, expressive, speak multiple languages. They are exactly what the workforce needs.
- [26:07]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. Well, I mean, you are redefining what transformation means. I just hope others not only will follow your lead, but I also think, I hope that others won't just give up. So many are really just ready to give up on higher education. Just blow it all up.
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Dr. Michael Crow
Yeah, I hope they don't. You know, I mean, the, the Chinese have been investing for the last 36 years, low trillions of dollars in the building of 100American style research universities. And they have about 30 of them up and running. And the reason they're doing that was they looked at our model from the 40s, 50s and 60s and said we have to have that. We don't have that. So they built Tsinghua University and what they call the University of Peking and Fudan University and a bunch of others, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. And now they've turned these into these behemoth research universities. And I'm like, game on. We're going to compete at the highest possible level and so forth and so on. But we've got to make certain that as we, as we ask our universities to be more impactful for the, for the United States and more focused on the success of the United States that we don't, as we're doing that, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like, oh yeah, we wanted to correct this, this baby here, but we threw that out with the bathwater also.
- [27:18]
Kevin Gentry
Well, okay, along those lines, if being ranked number one in Terms of innovation, you obviously had to break some stuff up, you had to discard some things, give us just a little bit of a sense for how you even approach that. Some, maybe even a couple of examples of how you just challenged what was going on.
- [27:36]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, so what I said to people was, here's this charter. Don't you want to be a part of an organization focused on the success of the country, focused on the success of students by being egalitarian in our admission standards? Don't you want to have higher public value and so forth and so on? If you don't want those things, there's plenty of other places where you can go and work. And then on top of that, I said, there's no way that we can get there. There's no way that we can, you know, return to the people what they really want from us. I said, I said, the people have given the universities unbelievable privilege. We have, we have tenure, we have, we have relatively high salaries. We have, you know, every sort of cushion and, and nicety that you can possibly imagine. I said, why would bus drivers and taxi drivers and hard working men and women, you know, want to support these kinds of institutions? So even if we're not getting appropriations, we get tax breaks and tax benefits and people can give us money. And so, you know, the public investment in the institutions is massive and the privilege that we're given is massive. And so I said, and what are we doing to benefit these people? And so it used to be that the argument would be, well, we're great academicians. I'm like, well, so what? You know, there's great academicians in lots of places. We have to be great academicians, great teachers, great scientists, great creators, great thinkers, great philosophers for the success of the democracy that we're a part of. And so I use that logic. And then also I said, the old design is producing the following. So, you know, most people that go to college in the United States don't graduate, right? Most people, most people that have debt from college have no diploma. Now they do at the small, most elite schools where they're handpicked, where they already are fully qualified to graduate. But that's not the, you know, that's not, you know, the mass of the country. So I said, we've got to demonstrate that this model can be enhanced. Now to do that, you have to change up everything. So we eliminated 85 department schools and colleges. We built 40 new, fantastically newly designed things. So for instance, we had three underperforming biology departments. And I said, well, you guys are okay as a faculty. You're like B plus, A minus, but your units are operating at C plus, C minus. We're not going to have any C level performers in the institution, no matter what. I'd rather have nothing. And so we began a reorganization process to enhance. How many students could we educate? We now have 11,000 undergraduate biology majors. How much research could we do? We're now doing 10 to 12 times as much research as we were doing before. How many companies could we spin out? How many new technologies could we enable? We're at, you know, 20 times whatever we were doing before in the past. So it turns out that we built a charter as a thing that was aspirational for us. And then we built a modality of design being, you know, not running a bureaucracy, we're running this thing that's continuously going to design itself to do more things. And so, I mean, yes, there's standard culture issues and faculty issues and so forth and so on, but we said we're going to teach lots of people, we're going to build new ways to teach, new ways to learn, new ways to do research, make these things happen, and we're going to make this institution of greater value to the community, which we have been able to do. Like this Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Example, which is just the latest example here in Phoenix.
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Kevin Gentry
All right, so this begs, I think, an important question. Anybody who drives transformation is going to face challenge from entrenched interests. And I mean, you've got, I don't know about alumni. You mentioned, you know, Phoenix is kind of like, I think, sort of the capital of free enterprise still in America. There is a spirit of independence and innovation and entrepreneurship, but it's a state support university. So you have political actors, you have tenured faculty, you have lots of different interests. Any, any particular insights for surely you faced some challenge back a lot, A lot.
- [31:36]
Dr. Michael Crow
And, and very. Of various types. And so within the institution, there were the entrenched interests who wanted to protect the status quo. I, I took down the structure of the education college, which was against charter schools, against home schools, against all kinds of things. And there were about 40 faculty members that had to exit over that. Some retired, some left. And then, and then, and then those that, you know, left, then, you know, maybe they, they not, maybe they did. They campaigned against me, they worked against me. I mean, I won't walk through all of that, but yeah, there's lots of resistance. And so what I kept saying to them was one, let's talk about all of this. You Guys are really going off of old models and you don't really know what we're doing. Let's sit and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And some wanted to do that, some didn't want to do that. But, but really what it came down to was a lot of those people were not interested in the broader social scale success of the institution, which is my assignment. You know, I, I'm the only person in the institution appointed by the representatives of the people. So this is a, I mean, public universities in the United States are unbelievably democratic. The presidents are appointed by boards in other countries, they report to ministries, they report, you know, they're a part of the government. And the public universities are, you know, are appointed, the presidents are appointed by ministers. And so not here. I have, I have a board of about 10 people, 10 citizens who are appointed through a process within the state. And I'm accountable to them. And I, I would say to the faculty here, you know, listen, you know, my assignment here is to build a university of greater impact for the future of the economy, the future of the society, the future of healthcare, the future of human capital development, the, the future success of the defense of the United States. And you're coming at me with these tiny, tiny, tiny little things. Okay, that's okay for you to talk about, but you gotta give me these bigger ideas. And if you can't talk about the bigger ideas or focus on that, then your things are too small. They don't, they don't really, they're not material to the, to, to what it is that we're trying to do. So a lot of discussions or arguments about that. And then along the way, politically you said it right, that Arizona is, you know, very different. It's, it's, it is a huge, huge, huge place for free enterprise and free thinking and new ways of doing things and so forth and so on. Which means the political spectrum here is very broad. You know, we have, we have hyper libertarians to, and those sort of circle around to ultra liberal. So we have ultra conservative libertarians and then ultra liberal libertarians. And here's what I say to my libertarian friends to give you some sense of politics. And so those two groups attack the university a lot. And I say, listen, why are you doing this? I said, we're protecting free speech, we're enabling free speech, we're making these things happen. And I said, you probably don't realize this, but I'm a libertarian also. I'm just not a libertarian focused on me. I'm a libertarian focused on whether or not I can guarantee the liberties of my great grandchildren. I know five of my grandchildren already. They're going to have children. I probably won't know them. I might know them. I won't know them by the time they're adults. So how do I protect their liberties and their children's liberties? I do that by making certain that the country is safe and secure and economically successful, where people are educated and adaptive, where new technologies that we develop have a net, net positive outcome. That's how I secure those liberties for the future. So we have a lot of political debates internal to the university and external to the university, and there's nothing easy about any of this.
- [35:05]
Kevin Gentry
Okay. All right. Well, you've been very generous with your time today, and we need to begin to bring this to a close. But I've got so many other important questions to ask. Culture. So, I mean, you know, you obviously, you laid out your strategy in line with the objectives that you'd set through your vision, and you're just amazing. But as Peter Drucker famously said, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. How? Tell us about building the culture there that would support what you're doing?
- [35:32]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, this is the most difficult part of the assignment because there's, you know, 1400 or so institutions in the country that give bachelor's degrees. There's thousands of higher education institutions in the United States. There's tens of thousands of higher education institutions around the world. We have a faculty that's produced by all of these other culturally different kinds of institutions. And so, like Drucker said, not only does culture eat your breakfast, it eats your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And so what we did was we focused intensely on changing the culture, empowering the culture, with the charter basically saying that we would not accept status quo as an explanation for anything. We would not accept, well, this is the way they do it everywhere else. Who cares? And so we basically built in what we think of as the concept of continuous innovation. We can always be better. We can always do it in a new way. We can always find a way to do things in a more enhanced way. We have tens of thousands of double majors now. We have many triple majors. We've had kids graduate with four degrees in four years. We've built ways to go fast, ways to go slow, ways to do this, ways to do that. And so we just basically said that a part of our culture here, and you may not want to be a part of it, is going to be continuous innovation, continuous innovation all the time. And it turns out that that is in almost every case, unbelievably powerful. And after time, I'll give you an example. So there was a physics professor that wasn't so hot on our use of advanced learning technologies to assist learning. Well, he used them. He came in and was, you know, emotional when he told me that he realized that all these kids that he'd been flunking through the years weren't stupid. He just wasn't teaching in a way where they could understand what he was saying. And now he saw, using these new tools that we built. So the culture here became one in which innovation has greatly enhanced our ability to produce from any family background, any educational background. We've got kids graduating from here who. There was a young woman who graduated recently who was growing up behind Taliban lines in Afghanistan. She couldn't go to school after age 10. She took a bunch of our courses online and said, I want to come to your university. She never went to middle school or a high school. She did very well with these online courses. They don't cost anything. And she demonstrated that she could do university level work. So we let her in and turns out that she outperformed almost everybody else. And I mean, she might have been sort of an Abraham Lincoln type also, you know, just sort of really self motivated. Well, we have thousands of her now kids who got off track, weren't on track, found our tools, found ways to get into the university. And so the culture here, the ways that we're doing things, is such that people want to be a part of all that.
- [38:16]
Kevin Gentry
Oh, wow.
- [38:17]
Dr. Michael Crow
And so that's continuous innovation.
- [38:19]
Kevin Gentry
All right. I think we all want to move to Tempe.
- [38:23]
Dr. Michael Crow
Today it's only about 75, blue skies. It's pretty nice.
- [38:26]
Kevin Gentry
Well, it's an appealing time of year for you to be making that argument. All right, so going big, you've gone big. Literally. There are a number of people who challenge, you know, big. Big philanthropy, big institutions, big government, just all across the board generally, you know, leads to slower decision making, less transformation, less innovation. Speak to that if you. You would, because you'll truly have gone big.
- [38:53]
Dr. Michael Crow
Yeah. So one, we live in the third most populated country on the surface of the planet. We have approaching 350 million people. We're going to grow to 400, 450 million people. Before we know it, we've got what, 20, 25% of the global economy and 4% of the population. And so we're already big. So there's nothing about us that isn't big in everything that we do. It seems like it's big if you use the old model. So I'll take many universities. We have four campuses here in metro Phoenix, but we don't have any leadership on any of the campuses. We don't have, like, chancellors or whatever on the campuses we run as a single institution. We use technology to overcome this notion of bureaucracy. So I remember when in 2008, with the financial crisis, we were making a number of very rapid adjustments, and it was very easy to take 25 to $30 million out of the administrative costs of operating university by just realizing that if you use the structures of the old Systems from the 19th and early 20th century, you have a structure which isn't able to accommodate size or complexity. We did away with that entire structure. We did away with all of the mechanisms that cost extra money. I mean, there's. There's university Systems that have 10 presidents on 10 different campuses that produce fewer graduates than we do. And, you know, we don't have any of that. And so what I'm saying is that, is that BIG has worked in our favor. BIG has worked in our favor because we can buy the computers that we need and the technology tools that we need and the training assets that we need. So we have a staff of 700 people that support our 6,000 faculty members in the development of the most advanced learning tools imaginable. So if you were a faculty member, Kevin, here, teaching, you know, journalism or teaching whatever business or whatever it is that you wanted to want to teach, government, democracy, you'd have a team of instructional designers working with you at no cost to you, because we're big and we can do these things in which you'd be building whole new ways to enhance your teaching and learning and discovery outcomes. And so BIG has worked to our advantage because of the way that we've been able to do this.
- [40:59]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, the average university presidency, I believe today the United States is about four years.
- [41:06]
Dr. Michael Crow
You've been shorter more recently.
- [41:09]
Kevin Gentry
Yes, yes. And you've been there since 2002, continuing to stay innovative, cutting edge. Can you receive all these awards? And also, I think a very important element of recognition and that is the funds that have coming in the way of private support and other support because they see something that's working. Give us those listings. Some advice. How do you stay fresh and keep the energy and keep it going? Just give us some advice.
- [41:39]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, so one, it's very. If you look at the young people coming up in the country, they're really unbelievable. I mean, you know, we have 16,000, 15, 16,000 new full time freshmen on campus. And we meet with them all at once, right at the beginning of the year. I mean, it is unbelievable what they think we do surveys of them, what they're thinking about, what their aspirations are, what their hopes are. Not the negative stuff written in the media, not the negative stuff, all the negative stories in the newspapers and on the websites and so forth. We're talking about what they're aspiring to be. So we are driven by these next generations that are coming up. The things they want to do, the way they want the world to be, the things they want to achieve, the, you know, the, the, the things they want to build. And so that's inspiring to us. And then on top of that, you know, if you turn these things into, you know, the rough organizational equivalent of a jail, you know, or, or, or an institution, a post office, you know, these are not, these are not static institutions that are performing a process function. These are discovery institutions. These are enabling institutions. And so, so if you do it in a way where you make it in and of itself also adaptive and innovative, it changes everything. I mean, I guarantee you that when the day comes that I decide that, or my board, I should say, decides that there's somebody better than me that needs to do this job, because I don't make that decision. The people of Arizona make that decision. The day that that happens, I'm guaranteeing you that that person, whoever they are, if they don't fall back into the classic bureaucracy, you know, it's called petite bureaucracy in the bureaucratic theory models, if they keep it alive with the energy and the creativity of the students and the faculty, there is no wearing out, there is no tiring, there is no wearing down. Because one, the mission is so important, the country's success is so important, and the way that we do these things with so much creative energy. I remember during COVID you know, we, we didn't shut down, we stayed open, we kept our dorms open, we kept our classrooms open. We were hybrid. We built our own. We built our own COVID test. You know, we were able to just plow our way through this. And so we accelerated innovation. That moment during those couple years of COVID really demonstrated to everybody that works here, oh, this different model is a different model. It actually works. And so what we found is that, is that it was unbelievable, inspir. Unbelievably inspirational. There was a, a pack of kids here that won the Global X Prize, not the, the Global X Prize for masking technology.
- [44:11]
Kevin Gentry
Wow.
- [44:13]
Dr. Michael Crow
The oldest kid was 20 or 21, it was a million dollar prize.
- [44:17]
Kevin Gentry
How cool.
- [44:18]
Dr. Michael Crow
And so once people so that, that kind of innovative. I mean, if anything, you know, if universities feel beleaguered or bogged down, I mean, you got the wrong people leading them. And so, and so they. It's just the opposite. You know, we've been given privilege, resources, access to resources, unbelievable assets, tools, computers. I mean we were just given, I don't know, tens of millions of dollars of hyper performing chips by intel so that we can go out and do great stuff. Okay, let's go out and do great stuff. Who wouldn't want to? So, so that's just hugely empowering.
- [44:48]
Kevin Gentry
All right, final two questions. And I always ask guests this as we begin to close. First is thinking back on a younger version of yourself. You know, high school, early days, college, whatever. What would you tell that younger version of yourself today, knowing what you now know?
- [45:06]
Dr. Michael Crow
Well, I think that I would focus on telling that person college, high school, believe it or not, you know, you can, you can actually learn more than you even learned. You can work harder. I don't mean work harder like in measurement of hours, but, but you know, you can prepare yourself to even do more than you've been able to do in the life that you've had. Meaning, you know, if, if you, if you learned a little bit more and were a little bit more broadly educated and maybe a little bit more broadly aware. And so I would just say to go big, back to the name of your show, Go Big.
- [45:42]
Kevin Gentry
Awesome. All right, well then related to that, I mean, this is a tremendous profile, not just in transformation, but in leadership, in my judgment. And I'm so glad you have been a guest here today so that so many more people around the world can hear about what you've done. But the great thing is it's not just theory by any means. All of this is demonstrated practice. So for anyone listening around the world, maybe it's a prospective ASU student, maybe this is a way to invite that next group in. Maybe it's a parent or an alumni member or anybody. What advice would you give to anyone listening about how we should think about living that more meaningful and purposeful, purposeful life that is so implicit to the mission that you've laid out?
- [46:25]
Dr. Michael Crow
I mean, this is a, you know, a quick answer, but I think it's, you must understand history, how we got to where we are. And where we are, we are living at the most unbelievably positive moment in the history of our species. Today. It's the best day that there's ever been. And people are sitting around saying, well, there's this and this and this and this. I said, you have no idea. You have no idea. You must be grounded in understanding where you are in time and space and the fact that you are the beneficiary of generation after generation after generation after generation of people that have laid a foundation for you, which makes this the best day ever in the history of our species.
- [47:09]
Kevin Gentry
President Michael Crow, this has been absolutely great. Thank you for your time and keep at it. I'll look forward to interviewing you again in another 10 years.
- [47:17]
Dr. Michael Crow
All right. Appreciate it.
- [47:18]
Kevin Gentry
All right. Thank you. See you soon.
- [47:20]
Thanks for tuning in to the Going Big Podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling energized and ready to tackle your biggest goals. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps spread the word and it gets these inspiring stories out to more people. You can also find more content, resources and updates at our website, goingbigpodcast.com Remember, the only limits are the ones you don't challenge, the limits that you impose on yourself. Keep pushing, keep growing, and above all, keep going big. See you next time on the Going Big Podcast.