Staying Power: ASU's Michael Crow chose to build in Arizona because 'every idea was welcome'

Here, we’re highlighting some of the Arizonans who have stuck it out in the Valley of the sun – and made their mark here in the process.

And today, we’ve got someone I’m willing to bet you’ve heard of: Arizona State University President Michael Crow who gave me a mic levels check in what he called “pigeon French.”

Usually I ask people what they had for breakfast, but that beats it.

"I had two, two roll-up taquitos at a Circle K at, at 44th Street and Camelback," Crow said.

But, taquitos aside, Crow’s role in the Valley’s development and Arizona’s place on the map is undeniable — if sometimes controversial.

When he arrived at ASU in 2002, it was known as a party school. In fact, that year, it was ranked the nation’s number one party school by none other than Playboy magazine.

But, Crow saw it differently.

"I had become convinced that we needed a new kind of American university that could be more democratic, more connected to the people, more innovative, more fast moving," Crow said. "I was at Columbia, I was deputy provost there. I was a faculty member there. I'd been there for a long time. Enjoyed it, was successful. But I, I just felt like, like I wasn't going to do anything of the kind of level of significance that I thought that I should try to be a part of."

He could have gone on to become university president at any number of prestigious schools. But, he turned them all down.

“My wife got upset at me and she said, you know, what are the, what would be the places that you would go to? Write them on a list and you can't, you can't go anywhere to interview except those places,” Crow said.

Because he would turn down the others, anyway.

“And she said it's just horrible. So I wrote down three places," Crow said.

The University of Washington in Seattle, University of Colorado Boulder and number one on his list? Arizona State University.

'Every idea was welcome. Every person was welcome'

Rocio Hernandez/KJZZ

“Because Arizona is a place in my professional life that I had come to know of as a place in which it was a big house of argument. Every idea was welcome. Every person was welcome," Crow said. "People didn't care where you came from. People didn't care what religion you were, what they didn't even care what political party you were, they didn't care about anything. All they cared about was, you know, what can you do? Can you make something happen? So there was openness here."

The appeal made sense to the self-proclaimed Navy brat and Iowa State University graduate who moved 21 times while he was growing up.

He didn’t come from the elite. And he didn’t want to only educate them. Arizona, he thought, was maybe the only place where he could make his vision of what he calls a “New American University” come true.

“Arizona was the one place that you probably had some chance that you could birth an actual American university as opposed to a facsimile of a British university or a facsimile of a German university,” Crow said.

So it was the anti-elitism essentially that drew him here?

“It wasn't just the anti-elitism, but it was the fact that there was no elite base," Crow said.

But, this rethinking, this massive expansion into the community, this new approach to what a university is has not not come without criticism.

Lots of people will say, you know, the standards aren't high enough, the education is not going to be as good as it should be, too many online students then there, you know, criticism that it's been corporatized, right? Like that, it's too much like a business. What's his response?

"Well, first, it's not a business, it's a university that operates as what we call an enterprise. So we use business-like models to help generate revenue, to be able to pay our expenses in lieu of taxpayers paying for the expenses. And so there's nothing wrong with that. That's the particular political model that we're operating under," Crow said.

"But in terms of the quality of education, you know, that those are unfounded criticisms based on ignorant individuals who don't really have any idea what they're talking about. We're producing unbelievable graduates from our online programs. Almost 100,000 by this point," Crow said.

'Our university is designed to be ubiquitously present'

Gage Skidmore/CC BY 2.0

When he first came to the Valley, Crow told me, he thought that the city was being born. But, of course, this was more than 20 years ago when the population of the Valley was more than 1 million residents smaller than it is now and downtown Phoenix was a ghost town after 5 p.m.

Development has been a big part of the story of ASU. The footprint of ASU in Tempe and in shaping downtown Tempe is obviously huge, but also it is basically Crow and former Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon who shaped the future of downtown Phoenix a decade or so ago, and put ASU down there and changed that place entirely. How does Crow view his role in growing the city in revitalizing these places?

"Education has always been foundational to the democracy and so, and so like that, but in a new and modern way, we've designed ASU to be what we call one university in many places," Crow said.

"We, we're now in every home, we're in every school, we're in every company, we're making certain that we are reaching you. The argument then is that our university is designed to be ubiquitously present, not to be behind a wall, not to be behind an ivory tower. So that's what we've done," Crow said."

"We've taken down all the barriers, and we've said we're going to do the most advanced research in the world on how photosynthesis works using femtosecond speeds, billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, to understand the fundamental chemistry of how photosynthesis works. And we're gonna help your sixth grade kid get through math."

So it's about being everywhere. But what about the places, because those have really changed because of ASU, especially if you look at downtown Phoenix.

"So what happens is that people don't realize is that you can see this in London, you can see this in Paris, you can see this in, in Berlin and other big cities," Crow said. "Universities are historically, if they're in the downtown areas of big cities, they have a huge positive impact on things. And so that wasn't true here. It is true here now.”

It’s hard to imagine what downtown Phoenix would be like if ASU hadn't come there. But at the same time, there's concerns about gentrification, certainly affordable housing, rent's gone way up. What does Crow made of the criticisms there and see as the university's responsibility to the greater community, to the city itself?

“The way that one has to look at this is you have to listen to those things, be responsive to those things, be responsive to the community, engage the community," Crow said. "And then, and then basically, you know, we're more like the tide, we're attempting to raise the tide, we're attempting to float all of the boats.”

"And are there disruptions along the way? There are disruptions, all new technologies, all new institutions, all new things create disruptions. Our difference is that we are willing to accept that we're disruptive and then see what we can do about it," Crow said.

'I'm interested in being a place where ... the democracy is still being designed'

City of Mesa

Crow talked about the impact of Phoenix on him.

"Oh, it's been unbelievable living here has been like the, like an unbelievable thing for me to live in an open-ended, non socially, hierarchically controlled, preset place. Most places are preset. There's more openness here than in other places that I've lived."

"I've lived in New York City, I've lived in Washington, I've lived in other places. This place is very open, very open-minded, very advanced. It's criticized by, I don't know what to call them other than just ignoramuses. But all there's very few places that understand what that openness means," he said."

"What that openness means is that there's a lot of voices here. And so what you get here is you get a lot of voices, a lot of ideas, a lot of openness to doing things in a new way and all of that has impacted me powerfully. I, I don't, I don't believe that, I don't believe that we could have birthed this new American University model anywhere but Arizona and, and then it, it will definitively survive here and evolve here and then others, I think will emulate it from around the country and around the world," Crow said.

Every time over the last several decades a major university presidency opens up, Crow's name is always in the mix, and people may worry or hope maybe that he will leave. Why doesn't he?

"You know, I, I don't really want to run something, you know, I could certainly run other universities or run other things. I'm not interested in that," Crow said. "I'm interested in being a place where like Arizona, where the democracy is still being designed, the institutions are still being designed and, and the team myself and the others at ASU that have been a part of this, you know, we're a part of the birthing of a new kind of university. There's, there's no lack of recognition of that. We, we are now seen as having built that."

There's a national debate right now about if a city as big as metro Phoenix should even exist in the desert. Here's Crow's take.

"What we need to do is to realize that we want this place to prosper and to be successful for the families that are located here and the businesses that are located here for the indefinite future. And the only way we can do that is to no longer think that this city should look like Minneapolis or it should look like Seattle," he said.

"It should look like something that's never been built anywhere else before. It should have certain ways that it operates in certain ways that it does things that are truly unique and we have a lot of those, we need more of them. So what we need to become is a truly adaptive one with nature kind of place and we'll be fine if we do that."

And he has complete faith those changes will take place.

What are his plans for where he will end up in the future?

"My wife and I, Sybil and I, we don't, we're, we're not planning on going anywhere, you know, our plan is to keep working here until, until, you know, we can't do it anymore or move into a different kind of role. But stay here," Crow said.