Arizona’s public universities are trying to figure out how to respond to the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related initiatives, at the same time they are grappling with the fallout from grants, projects and research that continue to be cut.
The Maricopa County Community College District, which KJZZ is licensed to, canceled an array of programs and policies in order to protect federal funding. At the University of Arizona, the website for its DEI office was taken down, and diversity-related language was stripped from its land acknowledgment. And, ASU is now calling its annual convocation ceremonies honoring diverse student groups “celebrations” instead.
But, ASU President Michael Crow told The Show that they have not had to make any substantial changes to comply with federal directives, because they have no diversity or DEI-related goals as a university.
As for canceled projects, Crow says, those are more than threats. They’ve already had dozens of canceled projects already — and more being cancelled everyday. And, he recognizes the federal government has a right to do it. But he doesn’t agree with their reasoning. Crow joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
MICHAEL CROW: The hard thing for us is that the reasons that they're giving for elimination of these grants are almost always wrong. That is, they don't have the information down to the grant level. They're making broad brush policy shifts, which is fine. But they're not looking at the specifics of the grants.
The grants that we have, for instance, with the U.S. Agency for International Development are unbelievably important to the protection and advancement of American interests. We've been working in Central America to help, fewer people want to flee Central America and become undocumented or illegal immigrants to the United States. We just had a project canceled yesterday which talks about the need for vaccinations and the education about vaccinations and so that project's been canceled.
So what we're seeing is sort of a high level policy decision which is being implemented without discretion across all projects, all things, all activities, and it's, it's not wise.
LAUREN GILGER: So what's your response then? Like if it when these programs get cut, this funding gets cut, these grants are gone, you're reorganizing where those employees go, they're fired. How do you handle it on an internal level?
CROW: Well, I mean, our basic strategy is that we're regrouping to be of service to the new trajectories that the government wants to move in. So it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be projects in these areas or there isn't going to be scientific research. There's going to be and if there isn't, then the U.S. will never have any ability to attain the kinds of outcomes that the new administration is searching for this, you know, this notion of the president's moving America to the golden age of the future.
Well, there's no way to do that without the universities. There's no way to do that without scientific and technological research being at the highest level on the entire planet. There's no way to do that without our interest being advanced and protected around the world through the kinds of things that we do. So we're just regrouping to be of as much service and of greater service going forward as we can be.
GILGER: Are you making those arguments to the federal government saying this is a program that should not be cut, it is in the U.S. interests?
CROW: We're making our interest known everywhere that we can using rational arguments and fact-based, presentations, and we're also leaving for the record if a project is canceled, a final statement from us that says this is what this project was designed to do, this is what we've done, this is what we were attempting to do, this is the why for the project.
I gave a talk the other day at Rice University where I talked about the invisible hand, the invisible hand of academic science that underpins all of the technological breakthroughs from Mr. Musk's, Tesla vehicles which are based on thousands of academic inventions and discoveries and basic science, to the Steve Jobs's iPhone, which is a product of literally hundreds of thousands of academic articles, academic research, all of which is invisible, so we're leaving for the record what we did.
We're not allowing this notion of waste fraud and abuse, which none of our projects are involved in waste fraud or abuse, none of them, to be the mantra by which these things are labeled in terms of their being ended.
GILGER: It's interesting because so much of what you have found at ASU on or tried to shape it around, right, is this idea of creating a new American university, right, that phrase that you talk about all the time where you have anybody can be included that the university is part of the community, it is not in the ivory tower. Do you feel like this is a misunderstanding of what it is that universities are for from the federal government?
CROW: Well, I mean, what's going on. The Supreme Court did rule that there can't be any race-based admissions at universities several years ago. We did away with the concept of affirmative action in the first year that I came into office in 2002, 2003.
What we said was that we will be what we're supposed to be inclusive and measure our success based on our students, and we will not measure our success based on how many students we exclude, that is the schools that see themselves as the best are those that have the lowest admission rates and then those schools sometimes then have to make certain that their classes are more broad so they in the past have had specific ethnic groups identified for admission to the university because they have so few seats.
We admit every qualified student, every qualified student, the second that we decided to admit every qualified student and to adjust with that and grow with that, our student body became completely representative of all of the family backgrounds and all of the socioeconomic levels in the state, and we have no DEI goals, we have no affirmative action goals. We just have an admission standard, which is the qualification to attend the university. It has worked.
GILGER: So that's the way you approach the term inclusivity, but of course inclusivity is one of these, you know, hot button words, right, in the DEI debate. And you're facing federal funding cuts again because of threats saying if universities like yours do not get rid of DEI programs, language, ideology, etc. We will take away funding as well. What changes has ASU made in response to that?
CROW: Long before these debates occurred we said that we would maintain the purity of what a public university is supposed to be. So what we've done in the moment is make certain that all of our language, all of our communications reflects what we're already doing and have been doing for two decades. And so for us there's no material change in anything. We don't have to change any policy. Nothing.
What's happened is that other people built that three word phrase, diversity, equity and inclusion, and then built a rhetoric around that, and that's what's being attacked, you know, we were past that.
GILGER: So what about changing things like, you know, convocation ceremonies that used to be for specific student populations like Latino students or Native American students. Now they're being called celebrations. These are language changes to you. Are they substantive?
CROW: Well, there's only two graduations in the university, two official events. I preside over both of them. Then the colleges themselves have convocations. And then any group that would like to get together and celebrate for whatever reason, we allow them to do that as a part of the celebration with their families and so we, we're completely compliant with whatever the concerns are.
We don't have any concerns relative to what we're doing. We don't have any separate graduations. We don't have any separate groups. We have two graduations, undergraduate and graduate, and everything else is a convocation at the college level or a self-assembled group that's getting together to celebrate graduation.
GILGER: What have you heard from students? Are there concerns from the student body saying, you know, ASU is walking away from these initiatives, this idea, this, this commitment to inclusion?
CROW: No, because we're not walking away from anything. We already are massively representative of the socioeconomic diversity of the country and of the state and massively representative of ethnic diversity without any ethnic diversity goals because we made sure that everybody that was qualified was admitted.
GILGER: So it sounds like you still believe and very much believe that diversity though is important and being representative of the community that you're from is essential in a university.
CROW: It's not about the idea of diversity per se. It's about the idea of America, which is an unbelievably diverse polyglot place with people from everywhere, families from every background, people from every religious perspective that you can possibly imagine, and what we say is, well, all that's great, but if you're qualified, you're in. And we even say if you're not qualified, we're gonna find ways to help you to be qualified so you can earn your way in.
So it's a completely merit-based, merit-driven, egalitarian university operating through innovations at scale to do the greatest amount of public service that we can for the greatest number of people that we can.
GILGER: So as the leader of the largest public university in the country, how do you see your role right now as it seems that the federal government and these major universities are more at odds? Is it becoming more difficult, I guess, to become apolitical in light of what's happening?
CROW: What we need to do is we need to say to the national government, here we are, this is what we do. Yes, we understand that you're concerned about this and this and this, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
We are a national asset of unbelievable value to the country and its ultimate success. Let's work on those things where there's policy concerns or policy differences while at the same time we do everything that we can to continue the unbelievable economic progress that we've made in the United States when these kinds of things are essential to us continuing to evolve both as a democracy but also as a society where life is better and so we're essential to that. This is an unbelievable moment for the universities to step up and say how can we be of greater service.
