ASU's President Crow is consulting with the Trump administration on higher education policy

The Trump administration’s approach to higher education has been a major storyline of the president’s second term.

The administration has engaged in high-profile confrontations with schools like Harvard and Columbia, threatening to revoke federal funding unless the schools adopted the president’s policies. Recently, Trump took another provocative step, offering nine universities the opportunity to sign what it calls “The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

It asks them to take very specific steps, such as screening international students for “anti-American values,” and committing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” The implication of the document, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, was that the government might withhold federal funding if universities refused to sign.

Most of the nine schools — including University of Arizona — did refuse to sign the compact. But Eliza Collins from the Wall Street Journal said ASU President Michael Crow was upset that he didn’t have the opportunity to make that call.

Collins wrote that piece in the Wall Street Journal about the compact and Crow’s subsequent negotiations with the Trump administration. She said on The Show that when Crow saw UA on the list, he thought there must’ve been a mistake.

Eliza Collins

Full conversation

ELIZA COLLINS: Basically, Michael Crow's reaction was, did they mix this up? Did they need to reach out to us instead? And that is, you know, typical sort of rivalry, sister schools, all of that.

But there is something bigger here for why Crow and his advisors thought the administration had confused them. And that is because your listeners will be very aware, ASU is this behemoth. And Michael Crow, in the two decades he's been here in Arizona, has completely transformed the school. And he's done a lot of things differently than a lot of other schools, including like letting most people in.

SAM DINGMAN: Yes, this was something you pointed out in your piece that I wanted to ask you more about is you described Crow's philosophy around admissions and education at ASU in general as, quote, populist.

COLLINS: Yeah, so just to kind of go back to the Trump administration and one of their focuses is that the administration is very concerned that schools are letting people in based on quotas, based on their race. ASU has a 90% acceptance rate.

Basically, Crow's thing is if you want to go to college, you can. And so he's sort of trying to thread a needle while having this populist, no quotas, everyone can come, you know, big state school, it's not elitist, which are all things the administration is looking for while avoiding the other part of it, which is that Trump wants much more specific things to go after what he views as liberal ideology.

DINGMAN: Right, right. And Crow mounted something of a, and this is not a phrase you use, this is, this is my own phrase and tell me if it's wrong, but something of a charm offensive to try to kind of get the administration's attention on the things that he has been doing that he feels like would be well aligned with the administration's aims.

COLLINS: He reached out after the compact and basically said, if you want to include me here, I'm happy to be of service. ASU is a massive school. I have things to say. But he had been doing this charm offensive, as you say, for the last year with the Trump administration.

I think it is important to point out with Crow, this isn't a partisan thing. He does, you know, had a charm offensive with the Biden administration. He is someone who believes American universities need to change.

The thing that's very unique is that until now, the rest of higher education and the rest of government wasn't that interested. Whereas now you have a disruptor in the White House and you have a disruptor in higher education, and Crow is trying to say, Look, we can align on some things.

DINGMAN: And so, Eliza it seems like some of those efforts seem to be landing. You mentioned in the piece that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has been, quote, impressed with Crow's efforts at ASU. Do we know what she is impressed with?

COLLINS: A really good example is the Trump administration has tried to dramatically limit the number of foreign students that are studying at American universities. That was part of the compact proposal. And in fact, one of the biggest contention points actually for Crow, because ASU does rely so much on the international population, in part to supplement the education of in-state students, because these students pay full price.

But the administration, one way that they are trying to do this is that they have basically made it so that international students coming back into the U.S. to start school, they needed to have all of their social media vetted.

Crow was trying to work with them, so he offered to basically hire, at ASU's expense, a third-party vendor that would vet these students' social media, and he offered for the administration to vet the third-party vendor. That idea was rejected by the Trump administration, so it didn't happen. But I think it's a really good example of showing how Crow is trying to operate.

DINGMAN: And do we know what Crow's position has been on the ideological parts of the compact when it comes to curriculum and actual content of courses that are taught at the university?

'Cause if I'm not mistaken, part of the compact stipulates that there needs to be some sort of review about whether or not what the school is teaching is negatively biased towards conservative ideas.

COLLINS: So Crow is very tricky with this because when I asked him about the compact and I said, you know, most of these other schools have said they're not going to sign on. What do you say? He said, "I was not asked to sign the compact."

Now that is tricky because he was asked later to join meetings about the compact and they did send him the compact. But he basically maintains that he was never asked to sign anything, and he was very careful not to weigh in on specifics of the compact.

He says, "I have this grand vision for American higher education, and I'm trying to find anyone that will listen, basically." We don't know where he is on those specifics.

DINGMAN: So this gets, Eliza, I think, to a really interesting sequence in your story, which is that you speak to some sources who are critical of the way that Crow has approached this, who are really thinking in terms of legacy.

And they say pretty definitively that they feel like history will not look favorably on schools and the leaders of schools who align themselves closely with this particular administration. One of them says, I think the quote is like, it's unlikely that those schools will be, quote, "covered in glory."

That's interesting to me in the context of Crow because as you have pointed out in this conversation, his goal seems very legacy oriented. He wants to remake the way we think about higher education. What sense did you get from Crow in terms of how he thinks about legacy as it relates to those sorts of criticisms from others in the world of higher education.

COLLINS: So, yeah, I asked Crow directly, you know, what do you say to your critics? And Crow's argument was, why give up our seat at the table? He said, Trump is remaking higher education, whether we're there or not. And so why would we not try to have a say?

And also, one of his aides told me in direct response to that criticism, which was from the president of the American Association of University Professors, that he said, Crow is not looking out just for one school. Crow thinks all schools should change.

So I think that's sort of where the rub is, is that Crow right now says he should be in the room while higher education is being remade because his whole goal is to remake higher education.