The Maverick Minute | ASU President Michael Crow

Chancellor Jeffrey Gold sat down with Arizona State President Michael Crow, who received an honorary degree on May 4, 2018 at UNO's Spring Commencement, for his commitment to innovation in higher education and providing access to students from all backgrounds.

Read more on Crow's thoughts of what Higher Education means to him, and watch his interview with Chancellor Gold on how breaking down silos and helping build new structures has led to greater innovation.

Full Transcript

Chancellor Gold: Hello and welcome to another Maverick Minute. I'm Jeff Gold and thanks so much for being with us today. I have an incredible honor to being joined today by President Michael Crow from Arizona State University who has received an honorary degree with us as part of our spring commencement ceremony. Michael, thank you so much for being with us today.

President Crow: Happy to be here.

Chancellor Gold: You know, the Maverick culture is a culture of innovative thinking, breaking them down and new ideas and Arizona State has just been in the forefront of that for a really long time. Maybe you could share some of your thoughts about where real innovation in higher education is going and why and what it has been so successful for ASU?

President Crow: Well for us real innovation means finding a way for the public university model to reach society and empower lives to be changed across the full spectrum of society. That means the kids coming to campus need to come from every family background means we need to find ways to reach out to everyone, which then means we have to rethink the design of our faculty the design of technology around our faculty. The ability of our faculty to enhance their creativity, their productivity, and what we have found is a way to do that we found a way to modernize the culture. We found a way to create this ability to project to empower the faculty. And so that's been the exciting thing that we've been able to pull off so far.

Chancellor Gold: I know you've seen a lot of great results in terms of growth of enrollment and research productivity, etc., but in terms of the impact on society how would you measure that?

President Crow: When we measure it, we now know our student body is completely representative of the entirety of socio-economic credible diversity. We've we've been able to make that happen. We have 500,000 other learners taking at least one course with us who are working to advance their career or learn something new or pick up and enhance their math skills or something. We've we've built intelligent tutors that are able to create adaptive learning environments for anyone learning really complex subjects where they they just need someone, in this case a robot, that can work with them through all over their learning nodes and how do they learn and so we've been able to figure these things out and the impact then is that we believe that we're edging towards this notion of an idea that we call universal learner. That anyone appropriately motivated can can learn just about anything how do we create that opportunity for anyone

Chancellor Gold: I love that concept. One of the things you've done so successfully is also to grow the research breadth and depth at ASU at a time that some of the federal resources have been tight and so maybe you could talk to our audience a little bit about that as well.

President Crow: So what we've really done there first we went back and looked at our own intellectual structure. We blew up all the unnecessary silos connected. Those that were necessary and created 30 new transdisciplinary schools those new schools then have been able to rethink problem. Problem sets including fundamental science problems, which then has allowed our research enterprise to grow from about a $100 million a year 12 years ago to about $600 million a year now without a medical school, which is a pretty hefty level of activity. Now around that though we now have a 100 new research centers, not one of which was a usual or predictable idea. So what we found is that by breaking down the barriers within the University, we're able to create opportunities for intellectual genius to just emerge and sure enough people have found that genius and then fund it.

Chancellor Gold: Well there's certainly a lot of thought elsewhere across the country and around the world that the more barriers you break down in research the higher your productivity gets and and certainly you've obviously been a great example of that. Well you know as our audience now knows, as an honorary degree recipient you're now a Maverick, you're part of our family, you're philosophically part of our family and of course you now have an honorary degree. Congratulations, thank you so much for being with us, and thank you for being with us today on this Maverick Minute.