illustration by Brett Affrunti Michael Crow

ASU President

The top-seeded Arizona State University baseball team isn’t faring well at the 2010 College World Series, and Michael Crow flips on his office radio to check the score. “They’re down the last time I checked,” says the ASU president, who flew to Nebraska in June only to see the Sun Devils get rained out. Something in Crow’s manner – some untamed managerial tic – suggests he would fly back to Omaha, march into the dugout and fill out the line-up card himself if he had to.

Crow’s hands-on style has become the stuff of legend at the nation’s second-largest university, and his methods seem to be paying off. Since succeeding Lattie Coor in 2002, the former Columbia University provost has presided over an inclusive, community-engaged scholastic model he calls the “New American University.”
 
ASU’s minority enrollment is up two-fold, and the university has become a veritable research hothouse (expenditures have more than doubled to $300 million). And last year, TIME magazine named Crow one of the “Top 10 Best College Presidents” in America.
 
But Crow has come under fire from current and former faculty members for his hard-nosed management style. They use words like “dictatorial” and “obsessive,” criticize his abashed courtship of research dollars and call his office the “Dark Tower.”

It’s all in a day’s work for ASU’s six-figure-enrollment-envisioning administrative wizard.

INCLUSIVE EXCLUSIVITY?

Q: You’ve stated you want an enrollment of 100,000 by 2020. How do you reconcile that with wanting to make ASU an elite public university?

A: We’re creating microlearning environment programs. Small, cohesive, faculty-centric and student-engaged. You give the students (the tools) they need, but you don’t overwhelm them with the complexity of the university. Those old learning models with the professor with a piece of chalk at the front of the classroom, that’s not how it works anymore.


SPEAKING CROW

Known as a gifted scholastic salesman, Crow has renamed and re-branded many institutions at ASU. The Main Campus is now the “Tempe Campus.” The Department of Anthropology is the “School of Human Evolution and Social Change.” Here are some other Crow-isms.
University = “Knowledge Enterprise”
Medical school = “Integrated Health Care Institute”
BP-style industrial mishap = “Maximum Hubris”
Funding partnerships = “Outward Focus”
Population pressure = “Intergenerational Consequences”


ARIZONA ECOLOGY

As an undergrad at Iowa State, Crow took an ecology class in which students adopted a one-meter block of prairie land. Recalls Crow: “For a year I had to understand and monitor everything that happened in that block. Every bug, every organism, every plant, everything that was going on. It was a fantastically unusual course. I knew the grasshoppers by name.”

Asked to apply his observational lessons to Arizona, Crow (who later earned a doctorate’s degree in public policy at Syracuse) says: “Arizona is amazingly transparent. There are few smoke-filled rooms. Few decisions made in dark corners. Everybody’s up front. You know what’s going on. You may not agree with what’s going on, but it’s all right there.”


CROW BITES

On which of ASU’s 300 degree programs ensures the best job security: “The degree doesn’t make any difference. Typically, if a student asks me what (he or she) can do for a great underpinning, I’ll say English or History. Those will give you the best underpinning, and from there you can branch out.”

On the four-year university model: “All time-based models are dated. We don’t know what they were based on. So we’re looking at those.”

On SB 1070: “It’s bad public policy. Poorly written. Not well thought out.”

On the BP oil spill: “We shouldn’t be drilling on the floor of the ocean, 5,000 feet below the surface, without some demonstrated ability for repair.”

On Animal House: “A fantastically funny movie. Particularly the dead horse in the dean’s office.”