Arizona State University's Charter

Arizona State University President Michael Crow shares the vision behind ASU's charter — a model for the New American University. Rooted in Crow’s 2002 inauguration speech and formalized in 2014, the Charter challenges traditional academic norms by measuring success not by exclusions, but by inclusion and student outcomes, committing to research that benefits the public, and accepting responsibility for community health — economic, social, and cultural.

Through bold design principles—empowering faculty with intellectual freedom, shifting to student‑centric learning, and embracing continuous innovation—ASU has expanded access, created interdisciplinary programs, and launched groundbreaking initiatives like VR biology labs and large-scale online degrees . For higher‑ed leaders, administrators, and reform advocates, this video offers a deep dive into how Charter-driven design thinking can transform a public university into a social-impact engine—without sacrificing excellence or scale.

So there's a famous German philosopher that I was forced to read in graduate school in German, even though I neither read German nor spoke German, I had to translate his work because they wanted you to be able to translate work in German.

I'm like, okay, so his name is Lorenz von Stein, and he was a mid 19th century philosopher on theories of the State, you know, the people, and he had this thing called the Organic Theory of the State. And in that he said that, you really need to have to be successful in the public realm to have three levels of simultaneous thinking.

The first is the self, the second is the will, and the third is the deed. And the self is that thing manifested usually in a constitution or a charter or something that which you aspire to be, that which you aspire to achieve. The reason for your existence must be related to something other than we're just a university. And so I was convinced by that reading all those years ago that that was one of our biggest problems throughout the culture: too much generic thinking, too little – you know, the Constitution of the United States, which is the aspirational self for the country. That's not enough for the institutions. You need aspirational identities for your institution. So our charter was the articulation of our self, that which we aspire to be. The next thing that he talked about is called the will.

So the will is what do you specifically want to do to be the self that you're attempting to be?

So in our case, we came up with eight design aspirations that would articulate specifically what we want to be so as to empower the attainment of the self. So in this case, the eight, including things like, you know, where we're located is really, really important. If your university isn't grounded in where you're located, where are you located there, who are you connected to? Who are you serving? Who you're working with? Intellectual fusion is one of our design aspirations, which is we're not going to just build in the university that we're attempting to construct the same old, same old of every other university. We're going to fuse disciplines together and create new bodies of knowledge and new ways of thinking. Exploration as a scientific outcome, sustainability as a scientific outcome, new ways of structuring knowledge, and structuring teaching, and structuring learning.

And so those were the will and then at the end is the deed. And so that is what you do against a specific, measurable objective? And so those are our five categories of goals in which we probably have about 40 subgoals at the university level. So one is that we will have undifferentiated outcomes based on family income for success at the university.

We haven't attained that yet. We're still working towards that. The other is that will graduate 40,000 students, or that will have 150,000 degree-seeking students. And so self – what you aspire to be, will – your specific things you're going to work on to be that and deed – what are the things that you're measuring your success of your actual deeds on?

So self, will and deed became the design parameters from which the charter, the design aspirations and the goals were derived. And I think we've published the self, will and deed language at ASU more than 20 times in a small white white document that we call our vision and goal statement. We don't have a strategic plan, we don't have a strategic planning process. We have those things.