ASU's commitment to access and excellence

Explore how ASU President Michael M. Crow reaffirms Arizona State University’s unwavering commitment to both access and excellence, centered firmly in its pioneering New American University model. In this compelling video, Crow highlights ASU’s mantra: “measured not by whom we exclude, but by whom we include and how they succeed.” He references famous Americans who did not go to college, but went on to make incredible impact on society, and poses the question: How many of those people are still out there?

People believe that human beings are smart, kind of smart, not smart, and the opposite of smart. Not true. Everyone has the natural ability to be smart. So long as the mind and the brain is working biologically correctly and so that is I mean, the electrons are firing. And so we all have these supercomputers between our two ears.

And, I gave a speech the other day and I happened to be standing next to a statue of Sequoia. And Sequoia is a person who was able to conceive, in his mind, a syllabary which is a library of syllables, 80 or so, from which he was able to construct a, a, written language and a way of communicating for the Cherokee people from whole cloth, and he didn't go to college and he didn't go to high school. Frederick Douglass is this unbelievable philosophical orator of American history, who learned to read under penalty of death as a slave in Maryland. Abraham Lincoln is this unbelievable, creative driver of unbelievable conceptualizations of Democratic philosophy, and as far as I know, he had one year of formal education. And never was able to go to school because he lived in the backwoods of Kentucky and Indiana. And then he studied the law by traveling around a lawyer somewhere in rural central Illinois, around Springfield and Sangamon County and that whole region over there. Just take those three people — or take Harriet Tubman, who ran an unbelievably sophisticated railroad in the days of bringing slaves to freedom. All of these people were geniuses, and none of them were formally educated. So what I, what I, what we've been doing is – we we this notion that access, which is so, so Sequoia, Lincoln, Douglass and Tubman, and others, you know, they're, well, let's let's also bring in, Sojourner Truth, you know, other people who are just unbelievably capable human beings who would not have access. Well, how many of those people are still out there?

So I just think it's a completely false premise, and it goes all the way back to Plato. And what I mean by Plato is Plato said there's three types of people. There's the philosopher kings, the guardians and the artisans. And the philosopher kings are those that are smart and gifted, and they should be able to do anything. And the Guardians are the people that are trainable, that can run things, and then everyone else is not interested in anything other than the vagaries of individual life. Not true. Not true whatsoever. So I just don't even believe that that's even. I don't believe that that's the way the human being is, the human species. You know, I have this completely different theory.