Designing the New American University

In this powerful reflection, Arizona State University President Michael M. Crow outlines the core principles behind ASU’s transformation into the New American University—a model rooted in student-centric culture, design-driven innovation, and egalitarian access. Crow critiques the outdated bureaucracies of traditional universities and explains how ASU broke from the legacy structures of European higher education by building an institution aligned with American values of equality, adaptation, and innovation. He emphasizes shifting from faculty centrism to student success, from rigid bureaucracy to adaptive design, and from political inertia to outcome-driven change. This video offers a candid, strategic vision for scaling impact, lowering costs, and redefining what a public university can be in the 21st century. Ideal for education leaders, policy makers, and institutional designers.

It's all about culture. It's all about purpose. It's all about design. It's all about innovation. So it's about those four things. There's no prayer, there's no additional funding. There's nothing that changes the outcome dramatically of the thing that is already designed. The car can only go so fast. The institution can only work in a certain way if it's organized in a certain way or designed in a certain way.

So what we focused on and what I focused on was changing the culture from faculty centrism to student centrism, changing the design from a simple bureaucracy to an adaptive bureaucracy, adaptive design oriented organization. Almost all universities are simple bureaucracies in an organizational theory sense. How do you make the organization adaptive? How do you make it design driven as opposed to politically driven as opposed to political exchange driven? How do you make it idea driven, design driven, outcome driven? And then and then in terms of embracing innovation, you can't think that the university of 17th century central France is going to be really a well oiled machine in 21st century central Arizona. It's not; won't even work. The concepts aren't even the same. Yet we have universities that look and feel no different than the ideas of central France in the 1700s. You know, the same departments, the same units, the same schools, the same way that they're designed, the same authority structure, the same role of the faculty. You know, we can't have that.

And then lastly, on what I mentioned in terms of innovation and technology, we have to find a way to scale and to lower cost.

And so what we did was we worked on all of those things as a part of the overall transformation into this New American university. So one thing that I said about the new American University is that imagine that you took the conceptual design of the United States, equality, pursuit of happiness, liberty, freedom of speech, and then you took the culture of the United States. The United States is in and of itself an innovation, risk taking, innovation, adaptation. Then you add to that as a function of equality, egalitarian access, egalitarian treatment, which we haven't had in the past at the level that we aspire to, but we were working in that direction. What would an American university look like, and how would it be different than, let's say, the traditional British, German, French, Dutch, Italian universities?

Well, it would be based on those things that are representative of more of our culture. It would be more egalitarian, it would be more innovative. It would be more adaptive. It would be more focused on rate of change, speed of change. It would be more polycultural. It would recognize the breadth of people that have come to the United States and all the places that they've come from.