Evolution of the New American University

ASU President Michael M. Crow traces the historical evolution of American higher education—from colonial colleges to land-grant institutions, philanthropic research universities, and today’s need for a new model. Drawing from personal experience at both a land-grant and an Ivy League institution, Crow explains how disparities in access and outcomes led to the rise of exclusionary practices disguised as academic excellence. This video details how these systemic issues inspired the conceptual and philosophical foundation for The New American University, a model designed to merge access with excellence and ensure that universities serve the full spectrum of society. Crow shares how this vision took root at Arizona State University, built on democratic ideals, innovation, and a commitment to public impact. For university leaders, education policymakers, and reform advocates, this is a masterclass in institutional transformation grounded in purpose, design, and scale. 

We'd seen the evolution of the United States from, British, British, British model to British colleges like Harvard and Princeton and Columbia that all got started early to – by the Civil War, you know, 100 years into the country's formation – the building of a truly American institution called the land grant university, and then and then all the things that those institutions began doing with, a focus on the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics, a focus on engineering, a focus on food safety, food security through agricultural research and agricultural extension. And then the American Research University, which emerged between 1876 and 1890 with three prototypes, all funded by philanthropy: Hopkins, Chicago and Stanford. And then nine additional schools or ten additional schools joining them to become the first round of the research universities; that would be Berkeley, Illinois and Michigan, and then Columbia and Princeton, and other places like that. So they were already in existence and then they shot up or using a phrase they fleeted up to be, research universities. And so those four waves of American higher education didn't solve all of the issues. It created unbelievable economic opportunity, unbelievable economic competitiveness, military prowess, health outcomes. But with all kinds of disparities in the outcomes.

And so in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at a land-grant university, people started talking about where's the urban land grant? Where's the universities that's working on the urbanization issues and the complexities of workforce development and education for the broader communities and so forth and so on? And nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. All the efforts to get new kinds of universities going sort of fell by the wayside.

And then you began seeing in the 70s and 80s, some public universities drifting to become very much like highly selective private universities by raising their admission standards. And then along about the 80s and the 90s, the coin of the realm for what was considered to be elite performing universities was selectivity and exclusion.

Well, when that began to happen and began to accelerate, then what you had was a bifurcation in the national higher education system for universities, and that is there would be access universities and there would be excellent universities. And there would be very few that were both and never the Twain shall meet, as the phrase from Missouri goes. And so I began thinking while at Columbia University –I had gone to a land grant, then I ended up at an Ivy, and my combination of experiences at those two places filled me with ideas that were visceral and, reading that I had done as a, as a child and as an undergraduate and experiences that I had growing up in a working class family where no one went to college and all the smart kids that I knew never got to go to college. They didn't have any money. They didn't have any opportunity, and so forth. I began thinking about new kinds of designs.

And so out of all of that came sort of a bolt of lightning to me. And that was when something like this, it's like, well, if you think there needs to be a new kind of university out there, you better think it up. You better philosophically ground it. You better come up with the conceptual design based on all the things that you had been doing through all of your life, and then you better find a place where you can maybe work with a faculty that's open minded and, and committed to social outcomes and then build one. 

I ended up at this graduate school in Syracuse, New York, at Syracuse University called the Maxwell School for Citizenship and Public Affairs, which is like, for me, like died and gone to heaven. I mean, they have like the Athenian oath on the wall, you know, carved when you go in the door behind the statue of George Washington and you go in there and the idea is, how do you make democracy work? Because democracy was a basic concept at conceptual design. That's the American constitution. Well, conceptual designs are never where you actually end up with. You have to end up with comprehensive designs and multi-tiered designs and multi-layered designs. And so, in all of that, I was constantly looking at how could universities be more valuable to the citizens? How can universities have more impact across the entire economy? How can they reach more families? How could they be less elitist? How could they be more connected? And so all of that thinking in that energy got into then the idea for the New American University, and then finding a place to take that seedling of an idea and connect it to a very fertile soil and other genetic material already present, that turns out to be ASU and, you know, right seedling, right genetic partners, the right soil, right place, right culture, where new ideas could advance. So that's how the idea got going.