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ASU President Michael M. Crow challenges the traditional detachment of higher education institutions from the real-world outcomes of the societies they serve. He argues that universities must go beyond simply producing knowledge or graduating students—they must take responsibility for societal progress, including educational equity, economic mobility, and public health. Crow calls for a redefinition of the university’s role: one where institutions are accountable for their impact on local communities, workforce development, and systemic challenges such as poverty, healthcare disparities, and high school dropout rates. At Arizona State University, this philosophy is embedded in new models for health innovation and community engagement, where success is measured not by prestige, but by outcomes for the people of Arizona. A vital watch for university leaders, policymakers, and anyone rethinking the civic mission of public higher education.
I think what's happened, and you can see this even in some of the angst in this going on about universities and colleges right now in the 2020s and even before that, the separation from society.
It's like, well, the universities are like, well, we have all these great ideas, we have all these great geniuses over here, and we're going to tell you guys what to do and good luck. But we're not responsible for anything. Well, the schools aren't graduating the students from high school. Whose fault is that? Well, they'll say, well, that's the students fault. Or they'll say, that's the government's fault because they're not providing enough numbers, enough money, enough numerical dollars. And so and so I'd say, well, who produced the teacher? Who trained the principal? Who trained the superintendent? So what we're trying to do there is to take responsibility for the outcomes of our society that we are fundamentally responsible for.
If we produced every chemist through a university that does chemical work, and we produce tens of thousands of chemicals that cause cancer in humans, and those didn't exist in nature, and we built them. Who's responsible for that? We are. So maybe we should be thinking about those kinds of things in different ways. And so taking responsibility, you know, for a university also means then, if your university is operating in a neighborhood that's economically unsuccessful or a city that isn't successful, or if there's a high poverty index in your state, well what are you doing about it? How are you working at that? How are you helping families to move ahead? So taking responsibility means being something other than just a generic, knowledge producing, teaching and learning institution that just could be located anywhere. Well you're located somewhere, and you need to take responsibility for some of that somewhere.
My own view is that universities should be doing a lot more of that, a lot more of concern about, you know, you know, why is there still, you know, 25% poverty rate in certain areas or even higher in certain areas? And what do we do about that? Or how do we have no one drop out of high school, or if they drop out of high school, they go off onto another track where they're still evolving and still developing and so forth and so on? And so what I'd rather have is, is, every university working and every college working to enhance their community as well as to enhance their university.
And so what I think we need is more focus on specific goals. So, for instance, we're building a whole series of new institutions related to health outcomes in Arizona. So we're not building a medical school so that we can create rich doctors, and our objective is to educate a few more doctors and call it a day. We're trying to design a whole new class of institutions inside ASU and connected to others outside of ASU, which are going to be measured in terms of their impact on health outcomes for the people of Arizona.