YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Crow

lines on the record: 73
first: 2024-03-07
most recent: 2024-03-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so here's the weird thing. So, you hear all these falsehoods out there. They say, well, nobody in the United States wants to be an engineer. How many of you have heard that? I mean, a lot of people have heard that. That's not true. Four times as many people want to be an engineer. Many more people want to go to college than go to college. Many more families want their people to go to college. Someone said family members. All this stuff you're hearing in the surveys and so forth, that's mostly frustration, disappointment, and anger at the inefficiency and expense of the system. Not that they don't want it. It's that they can't get it. And they're upset about that. So we figured out, for instance, how to teach math in a different way, how to teach science in a different way, how to teach things in different ways, how to teach English in new ways, how to make things happen in different ways. It turns out that when you do that, I mean a lot of fires get lit. A lot of people start moving forward and we start getting to the basis where you can start realizing the truly egalitarian outcomes that the democracy was designed to help to achieve. And we're a part of doing that.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until the last couple hundred years, most human beings lived in authoritarian states. They lived among despots and dictators and ruthless kings, even beneficent dictators were barely that, and that was only for a while. And so here we are in the early stages of this democracy. And America has not yet built a truly, truly toque-bill-like university. And so in this part of the United States, the 48 of the lower 48 states in this brand new rest of the world, the rest of the country thinks we're like nuts over here. We're trying to emerge a different kind of institution. So I say to people, the institutions we need for the future aren't made yet. The best designs aren't built yet. And so it's like each of us have this responsibility to do something toward that kind of end. So that's how I sort of view it.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sort of a very serious student of history. And you look back from history and you see all these people in the United States that helped to do something, helped to think of new models of social work. If you read the book Gotham about the history of the city of New York between 1598 and 1898, just read that book. You will be astounded beyond belief at what it took to make that city work and all the things that they went through and all the people that made changes and fought for changes and made things happen. And so what I see is that it really is a function. You get this short time of existence with other people. We're trying to advance the democracy. So all I'm trying to do is just do my part. And my part is to help design a new way that a public university can be transformative to the United States. So I say this thing. So people have no idea what I'm talking about. So it's like funny, like the democracy here is nascent. Our republic is very, very young. For the last 50,000 years.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have 17 universities or so and a thing called the University Innovation Alliance. I'm the chairman of that and the founder of that Ohio State Purdue, Michigan State, Central Florida, Oregon State, UC Riverside, Maryland, Baltimore County, Virginia Commonwealth. I was just on the campus at Virginia Commonwealth a few days ago in Richmond. And so all those schools have decided we're going to learn how to innovate together. And all of us have decided that we can produce many more graduates, graduate more people, graduate more people from limited income families, graduate more minority students. And sure enough, in the 10 years that we've been running is saying, all of that has happened. So is the model, are models replicable? Are there new ways to do things? Absolutely.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our measures of success are not just the student success and the research of the faculty, but did we actually change the health outcomes of the... The state. That's the measurement. No one's ever built anything with that as the measurement.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, more important than what we're starting there is it turns out that if you look at what we learned during the pandemic, if you look at the health outcomes, if you're a white female in the United States with a high school diploma or less, your lifespan is declining at the fastest rate of any group in the history of the country ever. If you have a high school diploma or less, your lifespan is dramatically, dramatically less. I'm not talking about individual people. You know, I have siblings that didn't graduate from high school. And so I understand the different levels of educational outcomes. It turns out that we've done a terrible job of focusing our resources on outcomes versus focusing our resources on just a surgery or just this procedure. And so our ASU health initiative is building several new institutions, a new kind of medical school engineering, AI driven, a new kind of public health technology school with tools like these wearable devices, all kinds of other things. We're building a whole way in our only measurement of success.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asteroids and the comets that delivered the water along the way. There's no shortage of water, there's a shortage of thinking about water and creativity about water. And we're working on all of that, everything.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm 100% certain that we can deal with water distribution issues because it's a distribution issue. So there's lots of water in the atmosphere that's being, you know, we have a company that we spent out called Source that captures water from the atmosphere and it's purified when it's captured. Obviously, we have some of our faculty that are in here worked on water issues. We have a water innovation initiative. We can change agriculture. We can change how food is grown. We can change everything if we want to, if we're, you know, right now we say, okay, let's take trillions of gallons of water and just pour it over massive areas of land by the square mile. We don't need all that water, but we're going to use all that water. Or let's not recycle the water that the houses are using in ways in which you can, you know, just drink it again almost immediately, whatever. All of that science exists. We just have to decide that we want to do that. There's no shortage of water. In fact, I say to people, the same amount of water is on the planet today as was delivered by all of the rocks and the...”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what we haven't done is we must figure out how to communicate. So in global climate change, I mean, I know, I personally know a lot of the scientists who sound bizarrely maniacal to me by saying the sky is coming to an end, the sky is falling, we're all going to die. It's all going to happen right away. And I'm like, the planet used to be covered only with ice. And then another time it was covered only with water. And then another time it was covered with this and this and this. It's a very dynamic little ball that we live on. What we need to get people to understand is like, what is really going on? And we've done a really poor job of doing that”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, if you look at it, and you're an astute student of American political history, politicians are very similar in the United States because they are mostly lawyers, farmers, business people, and full-time politicians, lifetime politicians. There are not a lot of people that are scientists or engineers in our political arena. There are in other countries, including the country I was just in. And so what I worry about is, I guess I would call it arrogant denial. So we have to start raising everyone's literacy level. So the vaccine, some of you might have taken a vaccine in the last couple years. I've taken, I don't know how many vaccines. I mean, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, then the doctor says pneumonia, and then they say some other RSV thing. I have no idea, let's put it in my arm. I don't care. Shingles, you know, once you turn 60, apparently we're all going to die of shingles. And so I'd put it in my arm. But I actually know what this stuff is. So nobody knew what a messenger right.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into a room of people about this size, and they all didn't want to be there. They didn't think they needed to be there. I start walking through basically their public duty. I remember students would raise their hands. I don't have any public duty. I'm like, you're here because taxpayers in the United States are paying for your PhD. You have a public duty. What do you mean they're paying for my PhD? They're paying for your salary. They're paying for your tuition. People in the United States that work at ice cream shops and gas stations have paid for you to be in this room. And you need to figure out that they think that you need to have more responsibility relative to the research that you're doing. There's resistance in the scientific community.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can science save us if you look at the last 400 years of history and compare it with the previous 50,000 years of history? The answer would be probably. But can it also kill us when the physicists said Alan Magardo in July 16th, 1945 saw the weapon that they had built detonate? Some of them fell to the ground weeping. And I'm like to myself, I said when I read these diaries, I was like, what did you think you were doing? And so what we have is we have insufficiently educated individuals playing with nature at an unbelievable level, CRISPR, fusion, AI, everything you can possibly imagine. And I remember I taught a course at Columbia that was very revealing to me. So if you received an NIH PhD grant to work on your PhD, you had to take a course on research ethics. And one part of the research ethics course was taught by me, the professor of science and technology policy at Columbia.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You is that you know, we're green on the fire list. We signed up for the University of Chicago's. Principles of free speech. We practice those and we got people here at the University of Chicago haven't had on their campus in probably 100 years. And so they're all here. We have everything, every idea, every group you can possibly imagine, everything going on all the time. And we make that work. There's no wood up here. Knock on wood. We can keep everybody safe and keep everybody protected and keep the ideals of free speech in place. And we're trying very hard to do that.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what's happened is it's almost funny sometimes. I sat, I guess. I don't know what you'd say, but so it's kind of funny, like, I'll hear from some person about us not protecting free speech and then hear from the same person about some guy we're not supposed to have on campus. And so I think what we have is we don't have a good concept of free speech. So we have fought and won many lawsuits over these issues. So we had one group of students, and this is all since I've been here, and these are things that we decided. So we had one group of students that one religious group that said, we want to use your university facilities for our meetings. And people from that religious group can't come to our meetings. So then you can't use our facilities. Our facilities and our meetings are open to whoever wants to come. And they said, well, we're going to sue you. And I sue away. A million dollars later, they lost. And so we do get to make those determinations. And so I won't walk you through all the things that we have done to protect and defend the way that we're trying to protect free speech, what I can tell you.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, luckily, one of the one aspect of these jobs as university presidents is I don't think I've had one day here where there hasn't been some pile of unbelievable complaints about something that we've done or decided or irritated someone or something and not one day. And so what we do is we always listen. What is the person saying? What is the kernel of what they're saying? So in this particular case where people were very upset about the fact that we had some faculty in one of our programs against someone being here, I think these people forgot that our faculty get to have free speech also. And so then they so then they charged our faculty with trying to manipulate student thinking and all kinds of other things. So we investigated that. We brought in an outside lawyer to interview everyone and talk to everyone and there were no findings to that effect. Okay. So then we go back to them. We say there's no findings. And they say, well, you know, you're lying. I said, well, actually, we're not in the practice of lying. We hired someone else to do this. You can read their report. You can talk to them.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So we're waiting for the judicial process to take its course. And if these people are convicted of those offenses, then there's going to have to be some response and some contrition from that group. And if they were here as employees, then I don't know how they can continue to operate as a normal group because they have paid thugs.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so those people now have been charged by the county attorney and more power to the legal process to bring justice because it turns out you can't walk up to someone and start attacking them, harassing them, and then push them to the ground and then they cut their face and get away with it.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not views that I share or would ever share or could even conceive of, but there's a group of students or a group of faculty members that want to have them on campus. So if they're not doing the other thing, then I just mentioned then they're welcome. And then we have to protect the process by protecting the process of the university. So let's say that I'm a highly controversial speaker and you're interviewing me and this is the room that we're sitting here. We can't have people kicking the doors down and breaking into the room like happened at Berkeley yesterday. We can't have people standing up in the middle of the room disrupting. That's not free speech. Free speech is you get to say what you think, but you don't get to disrupt the educational process. So we sort of go this balance between educational process, the role of the university and being as open as possible now. You know, we did have two employees of a group that we had allowed people to speak from, assault one of our instructors.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's kind of funny, we're a university, we're not a public park. And so if our students and our faculty want to have speakers here and the speakers are not purveyors of hate speech or genocide or something that's death to this group or death to that group or death to this thing or that thing, because that's outside of our code of conduct, we do everything we can to allow those speakers to be able to be here. And the way I know that we are doing a good job at that is I am attacked from 360 degrees every possible group, religious groups, political groups, labor groups, everyone you can possibly imagine. And so what we do is we try to maintain as much order as possible. If you disrupt a meeting, you're asked to leave. You can't. So we just try to be as ordered and as focused as we can be. Some of the groups that, you know, they have views that are”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or at least as they're portrayed in the media, because there's what really happened, and then there's what the media thinks happened in they're often not the same.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have more than we've increased by two and a half times the four year graduation rate. We've taken our retention rate to just under 90%. We're operating at the same level as other major historic institutions which are not as representative of the totality of the population as we are”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the population. So the second you eliminate the financial barrier, the school becomes as diverse as the population ethnically. And so we've never had any ethnic goals. We've never had any goals, diversity goals ever, except that the student body must represent the totality of the economic distribution of the families in the country.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, right. Yes. What we decided was that the university was not successful unless we had a student body reflective of all socioeconomic groupings. So I was raised in a family in the bottom quarter of family incomes. And in 1970, when I was in high school, about 7 or 8% of the people from those families ever graduated from college. And 50 years later, 55 years later, 9%. We got a problem. Now, kids that aren't very smart and haven't worked very hard in the upper quarter of family incomes, you want to see it in the upper 10% of family incomes, they all went to college. And so what we decided was our student body would come equally from all four of the quadrants of family incomes. So our student body never did before and has for the last 12 or 13 years been representative of all family income distributions in the United States. The second we did that, oh, isn't it amazing? The school's already then as ethnically diverse.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we weren't representative, so we have about 40,000 PEL eligible undergraduates here. We have about 30,000 first-generation college students here. We have very large numbers, but those are very large numbers also. So when we started, we were not representative of socioeconomic.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you empower it. So most universities are crippled. And I was a trustee of Bowdoin College for many years in Brunswick, Maine, one of the New England super, super focused colonial colleges. And if you alter the culture and empower the fact to be designers and then you actually follow up with something, everything changes. And then if you also make the social commitment, so our student body in our past was never representative of the democracy.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of innovation in society, which is we're trying to get that off the ground. The School for Complex Adaptive Systems, how do you actually run a very complicated world? What math tools and decision tools that you need? And then a school for the future of the oceans. Now, none of those exist anywhere else in that particular form, and they all exist here together. Our faculty designed all of those are advancing on all of those. And they're all very, very hard projects, all very hard things.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some way that you can get the public to understand it. And then taking responsibility for the communities that we serve, economic development, social development, cultural development, health and well-being and so forth. Well, it turns out, and there's some fact in here, our fact they are, for the most part, above 80% attracted to that objective. And so, and then if you then empower that faculty and say, you are freed from the normal, completely inane academic bureaucracy. You are freed from it. If you want to be. And that is you can design where you want to go and what you want to do and how you want to do these things. And we'll help to empower that and help to make that happen. This room that you're in, this college of global futures, this global futures laboratory, the way that we have evolved that, that's an example. There's 700 faculty members involved in that through self-selection. There's 100 core faculty members. There's four schools in that college. The school of sustainability, the first in the country, and now there's hundreds. The school for the future.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's more than inertia. There's surrounded by wannabe geniuses, geniuses, pseudo geniuses, hyper geniuses, polymaths, polyglots, everything that you can possibly imagine around you. And so it's extremely hard. And you must approach it from the perspective of culture. And so what I proposed was a public university that would be focused on inclusion versus exclusion as the measurement of our success that we would take responsibility. I mean, I got so sick of listening to people tell me that it was someone else's problem that K-12 was underperforming. Okay, we produce all the teachers. We produce all the principles. We produce all the teaching materials. We produce all the evaluation stuff. And someone else is responsible. We're responsible. So in what is now our charter, we have three points. Inclusion versus exclusion and measured student success, research that measurably benefits the public.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, all working together. We have a school for human evolution and social change. We have schools where philosophy and history and religious studies have come together.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That definitely doesn't worry me. And so, and so the one thing when you're at an institution with 6,000 faculty members like we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of degree programs, 250 academic units, 20 colleges, you're working at the edge of so many things, new ways to teach in the humanities, new ways to teach in the arts, new ways to teach in fashion and design, new ways to build this college of global futures. I mean, it is impossible to imagine that there isn't an opportunity for unbelievably creative acts by our team and our faculty to make new things happen in new kinds of ways. We've built 35 new schools. We used to have a few dozen astronomy majors as an example. We now have 700 undergraduate astronomy majors, half on campus, half online, inside of school of earth and space exploration with disciplines that weren't typically working together.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a chance that I'm actually dead. You don't really exist. And I've just been doing this for a long time. And if so, I'm pretty happy with the outcome. But, you know, I think I'm still alive.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go into politics. Yes. So they literally held their wake for me. So before I took this job, there were five or six universities that were interested in me being their president. And I went and talked to them and they said, we'd like you to be the president. And I said, no. And my wife said, I can't keep going through this emotional stuff. I mean, write down a list of universities that you would say yes to if they wanted you to be there. So I wrote down three schools. Third was the University of Washington because I thought in King County, Washington, one of the most innovative places that exists in the entire world with all the companies that are formed there. Maybe you could build a new kind of university around the already really excellent university of Washington. The second was the University of Colorado at Boulder because in all the trips that I'd made to the front range and all the 14ers that I'd climbed in Colorado, all I saw was this spirit of wanting to be innovative. And the number one on my list was this school, Arizona State University, because of where it was, what it's going on here, what Arizona is like, what Phoenix was like. And so none of them were open.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, they literally, when I left Columbia, they said, You are nuts. There's something wrong with you. Like, what has happened to you?”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be highly agile, it would be highly innovative, it would be connected to the people, it would work to serve the people in every possible way. That's what Frank Rhodes said. That's what Jim Duderstadt said. That's what a whole series of other writers said. No one has ever tried to do it at the scale that our team here has been able to do it and our fact they've been able to do it.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Needed to have a D in 15 particular courses to make sure you were ready and could do college level work and the tuition was free. Where did that go? Where's that model? So we're working to be as close to that model as we can possibly be. So we have those admission standards and we admit every kid that meets those admission standards. If you don't have the money to come to ASU, we have the money for you to go to ASU. We'll work it out between our investment and the federal government's investment and philanthropy and so forth. And if you don't have it, we'll make that work for you. So our net tuition now across all of our Arizona undergraduates is under $3,000. So what does it cost to go here for a year and with no loans under $3,000? And so we have built this model. I think I was saying to you earlier, if you are designing a truly American university, not an offshoot of a German university or an offshoot of a British college at Oxford or Cambridge, what would it look like? It would be highly egalitarian.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was kind of funny. I was born in California. We lived in California several times. And I remember reading about the emergence of the University of California when I was in high school. And you go back and you can read this book called The Blue and the Gold about how it was formed and so forth. And what was weird about it was how egalitarian the design was. So on my desks in my office just a short distance from here is the catalog of the University of California from the”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“at Cornell right before in the late 1990s wrote a book called Creating the Future and it was really an apology about what he thought Cornell University should have done and could have been and might have done. And then a guy named Jim Duderstadt wrote a book called The University for the 21st Century. And so coming out of that was this notion of we have a serious design problem. We've decided in the United States that excellence is a function of who is admitted and how exclusive was the admission process. And that is the sign of excellence only. Now that's a sign of something, but it's not a sign of necessarily, so people call that. They call universities with limited admissions elite. Well, that's about as British before the revolution as you can possibly imagine because it means you're admitted and not very many are admitted. And if you look at the, you know, there's nothing wrong with this model, but it's an incomplete model. And so what we didn't have.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What has been missing in the United States is the evolution of truly public, truly egalitarian universities. I gave a speech, invited speech in 2012 at the University of Illinois on the 150th anniversary of the Land Grant Act, the Morrill Act. And so the University of Illinois was one of the original Land Grant universities. And I go there and I'm one of the moral lecturers talking about the future of higher education. And I remember, and I don't know if any of them are going to listen to this, so we'll see what happens when they hear it. So I sort of asked the question, if the Moral Act, which was, can you build me a college focused on the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics? And can you focus on food supply and industry and solving problems and helping people to be successful? And can you work with everybody? I said, how many of you would sign up for a deal like that today if that was coming along? And I didn't get many hands in the room. I didn't get many hands in the room. And so a number of people along the road along the way, Frank Rhodes, who was the president.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Columbia is a private university, has an honors college called Columbia College. It has a number of graduate schools built around it, and they run that like an honors college with very limited number of seats. They don't want to grow the seats. There was an argument there. When I was there for like five years about growing Columbia College by 50 students, and they did it. And so great reluctance. The joke is, you know, we considered the matter for four semesters, 87 academic senators vote yes, one vote's no, the matter fails. And so.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether or not they could or not, that's what they thought. I tried cocaine once and became addicted in my life at college was ruined. And 10 years later, I realized I need to fix it and couldn't fix it. I ran out of money and my father died. My mother, my parents were killed in car crashes. I mean, they go through all these stories and the system is so merciless. It is so merciless that there's no way to finish. And so we've now found this way to finish. In fact, we've learned so much about how to do that. We found a way that if you went to jail at age 17 and you want to still go to college, we have a way for you to earn your way in by these technology tools that we've designed and built. And so we figured out how to do this and we think it's an important service.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting, yeah. So you hear a lot of that, and a lot of that's so we don't give control over to anybody. There's nobody at Starbucks that controls ASU and there's nobody at ASU that controls Starbucks. We're focused on delivering an educational opportunity to people at Starbucks. They're called partners who went to college and didn't finish or who never had a pathway to college. And so we have this thing every year. Every graduation fall semester and spring semester. We have the Starbucks Cry Fest. So the Cry Fest goes something like this. 700 people graduating show up with their family members. The CEO of Starbucks is in the room. I'm in the room. Other people in the room. And then they tell their stories. I was at Princeton and my mother got cancer and I left and didn't tell anyone and they flunked me out and I couldn't go back to college.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More people go to college and don't finish, then finish the only one. And so, how do we go back? So, we've now found 85,000 of those people and helped them to graduate with a full scale, full ASU degree designed by our faculty. And we did that with all of these technology innovations.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My workday yesterday was in Shanghai, so you can spend the whole day in Shanghai. So my meeting started at 8 with a woman named Belinda, who's the CEO of Starbucks for China. They have $90,000 and 60,000 employees and 9,000 stores. And so we're talking about how to develop the human beings that are working at Starbuck, like Starbucks like we are here. So what we found here is that if you use technologies and design them in a different way, you can take a university and all of its creative energy, its faculty, its drive, its ambitions, and you can create ways to teach and educate across the entire society at scale. And so we found a way to do that using this unbelievably innovative factor that we have and this unbelievably powerful set of technologies that we brought together with our faculty, which means then that there's over 30 million people in the United States that went to college and didn't finish. The only industrialized country”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's happened hedge funds live off of, and that's what the stock market is also driven by. And so we don't at the moment have sufficient regulation. We started a school, which is still nascent called the School for the Future of Innovation and Society in our Global Futures College. It's just getting going. We've tried to build tools. One of our professors built a tool called Technology Assessment. How do you assess the impact of technologies going forward? But it's all nascent. And no one's putting any money into this part of the problem. They're just putting money into more computational time, more technology, faster technologies. And so we're not putting enough energy into all these other things.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And so if you listen to the people that were convicted for the January 6th crimes, listen to them weeping, crying. I thought this was true. I'm sure they did. I'm sure they, I mean, I had, I had, you know, I had little sympathy for their actions. I had sympathy for where they're hearted and head were now because look at what they thought they were doing. And so they were tricked. And they were tricked on purpose.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the use of the technology, the political vehemence is no different than the lies of Thomas Jefferson against John Adams. They're just spread over and over and over and over and over. in ways in which no one can even manage or sort the truth from lies as easily. And so it's a problem we're going to have to address it and we need to address it soon.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I know. And so he didn't have what exists now. Steve Bannon's old company Cambridge Analytica and other things that have been used as ways to analyze this data, make predictive analytics, decide where you want to put your emphasis, change your political strategy in your communication strategy on a moment's notice. What happened is that those technologies got out ahead of us. Greed took over. political avarice is the function of being empowered by those that are greedy that develop these technologies. So these technologies are without regulation for the most part or without sufficient regulation. They're without sufficient understanding. We had conversations with companies, the big alphabet companies years ago, and we said, you all are heading into a train wreck. The train wreck is going to be probably not mortal, but nearly mortal. You have no idea what you're doing. You need to start thinking about consequences. You need to start thinking about how do you manage these things to a net positive outcome as opposed to a net neutral or net negative outcome. And so these are things that we haven't done. And what's happened also is that things are accelerating so quickly.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, not only that, but I mean, all the technology breakthrough of radio was hugely empowering to Hitler and the rise of Nazism and ultimately his takeover of Germany, his political manipulation of the masses through the use of that technology is highly, highly, highly correlated. Likewise.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I'm saying is that we're all technology users and technology efficionados because our species is incapable of survival without dramatic uses of technology. But what's happened is because we've so underinvested in human capital because so many educational institutions operate on what's called the deficit model, which is that there's a few smart people. There's some okay people, and there's a bunch of not so smart people. What we have is we have slowed up our opportunity to use technology across a broadly educated population to the benefit of everyone rather than to the benefit of a few. And so I have every concern that I'm sure that you have and every caution, but that doesn't keep me from thinking that we ought to move ahead and that find ways to move ahead where we can bring about advantage. And we've done a lot of that here at ASU in terms of advantage.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I share your concern, and you're not a Luddite. I mean, you have technology on your face called glasses, which alter the light going to the back of your eye from which the signal to your brain is altered. You're wearing a series of very advanced materials on your body called clothes. You have a watch somewhere.”
2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source