Most elite universities measure quality by their low acceptance rates. ASU's President Michael Crow flipped this model, defining success by the number of students they include and support, arguing that exclusivity is an outdated, elitist metric that ill-serves a democracy.
To drive change in a tenure-protected environment, ASU's president empowered faculty to redesign their own departments. This led them to eliminate 85 legacy units and create 40 new, purpose-driven schools, such as turning a Geology department into a 'School for Earth and Space Exploration'.
ASU partnered with 'Gladiator' producer Walter Parks to build VR science labs. By integrating professional storytelling into pedagogy, they created emotionally engaging 'lived experiences' for abstract subjects like biology, resulting in an average two-grade-level improvement for students.
ASU President Michael Crow argues that Ivy League schools are based on the colonial British model—small, elite, and fundamentally unscalable. This structure is insufficient for a large, modern democracy, which demands new university designs built for scale, speed, and broad accessibility.
Instead of trying to climb the traditional university rankings ladder—a game viewed as unwinnable and misguided—ASU President Michael Crow opted out. He created a new competitive framework for ASU focused on scale, speed, innovation, and societal impact, effectively inventing a different game to play.
ASU's president argues that if an AI can answer an assignment, the assignment has failed. The educator's role must evolve to use AI to 'up the game,' forcing students to ask more sophisticated questions, making the quality of the query—not the synthesized answer—the hallmark of learning.
Citing innovation expert Clayton Christensen, ASU's president explains that true transformation in legacy sectors like education requires disrupting from the core, not the periphery. This involves creating a new, differentiated institutional model rather than simply replacing old components through 'creative destruction'.