Todd: 00:00 Well, welcome to the podcast. We are honored to have Dr. Michael Crow, the 16th president of Arizona State University with us today. Dr. Crow. Welcome.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 00:08 Happy to be here, Todd.
Todd: 00:09 Thanks for joining us. So, let's maybe kind of set the stage here. We all know you from your time at ASU. 2002, 20 years.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 00:17 Yeah. Right. 20 years.
Todd: 00:18 Congratulations.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 00:19 Absolutely.
Todd: 00:19 I was at the legislature when you actually were coming down to meet some of those elected officials before you joined us, and it's amazing how much has happened. Maybe kind of set the stage with, tell us a little bit about your background prior to coming to Arizona, and maybe something about you that's not on your bio.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 00:35 Not on my bio. Let's see. So, I grew up in a Navy family. I moved around a lot. Went to 17 schools before I graduated from high school, 21 places that we moved to. Along the way decided I needed to go to college to sort of think about bigger issues about how to design, really, how do you design outcomes? How do you accelerate economic change? How do you accelerate stuff? So, I started studying all kinds of subjects, and threw the javelin in college. Let's see. Something that's not in my resume. I've been a Rocky Mountain guide in Montana, leading two and three-week backpacking trips through the mountains to the west of Bozeman. I've done the Boundary Waters canoe trip about 10 times.
Todd: 01:25 That's amazing.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 01:25 Between Canada, and I take my kids up there when they turn 11, and I take each of them up there and we fly up in a float plane and the float plane flies away, and I say, "Now, here we are. We're on our own," and away we go. So, I've done a bunch of that stuff.
Todd: 01:38 And an Eagle Scout.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 01:39 I was an Eagle Scout. Yeah.
Todd: 01:41 Your project, I think you've talked about it before, but the project that you did I think was interesting in how that sort of shaped who you are today.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 01:47 Yeah, we raised, me and this other kid named Randy, we lived on a Navy base in southern Maryland, Patuxent River Naval Air Station, and we decided to collect enough food, raise enough food for one family for one year. I remember showing up Christmas Eve that year in 1968, 13 years old, and giving the food to the family, and then seeing that the kid, one of the kids in the family was in my class. But they had a tarpaper shack, dirt floor, pot belly stove, no electricity. It was unbelievable, and so it had a deep impact on me in terms of understanding our family was working poor, that is, we were eligible for public assistance, but we had a roof. We had electricity. We had running water. These people didn't. It just sort of shocked me into realizing that there was this huge unrealized potential of people that we needed to figure out how to work on, and I really have focused a lot on that since then.
Todd: 02:38 It's interesting how that philosophy has transcended into Arizona State and your idea that-
Dr. Michael Cro...: 02:42 Well, the design of the New American University design, which is one that is hugely inclusive to students from every family background, deeply connected to the community and its success, not striving to be recognized for how many people we leave out, but who we include and how they succeed, all those things. All of that was sort of a process for me, eventually coming to the realization that we needed new models for public universities. We needed new ways to build them. They needed to be egalitarian, that is accessible to people. They needed to be unbelievably excellent. They needed to be agile, technologically-driven. They needed to be adaptive to the student, working with students in different places, our online programs, all kinds of things, and so all of that came from those experiences.
Todd: 03:25 I think it's an extremely powerful idea that intelligence and potential aren't dictated by a zip code.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 03:30 Well, I mean, it's the weirdest thing. So, every human ... If your listeners look up right now, just stop listening. Go to the internet. Type in most complex object in the known universe, the one thing pops up, the human brain. So, 80 to 90 billion neurons, tens of thousands of synapses connecting those neurons virtually trillions upon trillions upon trillions of permutations. Every single human being has one of these things between their ears. Well, why were we given that? So, that we could have some people who were highly empowered, and other people who were not empowered? I'm not talking about college or school. I'm just saying that each of us were given something capable of actual creation. We can create something from nature that doesn't exist in nature. Other creatures don't do that. We create things. We conceptualize things. We visualize the future. Our brains, we can create music. We can create artistic expressions. We can build jet airplanes. I mean, it's, by taking rocks and turning them into metal and turning them into jet airplanes. What is that? So, we just have never really fully realized that potential.
Todd: 04:42 The state of higher education, obviously we'll focus on Arizona State. Kind of give us an overview.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 04:48 I think the overview, Arizona is a fantastic place. Very, very successful in many, many ways. Because it's a late-comer, it has been both highly innovative in the way that we've taken on issues related to education and higher education. But then it is also not caught up with the future. So, we're, right now, we're underperforming. So, we've got too few kids born in Arizona, growing up in Arizona, moving to Arizona, who go on to college. So, we're under-producing, no matter what anyone says, and they have no data to back up their theories of the universe. We are under-supplied in terms of college graduates for the market, and deeply under-supplied for college graduates in Arizona. We're also under-supplied for technical trades and trade skills and other kinds of skills. So, basically, what we have is we have a supply chain problem. We're losing 20%, 25% of the kids not finishing high school. 20% more of the kids that do finish high school haven't really finished high school.
05:43 They're not really ready. So, we have a 40% attrition rate of people not prepared to enter the new economy. Then we've got in Arizona, we've under-built our education infrastructure, both private, there's very few private colleges, parochial, there's very few church colleges, public, where there's only three public universities, and we're under-built. So, we've grown so fast and evolved so fast that we don't realize that we're underplaying. Then you add to that the fact that things are accelerating. The changes are accelerating. Technologies are evolving at even faster rates, and then that means people have to be more and more and more adaptive, more and more empowered through learning, either college or trade school or technical school or just picking up courses or picking up ways of doing things. So, we're just a little bit behind the eight ball right now, and we're a little bit under-built in terms of our learning infrastructures in Arizona.
Todd: 06:34 So, we take that and then we sort juxtaposition this idea that Arizona State University was once again proclaimed the most innovative university in the country. How do those two live together? How do those two concepts live together?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 06:46 If we hadn't become the most innovative university in the country, we would be somewhere between failure and abject failure right now. We would be so under-serving the community. So, because there's a desire to be creative in Arizona, a willingness to accept innovation, new ways are the way that people can think here, we've been able to build the university to now try to catch up. The old model, there was no chance whatsoever. Zero chance out of a hundred. Zero out of a hundred of being able to perform the mission. Now it's the most innovative university in the country. Now we've got at least a chance to carry out the mission, that is a part of our assignment, which is really to lay down the tracks for the future.
07:27 New technologies, new ways of thinking, new ways of producing teachers, new ways of enhancing education, new ways of reaching learners across the entire society. We're able to do all of that. So, it's not a juxtaposition. It's that Arizona had a necessity for, and we are adapt ... we are creatures of necessity. We're reacting to the necessity. So, therefore, we built the most innovative university ever created to try to meet the challenge of Arizona.
Todd: 07:51 So, what's the reaction of your colleagues, for instance, at MIT? Now, I'm sure they've seen the survey.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 07:57 Yeah. So, Rafael Reif, the outgoing president at MIT, took an honorary degree from ASU. He's a wonderful person, loves ASU, loves what we're up to. I mean, people see us as necessary, but they're perplexed about how we do things. How do we go from 6,000 engineering students just a few years ago to 30,000 engineering students this academic year? How do you do that? No one's ever done anything like that before in the US, and we're doing it, and we're doing it successfully. So, there's doubt, there's skepticism, there's concern, there's jealousy. There's what is this about? There's fear. So, all innovations create those kinds of reactions in others within their sector. But over at MIT, the leadership at MIT, they understand ASU deeply, very deeply. My wife went to MIT. My son went to MIT. Very familiar with the folks over there. So, they're very, very respectful of ASU.
Todd: 08:48 So, I guess the thing that, when I was looking at some of the stats recently, one of the things that also popped up was that Chinese universities are making great strides against American universities in their rankings. Speak to that a little bit.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 09:03 Well, in some ways we have been resting on laurels inappropriately in the United States. It's, we've just been fat, dumb, and happy, and using a phrase that my dad used from time to time, and that is that we never imagined that the Chinese would also build great research universities, also launch ... So, they've been building for the last 25 years, 100 new research universities from scratch. They've been enhancing the level of higher education such that they now will have several times the number of college graduates that we do as a part of their workforce. So, again, a lot of anti-college folks, they think that somehow college folks are interested in everybody going to college. No. We're interested in having the most successful economy possible, which means we actually do need college graduates to help lay that new economy out. So, in China, what we've missed is that they looked at the United States and they said, "What made the United States successful," and they saw that it was education.
09:59 Then they saw the power of the universities in the United States from the 1940s and the winning of World War II until the building of the new economies, and they said, "We got to have some of those." So, they set out with trillions of dollars over these last few decades to build these institutions to educate their entire population. And lo and behold, now we have a competitor. The competitor doesn't always play by the rules that we'd like to play by, but we have human beings who are highly empowered coming from China, who are now competitors. We've got to continue our own evolution to be the most competitive country, be the most innovative country, be the beacon for democracy, protect ourselves, all those kinds of things. But they're very empowered right now with educational attainment.
Todd: 10:42 So, who should be concerned? Not concerned. Who should be moving some of these levers? Should it be policy makers? Should it be the universities themselves? Who's, where does this, where does this lay?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 10:54 In this space of competing against a major economic and potential military competitor like China, obviously the national government needs to be heavily involved in that. The state and local governments which have the responsibility for public higher education, there's not really much responsibility for that at the national level. It's really at the state and local level who operate the universities, build the universities, make them happen. They've got to start thinking more broadly about competitiveness, and they've got to start thinking about human capital development, and the investment in human capital. That's really hard for people to do, because people are, they don't want to pay more taxes. They don't want to part with more of their resources. So, what we need then is, the who's responsible, to your question, is literally everybody. Leaders of cities, leaders of the states, leaders of the universities, business community. The thing in Arizona that we don't have is we don't have a plan.
11:45 So, we're kind of an anti-plan, anti-strategy place. I'm not big on either strategy or plans as definitive, but we need to know where are we going, and what are we attempting to achieve? So, right now, we're still accepting 20 to 25% of kids not graduating from high school. If you look at their life outcomes, not graduating from high school, if you look at their ultimate cost to the rest of us in terms of public support for them, incarceration for high school non- completers, all these kinds of things, it's an unbelievably bad outcome. It has to be fixed. So, we've worked to actually, we run public schools. We run charter schools, public charter schools. We have K-12, thousands of K-12 kids, and we graduate nearly everyone. 98 to 99% of our kids graduate, regardless of their family backgrounds. So, there's just this acceptance in Arizona of failure. There's an acceptance of under-performance, and so who's responsible? We're all responsible for accepting the notion that human beings don't have to be more educated and more adaptive for the future. They have to be or we're not going to be successful.
Todd: 12:51 So, that sort of takes me to something that I find interesting. You always talk about this idea of lifelong learners, and in our society, everything has to be black or white. You're Republican. You're a Democrat. You're good. You're bad. You seem to look at it a little differently. You're, this idea that you're a lifelong learner, that's going to include some sort of higher education, sort of technical training, something along the way. Why is that important?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 13:12 Yeah.
Todd: 13:12 Why should we be looking at it that way, versus this idea that it's either one or zero.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 13:15 Yeah, the one or zero thing, those are just small, human mental computers making poor calculations about non-realistic ways in which the world doesn't operate. So, what I mean by all of that is that, if you look at the rate of acceleration, of technological advance, the rate of acceleration of social complexity, the speed of all things, the speed of the internet, the speed of change, the speed of everything, it turns out then that a person going forward, who's 20 years old today will in all likelihood not have one career and one job or one career and two jobs, but four careers and 15 jobs over their lifetime. They'll also be living longer if we get certain other things under control here. They'll be looking to adapt to more complexity. So, it turns out then that the model of early only education, outdated, antiquated, flawed, incomplete, no longer satisfactory for what we need.
14:13 So, what we need is the concept of lifelong learning, and every individual as a universal learner. So, let's say you didn't finish high school, and then you want to finish high school later. No problem. There's a way for you to do that. Let's say that you went to college, and you want to learn some other things not about college. No problem. There's ways to do that. Let's say you want to switch careers. We got a way to help you to be able to do this. So, we're now beginning to expand the notion of the idea of a universal learner across their entire life with us adapting to what they need, rather than us trying to force fit them or form fit them just into a university.
14:47 So, if you were young and 21 or 22 years old right now, and moving forward, you're off on a certain track, but you don't know where you're going to end up. You don't know what you're going to encounter. You don't know what situations you're going to encounter, and so we now need to take the idea of learning and the idea of college. And now spread it out across and a person's entire life, and that's what we're doing. That's exactly what we're doing.
Todd: 15:09 Well, it is relevant to today's world. I would agree. Before we leave this, you talked a little bit about the K-12 system, and again, this argument at the legislature's more money or more accountability? What is it?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 15:23 More money is not the answer. I mean, paying teachers more, yes. They need to be fairly compensated for the very important role that they play and the outcomes that they affect. There was an economist, conservative economist a few years ago that calculated the actual impact of a kindergarten teacher on the outcome of society. So, a person's educational attainment and their ultimate success in our society is influenced by a number of things, and one of those things is what is your vocabulary at age five? If your vocabulary is at a high level, and you're engaged in learning at a high level, then your outcome for your entire life is highly, positively altered. A kindergarten teacher, it turns out, is worth about $300,000 a year. Now, I'm not arguing that we pay them that, but that's their impact on the society. So, we've undervalued teachers, but we've also put teachers into archaic, unbelievably old- fashioned structures, which are not adaptive to the present world.
16:18 So, what we need more than anything is we need design level changes. We need to no longer accept failure, the acceptance of failure. If you're not graduating 95% of your kids from high school, you're failing. Therefore, you need to be attacking the failures. So, what we need in K-12, more than simple, simpleton arguments of more money, less money, more accountability, less accountability, what we need on the accountability side are measures of success, people held accountable for those measures of success. But more than anything we need, we need more and more innovations, more and more new ways of doing things, more and more new ways of thinking about outcomes, new types of schools, new designs of schools, new structures for schools, new ways to make things happen. That's what we need more than anything.
Todd: 17:02 So, innovation.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 17:03 Innovation.
Todd: 17:05 Let me pivot a little bit. Arizona, we're at a really, I guess a fortunate place that we have more jobs than people.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 17:11 Yes.
Todd: 17:11 But, of course, that creates a challenge. How is Arizona State attacking that challenge of the idea that we have a huge demand for a workforce that's not there?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 17:20 So, we're working on that in a lot of ways. I mean, so at the macro level, we're trying to accelerate the number of college graduates that we're producing by not only educating more Arizonans, but attracting students here from every state, including Texas and other kinds of places. We're bringing students in from all over the country. We're bringing in students from 158 countries around the world. Those students get to stay. They get their college degree, their Master's degree, their PhD, their Bachelor's degree. Those international students get to stay. They get to start working with companies for a couple years, then maybe the company can apply for a green card, and get them on the legal path to legal immigration to the United States. They're legally present as students, and so ASU is a massive engine for the attraction of talent and the development of talent within Arizona.
18:05 I think the other thing that we're doing is that you've got all these people who are living here who are not in the workforce or who are not prepared for the actual jobs. So, you've got this huge gap. So, we've just launched a thing called the ASU Learning Enterprise under Executive Vice President Maria Anguiano. She is focusing on how do we take everything we have, anything that can help any person to advance in their life, their career, their family, their educational outcomes, their toolkit, whatever they have, and make it available to everyone? So, the ASU Learning Enterprise now is there so that maybe you're on one track, and you'd like to move to another track. You're working in marketing, but you now want to be a software engineer. No problem. We've got the ways for you to be able to do that.
18:50 So, we're working with Arizona companies to help them to attract more workers, help them train more workers, move forward on lots of ways. We need a steady flow of immigration and immigrants to drive the workforce forward, to help the workforce to continue to evolve, so that everybody can be upgrading and new workers can be coming in, and then they're upgraded and they're moving forward, and that allows the economy to expand. So, what we've done at ASU is we've restructured ourself completely. So, we've restructured ourself around what we call the Academic Enterprise Degree programs and so forth and so on. The Learning Enterprise, which is making learning assets available to any learner, any age, any point in their life, any point of their career, and then the Knowledge Enterprise, which helps us to create new kinds of technological solutions, socio-technical systems that can solve certain kinds of things, make all of that happen. Then, that's what we're deploying. So, we're deploying this new kind of university, which can work on social scale, can work at transformation scale, and that's what we've decided to build for ASU's trajectory.
Todd: 19:49 Well, so that makes me think about the future. If you're talking about launching sort of an initiative on AI or robotics today, you're probably 10 years too late. What is ASU doing to look around the corner, because it takes time?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 20:00 Well, we only look around the corner. So, it turns out that we're working on building seven, from scratch, new science and technology centers, about where we think industry will be going. So, managing our way through new kinds of healthcare systems, data-driven healthcare systems, which are applications of these AI systems. So, we're obviously heavily involved in artificial intelligence, what we call augmented intelligence. We've got huge computational things going on. We've got all kinds of research going on in the future economy, which is less carbon-centric, but then boldly and I think vigorously moving in new directions. So, we're positioning in leapfrog ways, new research and training initiatives in global futures, new renewable energy technologies, new uses of augmented intelligence, new systems, new systems designs, new tools, new ways of teaching and learning. All these things are also not only tools that help everyone else, but they also become whole new parts of the economy.
21:07 So, in Arizona, I think the potential here is fantastic for new, advanced agriculture systems, new, advanced energy systems, new, advanced water systems, which then become usable here and sellable to others. In terms of where everything's going in microelectronics and microelectronic systems, everything that's computationally intensive. It turns out that one of the reasons the Chinese spent so much money on artificial intelligence isn't actually, as people think, only for military objectives. In fact, that's not even their principle objective. The principle objective is the acceleration of economic growth. The more systems that we have that are driven by what's called general artificial intelligence, GAI, the more systems we have that are operating on those kinds of technological platforms, the faster the rate of economic growth accelerates. Now, then, that means then that workforce has to be able to keep up with that. The economy has to be able to keep up with that. So, then the university, if all we're doing is chasing others, we're-
Todd: 22:04 Too late.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 22:04 Yeah, we're just too late, a day late and a dollar short, as my dad used to say.
Todd: 22:09 Yeah. Well, how can the business community be a good partner in that? Maybe I'll back up and say, "Is the business community a good partner for ASU?"
Dr. Michael Cro...: 22:17 Individually, they're good partners. Collectively, they're not a good partner, because collectively they have failed as a group to help set important goals that are in their own interests out of fear of taxes or whatever. What I mean by that is, in Colorado, in Utah, and in Texas, just picking three of our competing states, the business communities in those states have then outlined educational objectives. 90% high school graduation rates, 95% high school graduation rates. They've outlined objectives relative to post-secondary attainment. 66% in Colorado. 60% in Texas. 60% in Utah.
22:56 Now we have the same kind of goals in Arizona, but they're basically empty books. They're not real. There's no then strategy of how do you do that? So, in Utah, in Texas and in Colorado, there are specific strategies being pushed by the business community about how those goals can be attained, and so they're not simple binary arguments. More taxes, less taxes. That's the stupidest, narrowest thing that I've ever heard about how the world really works. That's important to have low taxes, to have managed taxes. It's also important to have unbelievably important strategic objectives. So, in Texas, for instance, the business community supports spending about four times as much on higher education, seven times as much on higher education as Arizona.
Todd: 23:42 Per capita?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 23:43 I mean, seven times total. Well, let's just go per capita.
Todd: 23:46 Yeah.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 23:46 So, let's just look at some western states. So, per capita, the highest per capita expenditure on higher education in the United States is Wyoming, about $800 per person, per year for higher education. Texas is around $300. Arizona's around 100.
Todd: 24:03 Okay.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 24:04 The second lowest or the lowest, depending on how you calculate it. So, what that means then is it's not a simple calculation. Someone's spending more than us, et cetera, et cetera. What it means is that we haven't decided that that's an important strategic investment. Yet, nearly everyone else has. So, if you look at the transformation of Georgia, economically, which is unbelievable, unbelievable transformation economically, socially, competitively. So, if you live in Georgia and you go to high school in Georgia, and you graduate from a high school in Georgia and you have a B average, you don't pay to go to a public university any tuition. Well, then there that for then means every kid is motivated to do really well in high school, and every family understands that if their kid does really well in high school, then they can continue going by working hard.
24:51 We don't have anything like that. It's not a big deal. It's not even that expensive. We have nothing like that in Arizona. So, only four or five states don't have major state-based financial aid. We're one of them. So what that means, back to your question on the business communities, that the business community, in my view, needs a somewhat longer term view. So, in fact, I've been, it's kind of weird. I've been told, "Don't talk to me about investments. We don't do investments, public investments in Arizona." I said, "Oh, that's not true at all. The investment in the Central Arizona Project and the investment in the Salt River Project, two major multi-billion dollar investments, over time, have netted trillions of dollars of returns since those projects were implemented." So, we're past a lot of fiscal infrastructure now. We still need it. Now we're into human infrastructure.
25:37 In human infrastructure, we're not making enough investments. The business community isn't stepping up and saying, "This is what we need. This is what we need to achieve, and here's what we need to invest to make those achievements, to make them happen." So, we're not doing it.
Todd: 25:53 So, you talk to a lot of business leaders?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 25:54 Yeah.
Todd: 25:54 In your opinion, why?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 25:56 Why do I talk them?
Todd: 25:57 No. Why does that happen? Why are we not doing what Texas is doing or-
Dr. Michael Cro...: 26:01 Well, part of it's kind of weird. So, if you go to Texas, there's a feeling about Texas. Texas, it's a big deal. It's like it used to be a country, but then it became a state. Some days they want to be a country on their own again. I mean, I hear this from time to time, but there's a pride in Texas that is even a little bit off-putting and overbearing from time to time, but it exists. In Arizona, we don't have a here's what we want Arizona to be. What we want Arizona to be is just this very relaxing, beautiful, wonderful place. Okay. That's insufficient. That is not enough to stay competitive. You know where we are in per capita GDP by comparison against the national average, we've fallen. If you look at a number of statistics, we're falling, falling, falling. Educational outcomes, educational performance, we're not where we need to be.
26:50 The business community needs to say, "Here is what we need to do to maintain unbelievable human capital development for us and our workforce, and for Arizona to be successful." They've been unwilling to do that, because their interests are too narrow. Their focus on what they think they need is too narrow, in my view.
Todd: 27:13 So, I just want to talk a little bit about the CHIPS Act. Arizona State University was a big proponent of the CHIPS act. You do a lot obviously in that space.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 27:22 Yeah.
Todd: 27:22 Why?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 27:23 So, it turns out that at the stage where we are right now in terms of our evolution as a species, some of the most important things that have happened in the last several hundred years are the development of the book, the development of clean and potable water, that changed everything. The development of electricity. These are powerful, powerful things. Microchips will be more important than all of those put together, because they enable and enhance everything we do by allowing us to create tools, machines, and systems that are capable of greatly enhancing who we are as a species. They are an unbelievable species-enhancer. They give you unlimited information through your devices, your phones and so forth and so on. They give you unbelievable computational capability. They'll eventually be driving your car and doing this and doing that. So, at some point, microchips now will become like water. They'll become essential to all things we're attempting to do.
28:29 So, therefore, the CHIPS Act is a renewed effort on the part of the United States to basically say, "We will always be in the lead relative to microchips. We'll always have the most advanced chips. We'll always be producing those most advanced chips, and we'll never let our supply chain be negatively impacted by some other kind of interruption relative to this critical thing. Critical like water." So, the CHIPS Act was the coming together of industry, universities like ASU, local industries like Intel, new companies coming into Phoenix like Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company, hundreds of supply chain companies, thousands and thousands of other companies working with them, and basically saying, "We're going to make certain that this essential thing, water, electricity, is present in the United States, and under our control, and under our leadership, and pushed in the direction that we want to go. So that, for us, it's like unbelievably essential.
29:24 It turns out, in fact, I have a joke about this. Phoenix is an epicenter for all things related to advanced microchip systems, microelectronic systems, manufacturing and development, and has been for decades and decades and decades. So, I don't know if you ever saw the movie Independence Day where the aliens come in and they blow up the White House, and they blow up Los Angeles, and they blow up New York City. They won't be blowing up those places. They'll be blowing up Phoenix.
Todd: 29:48 No. Let's hope not.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 29:49 No, no, because Phoenix will be the place where these most important devices are made. So, we saw the CHIPS Act as essential to the success of the economic and military defense of the United States going forward, period. Bar none. It's actually called the CHIPS and Science Act, because there's tens of billions of dollars there to help speed manufacturing and located in the United States. Then there's tens of billions of dollars there also, to expand our research capabilities, and to build research centers, which is where we're going to have a harder time competing than for the factories. We're already winning the factory.
30:26 We're not easily going to win the others, because we're under-built in terms of our research infrastructure. We have a newbie, ultra big Baby Huey University, but we're not MIT. We're not some of the universities that have been involved in these things forever and ever and ever. So, those are areas where we're going to have to greatly extend our reach and try to win these new laboratories, so that not only the chips can be built here, but the future technologies can be developed here and discovered here and enhanced here.
Todd: 30:57 So, CHIPS Act, first of all, congratulations and thank you. That's obviously going to be significant for us. A rare bipartisan effort at the congressional level.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 31:06 Yeah, I've talked to Senator Cornyn from Texas. Senator Kelly's been unbelievably involved in all this. Senator Sinema, others. Others on both sides of the aisle, deeply engaged in making these investments, and so this is a national initiative in which people have stepped past some of their partisan differences, and made some big, important choices.
Todd: 31:30 So, you feel like we can close Pandora's box on this, what we've unleashed in the last decade, two decades in this black and white world, where no one can agree on anything, because it's all based on political ideology?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 31:43 Unfortunately, the media is out there stirring that pot that no one can agree. We know from the Center for the Future of Arizona, that in Arizona, there's all kinds of things people agree on. More than 75% of the population believes in access to healthcare for everyone. More than 90% of the population in Arizona believes that we need clean skies, blue water, clean, blue skies, clean water, clean air. We need all those things. That's more than 90% of the population. So, there's huge areas where people are in agreement, but what we have is we have, it's like a football rivalry. So, we have one team not liking the other team, red, blue, and then fighting to the bitter death over things that are often solvable or doable. So, it is unfortunate that we've gotten into this mix.
32:29 I mean, I don't know if you recall from history, but George Washington, founding parent, founding father was adamant, adamant that parties could come to destroy the country.
Todd: 32:40 I do recall.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 32:42 And that they themselves would lead to the parties becoming more important than the country. Now, luckily, CHIPS Act, other important things, we are coming together and making things happen. But if we continue down this divisive pathway, we're going to have difficulty competing against some of those that we're trying to compete against. Then, what does that mean? Then, the full potential of the United States will not be realized?
Todd: 33:04 Absolutely. As we close in, biggest challenge and biggest opportunity for ASU going forward?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 33:11 One of our biggest challenges is at ASU ism for whatever reason in Metro Phoenix, unlike Metro Austin or unlike Metro Seattle, or unlike Metro Denver or Metro Los Angeles or other cities with big powerful research universities, people aren't sure what we are. So, it turns out people will say things like, "Oh, you're so big."
Todd: 33:36 Yeah.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 33:37 Turns out we're actually under-serving the community. So, of the 15 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, we're probably 14th in educational attainment of the people that actually live here. Not the people that move here, but the people that actually live here, in terms of higher education. So, we're under-serving. If you look at the universities that are in Metro Seattle or Metro Austin or Metro Houston or other places, there's many more private universities, parochial universities. In Houston, you've got Rice University. You've got the University of Houston system. You've got the Texas Medical Center, which has I think six or seven medical schools, a whole bunch of nursing schools that are there.
34:16 You've got all these things that are going on there and here, people haven't yet fully grasped the role of the university or the importance of the university. Then you get a little, so that's a huge challenge for us. We're not ... People don't really see why we're important or what it means.
Todd: 34:32 So, just that we're big.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 34:33 Yeah, look around the world at Paris, at London. There are six major research universities in London. There are unbelievable universities all through the world that are central to the emergence of these cities, and here we're still kind of like a big yawn. "What are they doing over there at the college?" So, we're not yet seen as critical. So, biggest opportunity? I think the biggest opportunity is that Arizona is such a fantastic place. It is unbelievable. Physical beauty that's just unbelievable. The way this place works, the way that people basically get along, the way that you can come here from anywhere and basically be accepted, I mean, it's a big deal.
Todd: 35:23 Yeah.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 35:23 A lot of places don't work that way. So, our social fabric is warm and welcoming. Our desire to innovate is warm and welcoming. Our openness to arguments, I think it's fantastic. Argue away, but eventually make a decision. So, that's our biggest advantage.
Todd: 35:40 I couldn't agree more. We're going to do a quick lightning round as we wrap up.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 35:43 Okay.
Todd: 35:44 I know these, you're quick and these questions don't bother. We might ask a few more than usual.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 35:49 Okay.
Todd: 35:49 First job?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 35:51 I was a dishwasher, and a lawn mower guy,
Todd: 35:53 What did you learn from that?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 35:55 Hard work is hard work, and you're going to get beat out by other kids. My dishwasher buddies were both heroin addicts, so I learned to stay off heroin.
Todd: 36:03 That's a good lesson.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 36:03 Yes.
Todd: 36:04 First, or favorite college class?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 36:06 My favorite college class was this really huge anthropology class on where did human beings come from? How did we come about?
Todd: 36:14 Excellent. If you could take any 100 level class at ASU, what would it be?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 36:18 I'd probably want to take more classes on design, like 100 level design. How does design work? How do you design things? How do you bring things together? But then also we have this brand new class at ASU, Biology 180 1 in Biology 100, which has a lab that you take for the biology class, which is off the earth. So, you, virtual reality beam up to an alien zoo, and you do all your labs up on this alien zoo. So, I'd like to take that class.
Todd: 36:43 That one sounds good, and I have to ask that, is liberal arts dead?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 36:47 Oh, that's a joke. The people that talk about that I think are basically curmudgeons.
Todd: 36:52 Okay.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 36:53 So, are liberal arts dead? Are you kidding me? We have more liberal arts and humanities majors than we've ever had. Now of course, we got lots of engineering majors, and the big exciting thing at ASU is we have tens of thousands of students that are double majoring, triple majoring. I kid you not with this last point. So, I teach every year in the spring semester, and there's a kid in my class last semester. He said, "Well, Dr. Crow. I'm majoring in five subjects." So, I didn't believe him. So, we checked it out, and he's majoring in five things and graduating in four years, because he could take so many courses in different ways, and go in the summer. He's probably a little unusual, deep down. But nonetheless, he did something that I wanted to do. So, we now have the ability to now accelerate all learning. So, it's really exciting.
Todd: 37:36 It's good to hear. First car?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 37:39 My first car was a Gremlin.
Todd: 37:43 I love that.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 37:43 Yeah.
Todd: 37:44 Excellent. Excellent. All right. Then the final question, if you were playing for the Diamondbacks, what would be your walk up song?
Dr. Michael Cro...: 37:51 My walk up song?
Todd: 37:52 You have to, and we have to know what it is, because you have to sing it.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 37:55 Oh, well, no. It's probably the song, by 10,000 Maniacs on the World on fire.
Todd: 38:06 Okay. I like that.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 38:07 Yeah.
Todd: 38:08 Dr. Crow, thank you.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 38:08 Yes. Thank you.
Todd: 38:09 Thank you for spending so much time with us, and thank you for everything you're doing for Arizona, and for our country.
Dr. Michael Cro...: 38:12 Thank you, Todd.