This episode of University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast originally aired on March 17, 2025, appearing live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to watch the video of the keynote. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to the Innovating Together Podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns, with the University Innovation Alliance. I am so excited to bring today's presentation to you. It is a speech that came from the UIA National Summit that profoundly affected everyone who was there, and I think people have been continuing to think about the lessons that you're about to learn, as they resonate so deeply. Strangely, this speech happened in, obviously, late October 2024, and yet the words are more important than ever today. I'm excited to introduce this speech from Michael Crow in a moment.
But first, I want you to know that the Innovating Together Podcast is sponsored by Mainstay, which is a student engagement and retention platform that actually engages in peer-reviewed research and proves that their product works. If you have ever been sold a chatbot, they likely used Mainstay's data. Consider looking at mainstay.com to learn more about the specific efficacy studies and how it is that their product has actually helped institutions retain students and help them reduce summer melt and a variety of other things. Take a look there.
The other is that we're sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who has been a long-time friend and ally of the UIA, and we are so grateful for their consistent and continued support.
Today, let's talk about this speech. It was a keynote from the UIA National Summit by the UIA Board Chair and ASU President Michael Crow. He's one of the boldest voices in higher education, and he certainly was that day. He was speaking to a room full of university leaders, and he called on all of us to really confront some hard truths about how our system is failing too many students, the future of our democracy is on the line, and the only path forward is going to be through being fearless and taking risks. Some of my favorite quotes from this speech were, "There is no leadership without risk.” “There are no excuses, none. It's us. We did that.” “The essential role of your institution is only for the success of our democracy and perfection is impossible, but progress is possible." Those are just a few, and I really hope that this gives you the inspiration, and perspective, and motivation that you are looking for. Please join me in welcoming a keynote from Michael Crow, which I believe the most apt title is “No Excuses: The Urgent Responsibility of Public Higher Education, Especially in this Moment.”
Michael Crow:
What I want to talk about today is you all. You wouldn't be in this room if you weren't a person willing to take risks. You wouldn't be in this room if your institution hadn't decided to take risks. You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't believe in the fundamental ideals of public higher education. You wouldn't be here. You'd be back at your campus, or you'd be at some other institution, less interested in what we're talking about here. What I want to talk about today is what's the responsibility of us becoming leaders? We need to stop thinking about bringing the whole sector along. We need to stop thinking about changing everything. We need to stop thinking about, "Well, we can't move until we have the entire K-12 reform. We can't move until we get all the universities moving in the right direction. We can't move until the government funds us." Forget all of that. You got one short life. You're sitting in this room. You're attached to an institution on which the success of the democracy is dependent.
You've got a cluster, as Bridget talked about, of other institutions to work with where you can do things together to make changes in people's lives and to change trajectories. You've got all of that, and now it's time to step up. But we have a big problem. Heather wrote this fantastic book. How many of you have read this book, The Sum of Us? It's a fabulous, fabulous book, and she is unbelievably brutal. Now, it's a book about racism and the price of racism. It's a book about the fact that racism hurts everyone. The ultimate sum of all of us together is diminished because some people are unwilling to accept others based on their ethnicity, their race, their religion, some stupid concoction that they come up with. They're unwilling to do that, and therefore even they are diminished. Well, this book obviously informed me in ways in which I'd experienced in my own life, just in the communities that I'd lived in and watching what was going on, but also informed me in another way. It's the equation, the sum of us.
We are so much less than we could be, because so many people have been unable to find the pathway to the realization of their full abundance. The sum of us in a country like the United States, which is designed – designed, not yet attained – designed to provide equal pathways, designed to provide pathways for liberty, designed to define and find pathways for the pursuit of happiness, our sum is dramatically below where it could be. Our class of institutions has more people that attend and do not graduate than graduate. That is an abject failure of the highest order. All of you will come up with some lame excuse as to why that's the case. There are no excuses, none. It's us. We did that. It's not the kid that's showing up who had a bad teacher from high school. There's ways to deal with that. It's not the lack of money from the government, it's not the underpayments from the taxpayers, it's none of those. It's us. We haven't decided to basically make the sum of us greater. We haven't decided that it is failure for our sector to drop out half the people that attend.
We have decided, in those institutions that don't have selective admissions, to think that somehow those that do have selective admissions are some gift from God. They're not. I came from one of those schools. I came from Columbia University, where I was Deputy Provost. I was a faculty member there. I got tenure there. I grew up there. It's a great honors college. It's a fantastic honors college. Not very big, 4,000 students in Columbia College, and a bunch of fantastic graduate schools that you can go to if you can afford it. "Okay, good. I'm glad you got that." In the big scheme of things, so what? It doesn't scale. It doesn't engage everybody. There's no way that – most people can't afford it, and so why we would compare ourselves to any institution whatsoever, under any circumstance whatsoever, that's engaged in narrow-gauge railroad or narrow-gauge focus? I don't know.
What is the algorithm for success in our democracy? What is the sum of our algorithm? What is the algorithm for success in our democracy? You guys don't spend time talking about democratic success. You spend time worrying about what's going on in our democracy. You're all worried. All of us are. You're all worried, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, not realizing that we partly did it. You think that 40 million people that went to college and didn't graduate are happy campers? You think that the 75% of the people with debt from having gone to college are really happy with the debt that they accumulated for which they got nothing? No, they're upset. You think that the general population of the country is really satisfied with the fact that we pontificate from on high about having all the brains, and all the pathways, and all the power, and kids from certain neighborhoods have very little chance of success?
I was in high school in the fall of 1969 and the spring of 1970, living in Southern Maryland at the time, near the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. At that time – you can go back and look at the statistics, I think Bridget put out some of these statistics – you had a seven or eight percent chance of graduating from college if you were born in the lower 25% of family income. My family was in the lower 10% of family income. All these decades later, that number is around ten. Now, you could be a not-so-bright person from a wealthy family in the United States today, and you got about an 80% chance of graduating from college.
Now, I'm just telling you that there's no success in that for our democracy. Going back to this phrase, “the sum of us.” If the sum of us is diminished because we can't find a way to engage in an overall algorithm where every kid that's driven, and every kid with talent, and every kid with ambition, and every kid that's got the drive, and the dream, and the want, and if you believe this doesn't exist, then you are not paying attention. If you believe any of the stuff about, "Oh, kids don't really want to go to college," no, they don't want to go to college, get debt, and end up with nothing. They don't want to have a degree that, in the market, is not worth anything. They don't want to have to go and listen to a bunch of people that say, "Well, listen, I need you to quit your life for four years. Quit taking care of your younger siblings that you're responsible for taking care of. Come over here and spend time with me, indebt yourself, and work on a product for which you probably don't have a very good chance of finishing."
There's no one to blame but our sector, and there's no one to solve it but the people in this room. No one. No legislature, no higher education authority, no overseeing board, no board of trustees, no board of regents. It is only a function of us, the people willing to innovate to change the outcome of the algorithm. The algorithm looks like this at the moment.
Most kids don't get to go to college. Most of them don't graduate from college. Most kids from poor families have an even lower chance of going to college or graduating from college. Most talent is left on the table, and we live in a world where we think that people are stupid. We think that people are dumb. We think they can't learn calculus. We think they can't be engineers. We think they can't do STEM. We literally think this. It's absurd. Just on the side, not subject to Bridget's criticism of people talking about themselves – Is she still here? Where'd she go? – A few years ago, we got sick of the way engineering ran for us. We were running a weed-out culture. We had about 6,000 engineering students 13 years ago. Only 68% made it through the freshman year, the rest got booted out of engineering. Half of them quit the university in disgust. If you went back and surveyed them, which we did, unhappy campers, most of whom hated our guts. Ran for the legislature and then hated us even more. We said, "Everything's got to change."
Chuck Vest shows up, the head of the National Academy of Engineering. He says, "I'm desperate. We got to find somebody willing to take some risks. We need somebody to blow up all the departments, and create Grand Challenge Engineering Schools, and watch what happens when people flock to your doors." I'm like, "Hey, why not? You only live once."
We dynamited all of the engineering departments, took out all of the people that thought about weed-out as their – They got their jollies from flunking people out, made them feel like better men. I'm not kidding. We decided to come up with robots that could help us teach calculus. We created Grand Challenge Engineering Schools. We created a new engineering school. In fact, Mitzi Montoya, who's the provost at Utah, helped us get this school off the ground, our polytechnic school. We made all this stuff happen. I'll just fast forward it. That year, we graduated 900 engineers. Last year, we graduated 7,200 engineers. This year, we have 25,000 engineering students on campus and 8,000 engineers online, and we're going to go to 50,000 engineering students. Our engineering students in the market have the same market value as Illinois, Stanford, UCLA, Washington, Texas, any of the other big public universities and some private universities. The algorithm was altered. Our algorithm was altered. There is no gap to your coming in. Don't know math? We'll teach you. Want to learn engineering by doing the engineering and you learn the math later? We'll have that as a route. Blow it up, blow it up, blow it up.
The essential role of your institutions and the essential role of you as the public university, you are here only for the success of the democracy. There's no other reason for your existence. It was laid down by our intellectual designers. Adams, Washington, and others, all of whom were 18th-century flawed individuals, but nonetheless, they said that essential to the success of the democracy was going to be higher education. "The seminaries of learning" is what Mr. Adams called it. Well, you're at one of those seminaries of learning. You're at a seminary of learning partially supported by people selling hamburgers at McDonald's are paying for you. People paving the streets are giving you money so that you can run an institution for the future. People believe in the future. Don't believe any of this crap that people don't believe in the future. That's a huge error.
We have a center here at ASU called the Center for the Future of Arizona. It's affiliated with the university. It looks at where do we have more than 70% of the population in agreement about shared public values, things that they share. It turns out there's nine areas of intense shared ambition. One of them is a pathway to college. A pathway to college. Not a pathway to a college that you fail from, a pathway to success in college. The essential role of the public university is to build a university that's actually successful rather than attempting to operate a university design, which, in fact, is not successful. If you're not graduating your students, I'm sorry, you are a failure. We are obsessed with our own failures here.
We've more than two and a half times increased our four-year graduation rate. We've gone from 8,000 graduates a year to 40,000 graduates a year. So what? We still can calculate that there's a measured difference in your success probability based on your family's income. We know that students from certain kinds of communities still have a harder time even with us, so we're not there yet. The essential role of the public university is to adapt to the people, not to have the people adapt to them. Adapt to the people, adapt to the learners. Stop attempting to be a weak version of some kind of a British academy where everyone learns in one path, there aren't very many majors, you assume that everyone will learn the same kind of thing. You pick people, you preselect people because of their learning ability within that modality. That's not a public university. The public is so diverse right now, it's beyond belief. Every family background imaginable, every ethnic background imaginable, every learning modality, every way of learning, every type of learning, every type of intelligence, all of these things. If we haven't adapted to all of that, if we just keep trying to cram people in and cram people in and then we think it's about efficiency, we think it's about getting better, we think it's about getting more money from the legislature, we think it's about the stupid people that are elected to public office, it doesn't have anything to do with any of that.
It has to do with you. It has to do with me. It has to do with us. We're not successful. Most of us are cowards. We're cowards. What I mean by cowards is we won't take the risk. Think of the risks that were taken to form the democracy that you're presently benefiting from. Think of the risks that were taken by individuals to correct the flaw of slavery in the democracy. There were 30 million people that lived in the United States, and 720,000 of them died. Two million were wounded. Entire cities were burned to the ground to make it right, to correct it. Leadership's not your job. Leadership's not your assignment. It's not your title. There are no leaders. Leaders are risk-takers. There are people that rally other people around them at every level of the organization, the fellows, the liaisons, the way that we're working, the presidents, the chancellors working together. There's no leadership without risk.
I just want to process that for a second. We don't need administrators. If someone calls me a college administrator, literally, I want to puke. It's like being a warden of a prison. I'm a professor, who happens to be the president of a university, who's paid more money than most other people in the institution, not all, but most people in the institution, to make decisions, to help to fulfill our mission, to find other leaders that can carry out that mission, to make hard choices until replaced, period. There's no outcome but replacement. There's no glory, there's only progress. Bales of hay wait for all of you in heaven. That's it. Enjoy it.
What I'm meaning is it's hard work, hard assignments, important assignments, and we don't have it right yet. We haven't figured it out yet. We're still not getting it right. There's no leadership without risk. What I really wanted to say today is that you're here, you're a self-selected leader, or you wouldn't be sitting in this room. Leadership is an action, not a title. Leaders need to be all throughout the organization. People do want leadership, but they are unbelievably cynical, particularly in our sector, about leaders. I used to have this joke that every day I would take elephant skin pills to make my skin thick enough to take the harassment that I take. Even now, even like today, I'm taking harassment. Now, that's never going to work. That's another one of your stupid ideas. "Aren't you old and almost dead? Now, we can get past you." The fact that people might be cynical about leaders, get over it and do something. Fearlessness. Audacious leadership is necessary for our system because our system has not been successful. I really want you to process this.
Have you looked at the survey data which we've been looking at about all this negative energy about college? Have you guys been looking at all the survey data? It's about broken hearts. Broken hearts. "Oh, I don't get a part of that. I don't get that. I don't get this. I don't get that. I couldn't go to college. I couldn't afford it. My mom needed me at home. I dropped out of college, and they told me that online education was a joke. Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever."
During COVID, I wrote an email message to my buddy who was the president of Harvard at the time, Larry Bacow. I said, "Larry, you got to get your dean of law school to shut up. He says that online education doesn't work. He wouldn't have known online education from a hole in the ground." He wrote back and said, "If only I can get him to shut up."
But what I'm saying is that audacious leadership demands fearlessness on each of your individual parts. Now, that's hard for me to communicate, but it really does. "Oh, that's not going to work. They're going to be mad at you." Okay. "You're going to get fired." Well, find the button, fight back. Fight back. Fight back with facts, fight back with progress, fight back with achievement, fight back with analytics, fight back with resources. Fight back with new ways that you solve the problem. Really important, the fourth bullet.
I have all these people telling me to make it simple. I don't know what's important and simple. There's certainly nothing simple in any of my personal relationships. My three children and my five grandchildren, they're all pretty complex to me. I don't think I'd want simple. What would we talk about, how much butter to put on the bread? I mean, that's kind of simple. Effective leaders embrace nuance, complexity. They embrace complexity. They race toward complexity. None of the things that we're talking about are simple. There are no simple pathways, there are no simple solutions. There are no simple little drop this in, buy this software package, and everything will be better. Are you kidding me? Everything we've solved created four more problems.
This last one, in academia, there's this thing about perfection. "Oh, we've got to get it absolutely right or we can't do it." "Good, because you're never going to do anything then." In our business, we're working with live, walking, talking, breathing, arguing, complaining people. Perfection is impossible. Progress is possible, perfection is impossible. The reason I'm going on this, the reason I'm focusing on leadership in this particular case, is you all are here because you've already selected that you want to be a part of change. You want to drive innovations forward. You want the democracy to be more successful. Now, you may not have thought about it in that way, but you wouldn't be here if you didn't think that. To do that requires every person in this room to become a leader. You might get fired. Who cares? If you did the right thing and you got fired for doing the right thing, you're going to be fine. You get fired because you're not doing the work, or lazy, or whatever, well, too bad for you. Fix it. What I'm saying is that this algorithm for democracy, this sum of us, the sum of us will never be what it can be if our institutions stay the same. It's not going to make it.
We haven't made much progress in social transformation at the level that we should since about 1980. Look at what's going on in the presidential campaign. Look at what people are talking about. Minimum wage, tariffs, not enough labor for the advanced industries that we need to be competitive. Immigration, which is a labor replacement policy. We've got 345 million people and over 10% of them went to college and never finished, and more than half of them don't like anyone in this room. We've got to figure out how to fix that, how to go back to them and fix that, which is why we've built our online activities with our own faculty and graduated 100,000 people. We're going to – The point is that you're all fighters for democracy. You're all in leadership positions. Leadership is action and not a title, and we really need to work on these things. I'm going to stop there and just see if there's any comments or questions. Thank you.
Bios of Guest and Co-Host
Dr. Michael Crow became Arizona State University’s 16th president in 2002. He has guided ASU’s transformation into a leading public metropolitan research university, combining high academic excellence, inclusiveness, and societal impact. Under his direction, ASU focuses its teaching, research, and creativity on the major challenges and questions of our time, as well as building a sustainable environment and economy for Arizona. He has committed the university to global engagement and to setting a new standard for public service. During Dr. Crow’s tenure, ASU has established major interdisciplinary research initiatives including the Biodesign Institute, the Global Institute of Sustainability, the Flexible Display Center, and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict; new schools including the School of Global Studies, the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and the School of Earth and Space Exploration; and an expanded research infrastructure. He has overseen a dramatic increase in research awards, including the eight largest gifts in the university’s history. Prior to joining ASU, Dr. Crow was executive vice provost of Columbia University, where he oversaw Columbia’s research enterprise and technology transfer operations. A fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he is the author of books and articles relating to the analysis of research organizations and science and technology policy. He currently serves as the University Innovation Alliance’s Board Chair.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance
As a trusted advisor to university presidents and policymakers, Dr. Bridget Burns is on a mission to transform the way institutions think about and act on behalf of low-income, first-generation, and students of color. She is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance, a multi-campus laboratory for student success innovation that helps university leaders dramatically accelerate the implementation of scalable solutions to increase the number of college graduates.
About Innovating Together
Innovating Together is an event series that happens live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a higher education luminary about student success innovations or a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of leadership. We hope these episodes will leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.
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