172. A New Kind of University

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hi this is steve levitt at the end of this episode we are making an important announcement about the future of the podcast so if you are a regular listener i encourage you to stick around to the end but first we've got today's brand new episode

it's a huge accomplishment to win an award for being the most innovative in your industry imagine winning that prize two years in a row three Three straight years? How about 11 years running?

That incredibly is what today's guest, Michael Crowe, has done as president of Arizona State University. We compressed a couple hundred years of university evolution into 20 years.

Therefore, rather than taking 200 years or 300 years to build Harvard, we're taking 20 years to build this new ASU, and this new ASU can then be this new class of institution moving forward.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

Arizona State University, also known as ASU, has not always attracted national accolades.

Back in 2002 when Michael Crowe became president, ASU was a pretty mediocre university on a broad range of metrics. Although it did have a strong national reputation on one particular dimension.

In that year, 2002, Playboy magazine named ASU the number one party school in the nation.

So I started our conversation by asking Michael, who held a top job at Columbia University, one of the most prestigious schools in the U.S., why he would leave that job to run a struggling party school.

I don't know that I exactly agree with the characterization, but nonetheless, it's a fair question.

What I realized realized in my time at Columbia was to become invigorated in the power of what universities have a capacity to do.

They've been unbelievably important and powerful in our society, in the advancement of our democracy, the defense of our democracy.

And what I realized while in New York City at Columbia was the model for an American democracy to be successful for universities could not be the remnants only of the colonial colleges like Columbia, that is is small, highly elite-oriented, elite-thinking, very unscalable kinds of places.

There needed to be other kinds of universities, and of course there are those like the University of Michigan or the University of California at Berkeley and other large public universities.

But along the way, what seemed to have happened in my mind was those universities had become increasingly limited in who they brought in as students, looking only for students with certain kinds of academic behavior or certain kinds of test scores.

And again, that's useful, necessary, but insufficient to the success of the democracy. So I began thinking about if you were building an American university from scratch, what would it look like?

I concluded that it would be highly egalitarian in terms of who was able to attend. It would be unbelievably connected to the general population.

It would be fantastically innovative, scalable, high speed, all the things that represent the uniqueness of the United States compared to our forebearers from Europe or other parts of the world.

And so what I was looking for was a place where one could propose such a design and then launch such a design.

And Arizona as a place and Arizona State University as an institution, both very young in terms of numbers of decades that they'd been around.

ASU was not permitted to become a university until 1960, roughly, and then didn't become a university except by public referendum. So we may be the only university voted into existence by the people.

That's interesting. And so that meant that it was held back.

So this is why it was still struggling 40 years later, trying to get off the ground after many well-established research universities had been built.

So the story was, where could you build what we now call the new American university? And that's what we've been building here for 23 years.

So your ideas about universities are truly radical, and what you've done at ASU is truly radical.

I'm curious whether you were talking about these ideas with your colleagues at Columbia, because I wouldn't think you'd get a very favorable reaction from the Ivy League crowd to your ideas around radical inclusion and completely rethinking the role of the university and how it should play in the community.

My experience with Ivy League-type schools is that, I don't know, the less things change, the happier people are. Well, I mean, the Ivy League schools in the U.S.

are basically all derivative of colonial colleges. They were built largely on the British model.
Then they added German model engineering and science programs.

And they are built on the notion of what we would presently call an honors college. So, all of the IVs are an honors college at its core, surrounded by great professional schools.

And so, the condition there is very Oxford-Cambridge-like, and therefore doesn't scale. And so, what you need in the United States, a country now approaching 350 million people, is scale.

And we need scale and speed and innovation. So, when I did talk about these kinds of ideas at Columbia, obviously we had great intellectual conversations.

My mentor there, Jonathan Cole, he and I spent a lot of time talking about what kind of universities could be built. And I was reading and writing in these areas and talking to other people.

But you couldn't build it in that model. One of the books that I have put out in the last few years is called The Fifth Wave.

You look at the four previous waves of evolution in the United States for higher education. And each wave has been derivative of some new national need or some new unachieved objective.

And the fifth wave universities that ASU is really a prototype for are large, highly innovative, scalable, directly engaged, social transformation kind of institutions.

As I've been around higher education for the last 30, 40 years, one of the things that's really surprised me is that every school, and I'd say Arizona State, an obvious exception, every school seems to be playing the exact same game.

The Ivy League schools are at the top and they're trying to stay there. And then the schools that are ranked, you know, 10 to 30, they're all trying to figure out how can I be number 10.

And the 30 to the the 50s are trying to get to be the 20, and the 50 to 100 is trying to be the 30. Everyone's playing the same game.

And what's interesting about what you've done at ASU is you just said, look, I'm going to play a different game. This is the wrong game.

Well, not only the wrong game, but it's the part of Britain that we didn't throw out with the revolution. We threw out the king.
We allowed jury-based trials.

We gave every individual inalienable rights. We based the governance of the country on the people and the will of the people.
But then we kept these British universities and these British colleges.

And in doing that, then we kept a system in which, and this is even to some extent human nature, exclusion or selectivity is the coin of the realm.

Well, that's fine for some universities, but if you run the entire system in a model where everyone is moving to become that and everyone is obsessed with how many people can you have apply so that you can have as few being admitted as possible, and that's the coin of the realm, then the country won't be successful.

What will happen at that point, and I've written a lot about this, is you'll get two types of colleges or two types of universities.

You'll get those that are playing that game and then those that are assigned to deal with everyone else.

And those that are assigned to deal with everyone else are by de facto outcome, secondary or second rate or second class institutions, which just can't be true.

We can't end up designing that because we'll end up with low levels of college graduation rates. We'll end up with faculties that are discouraged.

We'll end up with institutions that are not doing everything that they could do.

And then we'll end up with a few quote-unquote elite institutions on which everyone thinks that's the success of the country: having a few elite universities. Well, it's not.

I mean, many people that have gone to college in the United States have never graduated.

Many of the people that take federal loans or federal support to go to higher education have no diploma and no certificate. This is a terrible, terrible outcome.
Clearly, we need new designs.

And so the design that we have is a university that does three things at the same time.

It is is unbelievably excellent, research-grade faculty, equal to any faculty anywhere, capable of competing against anyone in the advancement of knowledge.

And then at the same university, you make it unbelievably accessible. You can't do that without introducing technology in new ways and making innovation the coin of the realm.

And then you want to have impact on the community. You want the United States to be more successful, more healthy, more economically competitive.

You want people to be able to learn better, learn faster in K-12 and so forth and so on. So we decided to build that kind of university.

And in the last 20 plus years, we have built one of those and it's now operating. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that over the last 23 years that you've been leading ASU,

that university has seen more positive transformation than any other university in the country. And in the college rankings that are put up by U.S.
News and World Report.

Now, I know that ASU is innovative, but I had not realized that you've been ranked number one in innovation for 11 straight years. That is a crazy winning streak.
Yeah, it's really really hard to do.

So, our crew here, our faculty, our staff, our team, even our students, they have embraced a cultural transformation. So, universities are culturally driven.
They're very filio-pietistic.

They adore tradition. They're very much built on the traditions of European universities that evolved over time.
And so, we added to those a dimension of continuous innovation.

We added to that a dimension of the faculty having more design power over how they evolve their academic units and their degree programs, which is why we have eliminated 85 schools, colleges, and departments and built over 40 new entities.

Wait, you've eliminated 85 schools and departments? Yes. Oh, that's crazy.
And then built new ones. I'll give you an example.

We had a fantastic geology department, but not very many geology majors, and then everyone became obsessed with rankings. So maybe we were ranked 25th or 24th or something like that.

And I said, okay, well, 100 years from now, we're still going to be ranked 24th or 25th because the game is set up in a way where you can't catch the people who define the game ahead of you because they set all the rules.

So I asked the faculty to go away and think about what they really were. They came back and after a while they said we're explorers.

I said, well, why don't we have a school of exploration where exploration science is the objective. And then I said, well, who are the other explorers?

The other explorers are in astronomy, astrophysics, astrobiology. So we took all those faculties around the institution and we created a new school for earth and space exploration.

And we created new majors, new outcomes. and we still have a geology degree and an astronomy degree, but we don't have 15 or 20 astronomy majors anymore.
We have more than 500 astronomy majors.

Now, I don't want to sound like a shill for ASU, which I think I have so far, but one last shill-like comment, which is, in general,

innovation and size don't go together. In business, almost always we associate innovation with small organizations.
The big companies are hard to change, sclerotic.

It's new entrants that drive the big thing. But in addition to being the most innovative school around, at least by some metrics, ASU has more students than any other university in the country.

So this is a really amazing combo to be able to be both big and innovative.

So when Clayton Christensen, the fantastic late Harvard professor on disruptive innovation, visited and he spent a couple of days here, he said, I've never seen anything like this.

You've disrupted from the core of the enterprise, not from the periphery or not from the outside. And I said, well, higher education is unlike the other sectors.

We have institutions in the sector in Europe that are a thousand years old. We have institutions in this country that are almost 400 years old.

We have wave one schools, colonial colleges, and the private colleges that emerged after the revolution.

Hundreds and hundreds of those still exist in the United States, meaning all of the previous waves still exist. Whereas in the private sector, the previous waves don't exist.

They've been replaced through the forces of Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. Here, it's not creative destruction that's at work in what we've done.

It's this notion of creating a differentiated type. So, this notion of what we call the new American university model, high-speed agility, innovation, that's a new way of doing things.

And it turns out that the educational and learning and discovery process is still open to these kinds of new ways of doing things because the scale of the challenges is so significant.

People think that we're overeducating everyone. It turns out we're actually undereducating everyone.
And so, we've come about this notion of birthing a new kind of American university.

We've done that several times before. We'll continue to do that in the future.
And it's just really important to understand that innovation is at the heart of that.

Now, the other place where you might say there's been a lot of innovation around higher ed is with these for-profit institutions, which I think a lot of people think are kind of garbagey.

I don't think you should be lumped in with the University of Phoenix or anything like that, but I suppose you sometimes do. I suppose you probably bristle at that, right?

We're a university with a billion dollars a year of research expenditures without a medical school. We're just forming a medical school going forward.

And so only four or five schools in history in the United States have ever achieved that, meaning our faculty are a first-rate, highly competitive, state-of-the-art faculty working on unbelievably scalable research activities.

The University of Phoenix doesn't have any research activities because they're a educational content purveyor.

We're a creator of knowledge, synthesizer of knowledge, storer of knowledge, transferer of knowledge.

And so it just means then that when we make an online electrical engineering degree available to students anywhere around the world, that degree was designed by active research-level scholars in our electrical engineering faculty.

And they built the most advanced computational tools, the most advanced learning tools, the most advanced breadboards for building your circuits, all these things.

And so the other quote-unquote for-profit universities, they're just borrowing the name university because we don't have enough names to describe what institutions do.

Right now, we call everything that's after high school a college or a university, and we probably need more names.

Universities are, look up the word, these are discovery-oriented, scholarly-oriented institutions, or at least they're supposed to be, and that's what we've built.

And that's not what these other guys have built. They provide a service, certainly.

I think it's a useful service and an important service, but it's access to educational content that's different than access to an academically engaged faculty.

We'll be right back with more of a conversation with the president of Arizona State University, Michael Crowe, after this short break.

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Okay, so about a decade ago, you introduced a new charter statement that affirmed ASU's mission and purpose. And most of the time, those charter statements get made and then they're hidden away.

But I've walked around the ASU campus quite a bit over the last year and it's all over the place. You see it posted.
Is that charter something you have committed to memory and can recite for me?

So the charter was first presented as the vision statement in my November 2002 inaugural speech, and then it took about 11 years till 2013 to basically sell the idea, get people to think, yes, this is something that we need.

The argument is that the public universities suffer somewhat from being generic. Why do they all have the same departments? Why are they all focused in the same way?

So I took some logic from some German philosophers which talked about how to best advance the understanding of what an organization or a society or a country could achieve.

And it was the notion of laying down what's called the self, the will, and the deed. So the self in the United States is the Constitution.
And most universities have a generic self.

We're a university and we just educate people. Well, we needed a specific purposeful self to be aspirationally pursued.
For instance, the Constitution of the United States is an aspirational document.

We work every year of the Republic to try to do better and better against its objectives. It's a living objective.
Well, for our university, I thought we needed that also.

So our self, our constitution, our charter, is that we will do three things.

We will measure ourselves based on the number of students that we include versus the number of students that we exclude and how they succeed.

We will do research and discovery that benefits the public. Our objective is to benefit the citizenry.

And then third, we will take responsibility for the outcomes in our communities, the health outcomes, the economic outcomes, the social progress outcomes.

And so those are three very specific aspirational goals outlined in the charter.

Aaron Powell, so to people listening who are outside of higher ed, those probably sound like completely reasonable goals. Like why wouldn't every university want to have those goals?

But let's talk about the first and the third. I think the second one about advancing research, all good universities would agree with.

But this idea that you would measure yourself not by whom you exclude, but by whom you include, that is completely contrary to what every other university is doing.

The University of Chicago, where I've spent so much time, they beam with pride, the administration, when they report that the share of undergraduate applications that are accepted today is less than 5%.

And that's gone down from 77% in 1993, which is seen as an embarrassment. But you flip the story completely.

There was a joke article written by a New York Times guy a few years ago in which Stanford had become the greatest university in the country because they admitted no one.

And so the notion of selectivity being the functional measurement of the quality of the university is literally absurd.

You're measuring the quality of the institution on its inputs, not on its outputs. Having said that, private universities in particular have a right to do whatever they want.

And so what we decided to do was to look back in time when significant research universities were already very successful like UC Berkeley or Michigan and then look at their admission standards.

and then say, well, those are the standards that were set up because that was what was perceived to be necessary for you to be a successful college student. You're ready to go to college, so to speak.

So we have those admission standards, and we admit every single student that meets those admission standards. And we think that in doing that, people think that's quote unquote open admission.

It's not. That's a B average in high school, at least.
So about half of our incoming freshmen have Bs, about half have A averages.

And so what we found is that we just built a university in which we admit all of those people and continuing to admit them, which means we then have to adapt to new ways of teaching, new technology, new learning technologies, new ways of training our faculty to work with an ever more increasing diverse student body as well as a scaled student body.

We have 33,000 engineering students at ASU in a country where people think that not very many people want to be engineers. Well, it's actually false.
Not everybody has a 1,500 SAT score.

In fact, only a small percentage, 2%, have that. Not everybody had a great math teacher in their high high school.

So we built an engineering program built with every learning tool that you can imagine. We're producing world-class engineering graduates.

We're producing over 7,000 graduates a year, up from just 900 just a few years ago.

And we're doing that because we decided to take this approach of if you've got the work in high school to be able to be admitted to the university, then you're admitted to engineering.

And if you're not a math wizard, then we make you a math wizard. We help you to become a math wizard by becoming an engineer.
So it's a completely different logic.

And we think that it's very important in the democracy that some universities operate in this way.

I'm not suggesting every university has to be like us, but I am suggesting that some need to be like us or we will not accelerate and scale.

We will not be able to reach all of the talent and all of the things that they want to do. I'll just give you an example.

There's about four times as many people that want to be STEM majors than are able to be STEM majors because

the boundary conditions for being admitted to some colleges are so high you can't get in and then you can't get into the specific programs and then if you do get into the specific programs you're underprepared for that what the university faculty think that you need to be able to do on day one and we're like no wrong method so for instance we're teaching biology with virtual reality now and we're getting the most unbelievable learning outcome enhancements that we've ever experienced in any of the 400 learning technologies that we've brought to bear yeah let's talk more about that because I've had the chance to go through and put on the headset and watch the biology and sometimes we've been talking in generalities about what you've been doing could Could you dive into how you reconceived introbio?

So the way that this works is that we know from studying the learners that we have that teaching certain abstract subjects like what is a messenger ribonucleic acid and how does it evolve and what is the protein chemistry of DNA or in organic chemistry, how do organic molecules exchange electrons, things that you can't even see.

It turns out that these are very complicated subjects for people to learn about and they're taught in abstraction.

So only about a third to a half of the population can understand the abstraction in the way that they're being taught by masters of the subject.

And so could we build a new way to teach these abstract sciences in a way that anyone could learn them or almost anyone could learn them?

So we decided that the way to do that was to build lived experiences. So we created, as you saw, a virtual reality experience where you become an avatar and you go into a learning experience.

In the case of biology, our introductory introductory biology classes have a laboratory program in which you visit an alien zoo orbiting the Earth that's 20 kilometers across and four kilometers deep.

And then you're interacting with all these organisms that have been gathered from around the galaxy.

And one of the things I think is really interesting about it is that you did this in conjunction with Walter Parks. He's like a major filmmaker.

And the storytelling, when I've talked to Walter about this, it's like the idea that storytelling should be central to education.

Historically, that hasn't been the case, but of course storytelling is important. It's just, you know, why would you expect any individual professor to be an incredible storyteller?

But by using technology in this way, it's really to me a sea change about engagement. Totally.
So Walter Parks ran DreamWorks.

He produced major movies like Gladiator and Men in Black, and he's written movies like War Games. And then he was running a company called Dreamscape Immersive in Los Angeles.
We visited, talked.

I could see immediately that the storytelling capability with 3D visualizations in virtual reality were such that we had never developed anything like this.

And you could see immediately that there was an opportunity to figure out how to teach biology and chemistry and astronomy and other kinds of subjects using these virtual reality technologies.

And so we brought Walter together with our biology faculty and chemistry faculty and others that we have here who were capable of thinking about how to create a learning experience in a new way.

And we've created these learning experiences. In the case of the biology classes, one and a half hours of virtual reality across all of these laboratories.

And we've gotten up to a 40% improvement in learning outcomes, an average of a two-grade level improvement in the biology score itself.

Now we're about halfway done with building chemistry. We're building astronomy.
We're building art history.

And so what we found is that this lived experience, storytelling, I'll ask you, have you ever cried in a movie? Well, the answer is probably yes.

You never cry in a chemistry lab or a biology lab unless you're failing. So there's no emotional connection.
There's no story.

So in our chemistry labs now, you're beamed in a light speed capsule to a problem in the Himalayan mountains.

And then you're all of a sudden put into this chemical situation where you're flying in this machine and you've got robots that are working for you and you've got people that are talking to you and you're eventually going to have an AI system that's your assistant.

And you are solving this chemical problem. And along the way, you're mastering chemistry.
It's called Dreamscape Learn. That's what we call it.
Yeah.

And I think just to point out, it's not that Walter Parks did all this and DreamSape came to you and said, hey, would you prototype it? This is a joint venture.

And it's not the kind of thing that universities usually do, cooperate with Hollywood producers to try to change the way they do curriculums. I just want to point that out.
It's really radical.

It's not a product. It wasn't, will you buy this? We saw the genius of storytelling that Walter is a master of.
We saw that we could link that into the pedagogical design of complex abstract subjects.

We took those two things together and then built this fantastic set of outcomes.

And then very carefully measuring the impact on every single individual learner across tens of thousands of learners from every background imaginable, we found that we have this tool that we could only have dreamt of and in a sense prayed for and we ended up getting it.

I just had Frances Arnold on this podcast. She's a Nobel Prize winning chemist from Caltech.
And she made an offhand comment about how intro chemistry is always an awful class.

And it's really interesting that you've gone out and you've proven that doesn't have to be the case. It just takes a kind of innovation that's been missing in higher ed.

What we've done is we've made people chemistry phobic. We now have people changing their entire life plans because they didn't do well in freshman chemistry.

We've got people not doing well in organic chemistry and defeating their dream of becoming a physician. It is terrible.

So now we've built chemistry such that for four of our introductory chemistry classes, the lab is living inside a virtual reality environment where you're a detective solving chemical problems.

And when you're done, you're a master of undergraduate chemistry. For us, it's a game changer of unbelievable potential impact.

So I'd love to talk to you about your leadership style because there are lots of folks with big visions and they fail miserably because they can't overcome organizational inertia and resistance.

I think in the university context, change is especially hard because many faculty are tenured, so it's virtually impossible to fire them.

Many older faculty don't actually do very much work, so they have a lot of free time to devote to sabotaging the administration plans.

And plus the faculty are smart, and I found the worst possible opponents to have are smart people who put a low value on their time. What are your strategies? How do you get things done?

How do you get anything done?

So the strategy was to articulate a vision of purpose so that you could be something other than a mercenary faculty member just waiting to get the best offer from the next university.

You know, why are we here? You try to build a purpose for the organization.

The second was to empower as many people as possible to become something other than the petty bureaucrats that fill up most universities with people arguing about how many resources the chemistry department's getting versus the philosophy department.

And so you empower the faculty to be designers.

The third is a kind of direct engagement by talking about where we're going and then setting goals and then helping to find resources to attain those goals.

I think the fourth is just constantly focusing on our mission. Like, why are we here? What's our role in society? What is the impact that we're having?

Are our faculty aware of what they're contributing to the broader society? Because we spend a lot of time talking about our impact. It's about

the positive trajectory of what we're doing. So a lot of universities get bogged down in a kind of overwhelming negativism.
Negative about what?

We live in one of the most privileged institutions ever created. Our tenured faculty have one of the most privileged positions ever created for human beings in the history of our species.

I try to work on how are we using our privilege? And I think maybe the last thing that I spend a lot of time working on and attempting to project is what is our role in the broader society.

We're the protectors and the advancers of hopefully more successful democracy, and that gives you some purpose for life. But we're also very much focused on the future.

We're producing the next generation of everything, the next generation idea, the better theory, the better model, the better tool, the better understanding of a literary history, the better understanding or projection of a complex musical expression.

And so, we have this unique role in society. And I think that a lot of institutions may have become sidetracked from some of that.

So, the style of leadership that I use is what you're hearing in this conversation, whatever that is.

Now, I've heard you walk the campus every morning. What are you looking for?

Who's around, who you can talk to? If I'm out before dawn, it's just how things are looking, how we're doing, what's going on, how are we adjusting.

I had a young woman come up to me, and she was very concerned about all the things that were going on in Washington and wanted to know our thinking.

And so I had a minute or so to talk with her about that. Lots of conversations.
You know, where are things not working? You know, people pay a lot of money to be here.

So we want to make sure everything works. Do you start most most of the conversations or do people come up and start them with you? It's both, but lots of people come up to me and just talk.

I'll say, I just got a second, or you got to walk with me because I got to speed to this meeting. And then they'll walk along with me, and then we'll have a conversation.

We do everything that we can to be responsive to the folks that we're responsible for, helping to get them on the right learning and education pathway.

Now, I've also heard that people in your circle can expect to receive roughly 50 articles a week that you've printed, scribbled comments in the margin, highlighted in multiple colors.

Is that true, or is that just a story that gets told about you? I don't think it's 50, but it's many.

I do send out a tremendous amount of information, articles.

For some people, it might be 50, but you know, it's a lot of what should we be reading, what should we be aware of, what's going on in other groups, things that are happening at the university.

I try to keep everybody connected. We try to go on this journey together about what we're doing.

You're listening to People I Mostly Admire. I'm Steve Levitt.
And after this short break, ASU President Michael Crowe and I will return to talk about AI's impact on education.

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Michael Crowe's mother died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by his dad, who was in the military.

I've only known one other person who grew up in those circumstances, and like Michael, he had an almost unmatched intensity and work ethic.

I asked Michael if he thought having a military dad as his sole parent impacted his leadership style.

Well, I think the work ethic from my father was very intense. He hadn't gone to college himself.
I was the first one to go to college in our family's history.

You have duty, you have responsibility, commitment to your country, commitment to your community, commitment to people that you're working with.

All of those things were values that were instilled in me, at least in part, by him. The other thing was adaptability.
I moved 21 times before I went to college and went to 17 schools.

Either you adapt or things aren't going to go well for you.

And is it true that as a high school senior, you turned on MIT to go to Iowa State because you wanted to throw the javelin?

I did get admitted to a number of different schools, including that one, and I wanted to throw the javelin. And was it worth it? Are you glad you threw the javelin? I was not particularly good.

I was middling collegiate class as opposed to my aspirations for high collegiate class, low Olympic class.

I lacked a number of skill sets and about three inches of height, but I had a fantastic time at Iowa State. I found great professors there.

And then the athletic part part of what I was doing was like mastering an athletic trade. You had this object that you were connected to, this javelin.
It's almost eight feet long.

It's a massive thing that you're throwing. And so it just became this thing to master, to understand the science, the throwing, your body, its limits.
It was fantastic fun.

Now, going back to your leadership style, I've spent a fair amount of time on the ASU campus. as we've been launching this new high school, the Levitt Lab on the Tempe campus.

And I have to say, the way that the ASU employees talk about you is with a reverence that's almost biblical. So people quote you all the time.
They say, as President Crow often says, evolve or die.

They've got a bunch of different phrases that I've heard over and over that you say that they repeat.

Time is divided into two periods, before Crow and after Crow, just like our Western calendar, we divide years into before Christ and after Christ. And I'm not kidding.

I've heard people repeatedly say, in this 23rd year of President Crowe's leadership, I mean, what organization is filled with people who know exactly how many years their leader's been there?

I've only seen such awe towards a leader once in my life, and that was when I visited Walmart and the employees held up Sam Walton in that same way.

So whatever you are doing, people are definitely drinking the Kool-Aid. I think part of it is consistent message, consistent psychological approach, working working as a team.

If your coach has been the coach for 20 plus years of your team and your team has been doing pretty well, well, you know, people get some sense of what the coach's logic is.

I've been the coach here, so to speak, for these years, player coach. And I think people have a sense of what we're doing and not dead yet, so still making progress.

So the obvious question to ask is: what happens after you're gone? I would not want to be your successor. Well, you know, I think the culture has been modernized here.

The new American University model is functioning. The staff and the faculty, for the most part, embrace it.

And so the person that comes after me will inherit an institution which has already gone through the transformation process. And so it won't be the same job.

The job for the person that follows me will be to now take this model that the team has built and the workers have helped to construct and find a way now for it to continue to evolve to be of greater service as opposed to design it and build it.

The next person doesn't have to take whole cloth and build things because we've built them.

The Global Futures Laboratory, the new School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, the new School of Technology for Public Health, the new way that we're teaching the humanities, the evolution of our Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the 10,000 students that we have there.

I know your vision goes beyond ASUs. You think the world needs a whole bunch of ASUs.
What other institutions are doing a good job in the same spirit of what you're doing?

Well, we have about 20 universities that are in our University Innovation Alliance, and that's Michigan State, Purdue, Central Florida, New Mexico, UC Riverside, Oregon State, Iowa State, Virginia Commonwealth.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is a new member, University of South Carolina.

These are universities that have joined this innovation alliance so that they can accelerate their innovation processes to do some of the kinds of things that we're doing here.

Some other schools around around the country are very interested in containing costs and moving in new ways, expanding their enrollments, expanding their footprints, enhancing their service to the country.

There's a lot of movement out there. Now, there's a lot of discussion and arguments going on about universities right now in general, but there's continued evolution at every level.

It seems to me that the single biggest questions facing education right now relate to AI. How can we best exploit the incredible power of AI tools?

How must we rethink what we're teaching and how we teach and learn? I'm guessing these are questions you've been giving a lot of thought to.

Yeah, we have 3,000 faculty members already trained in AI usage. We have three AI systems that we make available to our students.

We just announced a big project with WillIM to start a thing called FYI.ai, which is a way to build a small language model.

Think of that as a limited AI tool that has personality and persona and positive aspirations to become an agentic tutor for our students.

We see it as a significant opportunity that has to be carefully managed to maximize its positive potential.

And where we're headed is the training of all of our faculty, the empowerment of our faculty to use the tools in significant ways, the empowerment of our scientists and our artists and our creators to use these tools in creative ways that are useful within their disciplinary constructs.

And then ultimately, the building of an AI

agentic assistant for every student that becomes their lifelong learning ally who understands how they learn, how they think, what they've asked in the past, what they've been thinking about in the past.

And so we're working on all of these things. And the project that we've got going on with WillIM is a fantastic example of that.

So you're thinking that ASU's role should not be simply as a consumer of AI, but you'd like to see ASU as a producer of

agentic AI tools. I think what you mean by agentic is that they're really tailored to the individual.
So you think that universities should be in the business of producing the AI things?

Well, the AI tools are basically software code algorithms for high-speed calculation of unbelievably massive quantities of information to produce the most probable answer to that specific question.

What we need to produce for our students are things that have boundary conditions around them. They have a way in which you can verify information and knowledge.

They have ways in which you can use the tools in creative expression.

And we have to be the modifier of those things, working with some of the large language model partners that we have, and then with the small language partners that we have that we're developing.

They're what we're looking for is the building of these customizable, personalizable, agentic tutors that fit in with the way that we're teaching and learning.

It's not, here's the thing, you can do whatever you want. That's not going to work.
Knowledge has to be organized. Knowledge has to be curated.
Knowledge has to be contextual.

Now, you can have uncurated, non-contextual knowledge out there also, but what we're going to be doing is going to be curated and contextual.

What I've struggled with trying to think about the future of AI in education is obviously we want AI to help people learn better, right? It's a tool for learning.

And when you superimpose AI into the old educational models, like you send kids home and you tell them to write a thousand word essay on some topic they're not interested in.

Yeah, that's not going to work. Yeah, because they'll just get the machine to do it.
Right. And so then what you've got is AI replacing the student and getting in the way of learning.

Here's the problem though. I don't know the answer.
I'm really curious what you think.

In a world in which you can imagine developing really awesome AI tools that would work side by side with the student to teach them in new and better ways, that's obviously a great world.

But that's still asking a lot of the students. They still got to do the learning.
When side by side, you also have ChatGPT unfiltered where it'll write the essay for them.

I wonder how one can get take-up of the constrained model, the model that works side by side with the kid to learn, when the shortcut AI cheat is side by side. Have you thought about that?

Yeah, so it's all about upping everyone's game. If the questions are so simple or whatever that the AI becomes the substitute for the student, then we failed as the teacher.

And we have to become AI capable and AI aware and maybe even use the AI tools tools in ways in which the game is upped in certain ways. And so the questions need to be different.

So the other day I was going over to give a talk at the opening of a $300 million project that we have with a company called Applied Materials to build a really advanced laboratory for enhancing semiconductor innovation.

And this was at a facility that we call our Macro Technology Works. And so that's about a 40-minute drive from my house.

And so I spent those 40 minutes talking to my friend on Gemini in a voice-to-voice backup where I'm trying to understand at what point does an electron in a 10-angstrom chip, which is one nanometer, begin to act as a wave and a particle and thus create field effects that then become quantum level disruptors.

Now, I know enough to ask the question, but I don't know the answer. I don't know why it works.
I don't understand it. And so I asked question after question after question.

It was unbelievably informative for me. At the end of the day, it's not about the answer of the AI system, it's about the question that the student is asking.

You said it correctly. We can't use the old, antiquated: here's the books you need to read, here's the questions we're going to ask you, here's how you're going to have to synthesize this information.

We're going to need other,

not exclusively, but other forms of pedagogical design for this to be as effective of a tool as it could be.

The opportunities for us to get this and turn it into a tool of hugely expanding human creativity is really quite remarkable, But we have to do it right.

And I'm hopeful that we do because we don't get all this stuff right.

What's so interesting about the examples you give is you are totally engaged, right? You are engaged with that electron nano thing.

And in a world in which you've got a learner who's engaged, I would agree with you. The AI tools are unbelievable.

But in a world in which the learner is not engaged, the AI tools are again unbelievable, but they're unbelievably good at allowing the unengaged learner to skate by without anything.

Well, that's what we have to work on. So that means we have to come up with a different system.

Exactly. It just relates back to what we talked about earlier, say with Dreamscape Learn, that is a kind of engagement that has never been possible before.
Right.

To me, it really seems like the name of the game in education going forward is how do you get students to actually want to learn? And if you fail at that, and the pastor was okay because

even if students didn't want to learn chemistry, they wanted to be doctors and so they had to learn chemistry.

But now we're faced with a categorically harder problem and one that I'm not actually confident we're going to solve. We've been through it a couple times.

So Plato was not a big fan of the written language. And obviously the written language is a powerful tool, but he thought it produced weak minds.
When the printing presses began evolving in Germany.

500 years ago, these books, they're just going to make the knowledge available to too many people. And so we just have to look at this as we have this

machine that's capable of helping us to learn and personalizing our learning. But the way that it's being advanced by some of the companies right now, it's not focused on that.

They're focused more on other kinds of computationally intensive things, software coding, protein analysis, designing fusion energy systems. These tools are going to be very powerful for us.

In this learning space, we're going to have to be extraordinarily cautious. And that's what we're trying to be.

If you'd like to learn more about Michael Cross's vision of the future of higher education, check out his book, The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education.

So, this is the point in the show where I invite my producer, Morgan on. Morgan, how are you doing today? Hey, Levitt.
I'm doing okay. How are you? I'm doing pretty good too.

Although, unfortunately, I have to announce some news that I think will make some listeners unhappy. and that is that this podcast, People I Mostly Admire, we've decided to bring it to an end.

Yeah, the show's ending. In two weeks, we will be bringing the final episode of People I Mostly Admire to listeners, and it will be Levitt's turn to be in the hot seat.

Stephen Dubner, his Freakonomics friend and co-author, will be interviewing him about the show's five-year run. Levitt, why don't you tell listeners how you came to the decision to end Pima?

Well, I've always invested a lot of time and effort in the podcast, but it's never been work in the sense that I wouldn't do it voluntarily.

And it's still not work even now, but I can see that not very far in the future, it's going to start feeling like work.

And as much as I've talked about quitting on the show, I certainly think it makes sense for me to be a role model and at least for this one time in my life, to quit a little bit early instead of way too late, like I usually do and like most people do.

And I think it might start feeling like work for you just because you have so many other exciting projects on the horizon. It's true.

I'm in this incredibly privileged situation where I have so many amazing opportunities that I figure, especially at my age, I should be spending my time on the things that are really, really rewarding.

Something that's really exciting is the Levitt Lab High School. You have one high school right now on the campus of ASU in Tempe, Arizona.
But in the future, you're hoping to open additional schools.

And I can imagine this is going to take a lot more of your time and attention.

Yeah, the schools have been a real surprise to me, the amount of joy they bring me, the feeling that maybe we're really going to make a difference in education and in kids' lives.

And as you said, we've got the one school that we've opened on the campus of ASU, Michael Crowe's School, who we just talked to.

And next year, we're slated to open new schools, one outside of Boston and one in Los Angeles. And my hope is that if this works, we'll just keep on building and building.

I got to say, it sounds sappy, but it feels to me like maybe this is the thing I can do that is going to be, I don't know, legacy is kind of a crazy word, but I hope that these schools turn out to be so great that people remember me for having started some amazing schools.

And listeners, you shouldn't be too upset because you aren't. losing Levitt as a podcast host.

Starting in 2026, he is going to be a somewhat regular guest host of our sibling podcast, Freakonomics Radio. Levitt, do you want to tell listeners a little bit more about that? Sure.

I have loved doing these long-form interviews and getting to know these amazing guests that have come on, but I yearn a little bit for making some policy changes.

And this interview format isn't useful for that. And I just think back to when I did that early Freakonomics Radio episode I guest hosted that was about bringing data data science into math.

And something really happened. We built a consortium and we've made real impact.
So that's part of what my yearning is.

These five years of interviews have really whet my appetite for going out and taking some of the things I've learned from the guests and trying to push change and impact in the world.

Steve, we've made over 170 episodes. We've been recording people I mostly admire for over five years.
I think it's incredible.

Even though the show's ending, I hope listeners see this as a little bit of a celebration. We've done something great.
We've had an incredible time and you're moving on to new things.

I think you're right, Morgan. This podcast, it feels very personal to me.
It's so different from academic writing, where one at least pretends to be unbiased and scientific.

Even in the Freakonomics books, there was... very little of my own life and experiences and opinions.

And it's been really fun, maybe liberating even to be able to inject so much of myself, my beliefs, my biases, my hopes and dreams into this podcast.

And I really, I'm just very thankful that people have been willing to listen.

And on top of that, I'd say the thing that surprised me the most about the podcast has been the thoughtfulness and the wisdom and the kindness of the listener emails we receive.

We had a freakonomics blog for a long time. And the comment section was typical online stuff, mean and juvenile, sometimes outright offensive.

But I would say, and you probably agree, Morgan, that it's just amazing how

kind and wonderful it's been having to interact with the listeners over these last five years. Yeah, Steve, I couldn't agree more.
Listeners, you've been incredible.

You've written to us with your ideas, with your life updates, with your questions.

It's something I'm really going to miss.

And I've just loved making something something that's a part of your life and i hope you continue to listen to freakonomics radio and to steve that said we have one more assignment for you we know that the show has been really meaningful to many of you and we'd like you to send us if you want to a voice memo about a moment in a people i mostly admire interview or an idea that was shared that impacted your life or led to a change in your life.

We want to hear about it. So send us a voice memo.
You can record it on your phone in a quiet room. Please try to keep it short.
We will choose a few of them to play at the end of our last episode.

That sounds like a great assignment. Before that final episode, next week, we'll be having an encore presentation of a conversation I had with one of my heroes and mentors, economist Robert Solow.

And then, as Morgan said, Our final guest will be a really special one. It will be me in two weeks.
I will be the guest with Stephen Dubner taking my interviewer seat.

So listeners, please keep sending us emails, send us some voice memos. Steve and I will continue to read every email that we receive and we look forward to reading yours.

As always, thanks for listening and we'll see you back soon.

People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and the Economics of Everyday Things.

All our shows are produced by Stitcher and and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and mixed by Greg Ripin.
Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra.

We can be reached at pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at freakonomics.com.
Thanks for listening.

Can we start over? Yeah, let's start over.

the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything

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