The New American University
Metadata
Highlights
- ASU is an example of what President Crow and his colleague, William Dabars, call the âNew American Universityâ, a model that they hope other public research universities will emulate. There are a bunch of interesting aspects to this model, but the most striking, in my view, has been to throw away the Ivy League playbook, rejecting the idea that a universityâs prestige is defined by whom they exclude. Instead, ASU has significantly improved their rankings while accepting and graduating more students.
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Academic social networks are some of the most refined and valuable structures our civilization has produced. Nowhere have we amassed a greater concentration of specialists focused full-time on knowledge productionâŚ.This is the beating heart of progress. Itâs in these networks that the fire of the Enlightenment burns hottest.
- Borrowing a restaurant metaphor from Harvard physicist Atul Gawande, Crow and Dabars explain that most universities aspire towards offering a Michelin star experience to students, but what we actually need is a âfast casualâ, Cheesecake Factory-like option that can provide an affordable, quality education to millions.
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Institutional reform is hard is because everyone is stuck in the same way of thinking (Crowâs âisomorphismâ at work), and bureaucracy is hard to improve incrementally.