On November 26, Arizona State University featured in a Wall Street Journal article written by Elizabeth Collins, one of their national political reporters based in Phoenix, and Douglas Belkin, a Journal higher ed reporter. This was not the first time my university employer has been prominently mentioned in a Journal article in 2025: On June 20, President Michael Crow’s op-ed argued for the national benefits of international students at American universities, and on October 17, ASU was listed as one of the universities in discussion with the Trump administration over the Trump “compact” as the idea of the compact was falling apart. Collins and Belkin were two of the authors of the October article, along with Natalie Andrews, the Journal‘s White House correspondent.
The Nov. 26 article focused on ASU’s relationship with the Trump administration, and based on their reporting, and an interview with Crow, the authors described a much closer set of ties than had been public before. The article discussed in some detail a number of topics: ideas ASU had passed along to the Trump administration for changing national financial aid policy; an offer ASU made to hire a third-party to vet international students; time that ASU administrations spent clearing up allegations that the university was going to charge attendees at an on-campus memorial for Charlie Kirk; the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts and grants by university researchers who had won those contracts and grants in open competition; the university’s urging the local county attorney to charge spring 2024 campus Gaza War protesters with the sternest possible criminal charges; and Michael Crow’s wanting to take advantage of the chaos of the Trump administration.
The article made clear that many in higher education, including college and university leaders, are much more public in opposing Trump administration policies in various areas. Crow is far from Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth, for example — Roth is not mentioned in the Journal article explicitly, but if you’re looking for a counter-example to Crow, he’s an obvious one — here’s a New York Times column he wrote, for example.
How do I parse the Journal article? Before I outline concerns, I should state that there is nothing wrong with college and university administrators talking with public officials to educate and advocate–this is ordinary activity that falls under the government relations term. It is fine to share ideas and accomplishments of a university, and also to clarify factual misunderstandings (such as apparently happened with the on-campus Kirk memorial).
What is different is when there are private negotiations about the university’s core operations or national higher education policy.
- Given the capitulation of Columbia and Northwestern Universities to Trump administration demands, among others, many faculty, staff, and students at ASU are going to worry whether Michael Crow has any red lines he will not cross in private negotiations. My university’s administration is operating in a national environment where faculty and students are anxious and feel vulnerable with good reason, and ignoring that fact is weak leadership.
- Doing an end-run around policy structures for pilot programs is unnecessary in financial aid — there is already an Experimental Sites Initiative, which is still operative. And there are two problems with negotiating ad hoc for a pilot that a single university will conduct (the same university that floats the idea): the potential for such a pilot to avoid independent evaluation; and the perception that an administration is playing favorites, and freezing out alternative approaches.
- Anything that funnels significant funding to ASU for a priority of President Crow’s could be problematic without addressing the research funding cuts the university has experienced. The contrast could undermine the morale of hundreds of faculty and staff researchers who have been successful in competitive research and other programs. They might well ask, why does Michael Crow get his ideas funded, but he now leaves all of ours undefended?
- Private negotiations for President Crow’s policy ideas will be criticized for process. This has problems beyond those of university lobbying for earmarked funding (which is also problematic), because some will argue that it suggests Crow’s ideas could not win in open debate. And that’s a possibility even if the administration does not distort Crow’s or ASU’s ideas.
In addition, what the article strongly suggests is that Michael Crow is highly confident in his negotiating skills vis-à-vis the Trump administration. That may or may not be justified: I am not an insider in terms of the central ASU administration, and cannot guess what Crow’s strategy might be. (I was a director at the head of one of my college’s academic units 2014-2020. In that role I heard directly from Michael Crow a few times a year, either in a gathering of directors, chairs, and deans of academic units or in a several-hundred-person meeting of all managers of a certain level, both academic and staff. So: I am familiar with his general strategic approach, but neither up-to-date in those mid-level communications nor ever in deans’ council meetings and the like.) But engaging in detailed negotiations assumes good-faith negotiating by partners at the U.S. Department of Education or White House, which is a poor assumption. And it assumes that there is no internal cost or risk from engagement with the Trump administration in this way.
In terms of perceptions on ASU campuses, Michael Crow has demonstrated a spine regarding the university’s interests and academic values at various times in his more than two decades as ASU president. In the Great Recession, for example, he was thrown out of then-Governor Jan Brewer’s office arguing against funding cuts. A few years ago, when Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA put several ASU faculty on its “professor watchlist” for statements they made about Kirk, Crow wrote Turning Point and insisted on being placed on the “watchlist” along with his faculty, if ASU faculty were not removed from the list. And this year, the Arizona Board of Regents sued the Trump administration on behalf of ASU regarding the arbitrary attempt to cut indirect cost rates on federal grants and contracts (now on hold because of various court rulings). In more than a decade, at least in my corner of the university, I haven’t seen the administration try to violate the academic freedom of faculty, and the university has built a set of systems to respond to threats to faculty, staff, and students, including online mobbing. The charter that the ASU administration promulgated in 2014 is something that the vast majority of colleagues I know believe in wholeheartedly, and it talks explicitly about how we want to be judged not by whom we exclude but by whom we include, and how they succeed.
(The university administration’s response to the anti-Israeli protests in spring 2024 is a topic deserving a separate discussion; there is an ongoing lawsuit based on the university and community police response to an encampment.)
On the other hand, there are certain patterns at ASU that could concern faculty, staff, and students. Like many colleges and universities, ASU quickly removed university websites that supported queer students, shifting the material onto student-organization pages. Since the Trump administration released its draft “compact,” there has been extraordinary reluctance to speak publicly about it, or to talk about the issues in University Senate meetings. I know that President Crow responded more clearly to several elected officials who asked him, but has attempted to finesse the issue in public by saying such roundabout things as the compact not being “viable,” and he did not make any public statements until after elite universities framed their refusal as upholding their meritocratic principles in competing for research funding–a framing that would have made acceptance very difficult to fit with Michael Crow’s long-term narrative about ASU as a public university that can simultaneously be accessible in its degree programs and highly-competitive in research.
In addition, there is a certain lack of public introspection about failed initiatives, such as the MOOC-based Global Freshman Academy that operated from 2015 to 2019. As Phil Hill said to Inside Higher Ed in 2019,
“There are many schools that look at ASU as an innovator and try to model some of the things that they do, so it would be helpful if they were fully open about what happened afterwards,” he said. “It’s not surprising that ASU would try new things and shift its approach — the surprise is if you can get them to talk about it publicly.”
There is nothing wrong with initiatives that do not work out, and in pivots. But in my experience at ASU, we do not have a strong culture of learning from that in an open way. Centers and initiatives just disappear. We could do better, and one of the lost opportunities is to demonstrate that President Crow is surrounded by people who would tell him when he’s making a mistake that can threaten the university’s integrity. Most of the academic and research initiatives I can think of, including the Global Freshman Academy, have involved investments that are much smaller than the university’s annual athletics budget, which is to say that the success or failure of any individual project is not about the university’s future. On the other hand, negotiating agreements with a federal government that has demonstrated its desire to interfere with universities is something that is far riskier.
I write this over the Thanksgiving weekend. I have not seen any follow-up by local news sources on the Journal article, I have not been in touch with colleagues to gauge how they are responding, and there may be some errors in the Journal piece (I consider reporting to be professional if it is at least 70% accurate). So consider this a first-impression response.