Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Michael Crow: Well, good morning everyone. Can everybody hear me okay? They have like multiple microphones on me for some reason, so that’s me making those grunting noises that you hear somehow. I’m gonna take a little bit different approach. I’m gonna try to take us back to a really fundamental thing. We’re all at a university. We’re all a part of a knowledge enterprise. We’re all a part of an enterprise that at the root or at the foundation of what we do is we produce knowledge, that knowledge is embodied in three forms. The principal and most important form of the knowledge that we produce is embodied in the people that come here and that graduate from the institution and that move on.

The second most significant knowledge product that we have are the ideas that we produce. The ideas are in and of themselves powerful change forces in both what we do and how we do it. The last thing that we produce is really, really quite complicated and it’s a complex academic term. It’s called stuff. And so we produce people, we produce ideas and we produce stuff. Stuff can be, “Oh, well, let me show you my new whatever, gizmo, or my new algorithm that solves this problem, or this new way to configure the design of a city and so forth.” Let’s start with–that’s weird.

Let’s start with a concept–a new concept. We’ve had organized science going on, organized in a significant way; disciplined science going on, I think, for only about 400 years. Before that, we had pockets of disciplined science. Before that, we had a lot of people who get a lot of credit, and I often wonder–they must have gotten credit because they were the first ones that wrote down their ideas. These would be the Greek philosophers who somehow thought that the wind came from caves, and they were certain that the earth was the center of the universe and they thought there were particles smaller than themselves that they couldn’t see. They were almost sure of that.

They had no way of actually determining that. I won’t walk through everything, but what I will say is that while people think that science has been driven towards an outcome, science in my view has not been driven toward particular outcomes. It’s been driven toward a generic outcome. Science has been driven toward the outcome of eliminating our ignorance about how things work, about who we are, about where we came from. Science, in its effort to focus on giving us perspective and insight has been a powerful, powerful tool–powerful in helping us to know what we might be able to do; powerful in helping us to be able to better adapt to the very dramatic and powerful forces that we live around on earth.

But, it has not been something that has yet matured to the point where it’s driven towards a particular outcome. I want to use this as a particular point and I’m gonna try to jolt you out of your living inside the realm that all science is good, that it produces wonderful outcomes because somehow, a few of us on the planet are better off than we used to be, while many are not. I’m gonna basically try to keep us focused for the sake of this discussion on the notion of outcomes being one of the objectives that science actually should work toward. Now Phil Kitcher, who was on the faculty at Columbia when I was there–he was a person that we hired. He’s a philosopher of science. Anybody familiar with his work? He wrote a fantastic book called Science, Truth, and Democracy.

He says in that book, he basically concludes that science without purpose–and that means science without outcomes as the objective–and this will shock all of you, and I’m like really sorry for that–is immoral. It is without morality. Now just think about that for a second. What he means is that if you’re not working toward a particular goal, if you’re only objective–if your only objective is just science for the sake of science, and you don’t have a specific target that you’re working for–and remember I’m the messenger here. I’m just telling you what he says.

Just because I agree with him is–that’s another point. What he says is that it’s without morality because it can be used for any moral outcome. If it doesn't have a specific outcome, it can be used for any moral outcome. There were scientists in July of 1945 that were involved in–well, that’s July 16th, 1945. Anybody know what that day is? That was the day where at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at a site known as Trinity, a small box hanging from a chain on a tower that was built by a group of physicists in a campaign of about 36 months to build the first thermonuclear device, were able to detonate that device.

If you read the diaries of the physicists, which I have done, or you read the biographies of some of the more prominent people like Oppenheimer, or if you read the analysis by Rhodes and others, of how those weapons were made, physicists fell to the ground weeping, “What have we done?” I’m like, “What did you think you were doing? What did you think you were working on?” Here we are, almost 70 years later, and whatever genie might have been attached to that particular technology is definitively out of the box, definitively out of control, definitively moving forward. What we had at that particular point–and I’m not criticizing the decisions that were made because I think the decisions that were made were the best decisions that could be made, given the context of the moment.

This is 70 years later, and the outcome–what outcome do you want? They wanted to defeat whatever enemy they were fighting. Okay, they defeated them. Then what did they have? The notion is what is the outcome that you’re working toward. Imagine for the sake of this argument that sustainability is an outcome, so what is sustainability? Rick will remember from graduate school days, and some of you–I see a couple of you that have been in my class. I beat on this one particular Nobel laureate, mostly because he’s a political scientist with a Nobel Prize in Economics, and that just makes me smile. His name is Herbert Simon. Herbert Simon constructed this duality of knowledge–this duality of knowledge. He had what he called the natural sciences, and he had what he called the design sciences.

The natural sciences were those attempts by us to discern how nature actually functions. Unbelievably, almost limitless, or probably limitless effort, fantastic undertaking, and we’ve made fantastic progress. The design sciences are where we construct tools, mechanisms, cities devices, software programs, medical procedures, public policy constructs, constitutions, whatever it is that we construct. Those are design things. Those are artificial things. They don' exist in nature; we created them. Not that we’re not from nature, and this is a–I’m not gonna go on that philosophical thing about whether or not we’re nothing but really hyper-energized, over-aggressive beavers that are– because I’ve had that argument with people.

We’re just a species doing our thing, and I’m like, “Well, beavers don't have atomic bombs, okay.” They just don’t. They can damn up some water. I’ve crossed a lot of beaver dams. I’ve seen a lot of things that they’ve done. We’re not beavers. Natural science is how we understand what nature is. Design science is how we build our relationship and our built environment, and so sustainability is a design science. It is a design science, drawing heavily from natural science, but it is a design science. What is the outcome of design sciences? Medicine is a design science. It is a science of the artificial. It is us going into our bodies, altering our bodies ,changing things in our bodies, producing different outcomes than nature.

If we just allowed nature to run its course, well, some of us would have much shorter lives, so our lives have been extended through the design science called medicine. Through the design science called sustainability, we’re working toward a particular outcome. That outcome is a redefined relationship between the environment that we construct through our design science and the natural system as it would operate without us, on which we rely. Again, set aside this beaver thing–and I’m serious about this beaver thing. A lot of people will just say, “Well, we’re just a species on the planet, that evolved on the planet, just doing our thing, and so the planet will adapt to us or wipe us out or whatever.” Just imagine then that there is a possible outcome of a reconfigured relationship between the designers, us, and the natural system in which we are embedded.

That reconfigured relationship, which is one in where the natural system is allowed to be as natural and as–whatever the forces are that drive it. I lectured in a–is David here–Pijawka? I lectured in his class yesterday–or last night–to about 400 undergraduates, and it was amazing. Their level of fundamental understanding of what natural science has taught us about natural systems, so the students, 400 undergraduates, all freshmen and sophomores, they say, “Well, we know from science that natural systems are very complex. We know that they’re interconnected, and reliant upon each other. We know that they’re driven by laws of physics and laws of nature, and laws of biology.” It was amazing what they were able to walk through.

Given all of that, that we understand, how do we attain levels of sustainability? How do we advance human well-being–a subjective term that can be defined in many different ways–while at the same time, making certain that the natural systems have the ability to operate and perform their natural functions in ways that are beneficial to us, supportive of us, and we’re supportive of them. Most everybody in this room, I think has a sense of that as an outcome. Most everyone in this room would probably also agree with the fact that we’re one, not on a trajectory towards that outcome; two, we’re not on that trajectory, and here’s where you might doubt us, mostly because of us in this room, meaning academics. Let me tell you why.

This is gonna be the central theme of what I hope to get across as the point. If you want to get to a particular outcome, how do you get there? Well, first you have to define it. Just assume that we could come to some kind of agreement, which we probably couldn’t very easily, of what sustainability actually means. We’ll just assume that we’ve come to this notion that we want to move toward a societal level, global level outcome, where sustainability is one of the outcomes that science is being guided toward; that we’ve gone back into our natural science processes, and tried to learn more about how the planet actually works, and more about how natural systems actually evolve, and more about ecosystems and their inter-relationship with each other. We spent a lot more energy trying to ask the right questions, or perhaps more precise questions.

Over here, we’ve been working, trying to take the knowledge and moving into our design science, and we’ve been doing that to move towards this particular outcome. We’re measuring our progress socially and culturally, and economically, and behaviorally, toward these outcomes. Are we attaining these outcomes or not, given all the complexities? What is the means by which, or the single process by which we have the highest chance that we have of being able to achieve that. I put up one letter to see if anybody wants to take a guess at what that letter stand for. T–teaching, what do we teach? I would argue–and I’ve given a couple of talks on this in the past.

All of the stress, you know, the wiping out of the fish stocks, the elimination or the probable elimination of whales as a species, the wiping out of the polar bears, the disruption of the fresh water supply, the unbelievable stresses that we’re putting on our own bodies from synthetic chemicals that we put into the water and the air, the fact that in China you might have been reading lately, that they’re having massive issues even delivering fresh water at the level, necessarily to support even the fundamental basis of the population itself.

I won’t go through the whole list, but we have stresses and we have issues. I would argue that we have those stresses and issues because that’s the way we teach. We are what we teach. How could we be anything other than what we teach? I see some of our economists sitting here, so what’s the net present value of a piece of land 400 years into the future?

Audience: Tiny.

Michael Crow: Tiny–it’s like so close to zero, it’s probably immeasurable.

Audience: Assuming a discount rate is positive, yes.

Michael Crow: Yes, exactly. Even me, a non-economist, can understand these concepts. If the net present value of land in the distant future, but nonetheless, a future within the timeframe that our actions today can affect the utility of that land, or the sustainability of that land–if the net present value in an economic model is so close to zero, what does that mean? It means that today, I can do literally anything I want to that land, anything. I could strip mine it and leave it abandoned. I could create it as a polluting asset because I paid for it. What does that mean about–and I’m gonna pick on economics here a little bit. What does that mean about what we teach in economics, and the tools that we have available in economics? Are they really capable at the moment–I know there’s valiant efforts by many people, including some in this room, to change economics, and to help improve the utility of the tool, but what do we teach in economics?

We don’t teach, and don’t have tools for inter-generational decision making. We’re just beginning to understand ecosystem services, but we are still looking at that on a project, by project, by project, or place, by place, by place basis. There were some attempts–how long ago was it where we tried to look at the ecosystem services of the planet, and the number was so high into the trillions, it was rejected and scoffed at by most people, so there was an attempt. What about chemistry? Anybody in here a chemist? No chemists–in the back. In chemistry, what do we teach in chemistry? What do you do in chemistry? What do you do in chemistry? Yeah, so you basically–chemists focus on matter, and their job is to understand matter and to reconfigure matter, and through the reconfiguration of molecules, find molecules that will work for us to do the things that we would like done.

I’d like every mosquito killed. I’m gonna give you some molecules that you can spray on these mosquitoes, just because they’re kind of bothering you. At least in the past, for the last 100 years, when we did that, we produced those chemicals and we killed those mosquitoes, and little did they know that when my brothers and I used to ride our bikes behind the mosquito trucks spreading DDT–we did. We thought it was the coolest thing, so who knows what’s gonna happen to us yet. I mean that fate’s yet to come. We loved riding behind the mosquito spraying truck on these Navy bases that we lived at. We’re probably like walking dead men and don’t even know it because the chemicals that the chemists put out, and that they taught–how many chemistry departments in 1970, or 1980, or 1990, were probably teaching, “Well, you know, if you produce that molecule that can kill those mosquitoes, what will that molecule do to other organisms? What will that molecule do to humans? How many chemistry departments do you think worried about that?

Well, let’s say none because that isn’t what chemistry is about. Chemistry in its silo, in the way that we teach it, in the way that we advance it, chemistry was about give me some molecules and I’ll configure what you need. It’s not my job, just like those physicists, back to those physicists who built that weapon. They even said this. They said, “We just made the thing. We just dug up the uranium, processed it out of the rock purified it, concentrated it, and found some geometry to put it into some kind of assembly that if I compress it fast enough, I can get a thermonuclear explosion to occur. Politicians decide whether or not we’re gonna use it–bad logic, in my view, bad logic. We are what we teach, and so let’s look at how we have–and I wrote a little article on this that just got published in a book, so let’s look at how we designed our Constitution.

The Constitution, something else that we designed, and something else that we teach–the Constitution of the United States is an unbelievable aspirational document. A German philosopher that I really enjoyed reading, except he never wrote anything in English, and I don’t speak German, and so it was a very complicated process, sort of page by page, line by line. He had this guy named Lorenz von Stein–he had this theory that–he called it the Organic Theory of the State. These are design scientists, even political scientists and political theorists. He basically said that we operate in the following way. We set our aspirations of what it is that we want to be around what he called the conceptualization of self, the state as self. What does the state want to be? What outcome does the state want? Then he said that you then dream about how you might get there through the exercise of your will. I’d really, really like to lose weight, and I have a lot of will power, but not enough. I have an aspiration of myself. I have a lot of will of what I would like to do.

Then there’s what I actually do, which is what he called deed–self-will and deed. In the articulation of self, we have a construct that we teach, the construct of the self. The aspirational goal of the United States is the Constitution of the United States, a powerful document of unbelievable aspiration and potential, also deeply flawed–deeply flawed. You might remember that it didn't consider everyone a citizen. It didn't consider everyone a whole person. It left all kinds of issues unresolved, relative to the status and equality of people that it strove for, but it’s gone through all kinds of dramatic change. Now, someone tell me–name one phrase in the Constitution of the United States, one thing that has anything to do with the environment or sustainability.

Audience: Protect the general welfare.

Michael Crow: Protect the general welfare, and then provide for the pursuit of happiness by the individual. Those are concepts that you and I could agree to what that might mean, the protection of the general welfare. Below that, as a concept, which by the way ,our broader society has yet to fully embrace, there is not a single articulation of a value related to the relationship between us and the natural environment in which we are indebted, not a single articulation. There’s only one articulation of science in the Constitution. It is the assignment of intellectual property rights to individuals, which was a counter to the assignment of those rights to the crown of England.

The point that I’m making is that it’s little wonder that the last 200 years that we’ve been teaching, we’ve been teaching a very limited model of economics in my view, relative to that outcome–a very, very limited model of chemistry related to that outcome, and an extremely limited model of the design of our constitutional identity, our aspirational self, what it is that we’re trying to achieve. Now I could go through another 40 disciplines this way, but we don’t have time for that today, and so we’ll just stick with these. Now if we are what we teach, then how do you bring about change to get to this? Take a guess. Yeah, something different, so you go to what I call new teach. It’s not so–in our building, we’re just very simple over there. You go to new teach. That means you want a different outcome, you’d better teach something different. You’d better teach something different.

At ASU, what we have decided to do is to operate in several modalities relative to new teach. I don’t know why, when I get close to that, it starts making that noise. Within the university, we decided to do something called the Global Institute of Sustainability. We decided to do something called the School of Sustainability. We decided to do a bunch of other stuff in other units and other places around the university, in the hope that we could organize ourselves around a design science, draw in from as many of these limited disciplines as possible, draw these people together into a pedagogically and methodologically differentiated teaching and learning environment, and from that, figure out how to do new teach. How do you teach outcomes? How do you teach the design science of sustainability? How do you make those two things come together?

By the way, it’s non-trivial and not easy, so how many of you are students in this GIOS or SOS? Well, you’ll even experience that in your programs. You’ll even be frustrated by it because you may be ahead of, in your own aspirational goals, of where we’ve gotten to. It doesn't mean that it won’t all work out; it will. It’s just a little frustrating sometimes when it’s very hard–very, very hard to go from here to here. What do they give Nobel Prizes in, by the way? What are the disciplines? Chemistry, economics, physics, they give one in peace–I’m not sure what that one means. There’s a long elaborate list of folks that get those, and I’m like, “I don’t know about that one,” and so physics, and there’s one in physiology and medicine, right?

Chemistry, economics, physics and physiology or medicine, so what does that mean? What do we prize? Is there one in sustainability? Not yet, yeah, and so we’re in the process of creating within the university a new teaching, learning, and discovery environment around the design science that we call sustainability. Now what does that mean? Well, that means we’re under attack for having called it sustainability. We’re under attack even within our own internal debates and discussions about well, if you do this, all the students that go through that program, they’ll all be weak. How many of you ever hear that kind of stuff? We hear it. Chuck heard it. They’ll all be weak because they won’t be based in this. This is what they really need to know. They don’t really need this.

There’s even a hierarchy of knowledge where somehow people think that in general, natural sciences, particularly those that are the most quantitative, are the most superior subjects. Everything else is inferior as a subject, and so we have a whole social hierarchy that we’re working through, a whole series of cultural paradigms that we’re working our way through. A part of our new teach as ASU, was to design a new teaching, learning and discovery enterprise. It’s just underway. It’s moving forward. It’s been launched. We’re committed to it. We’re moving resources to it, and we’re making those things happen, but is that enough? It’s not enough because it turns out that that institute and that school sit inside an institution in and of itself, that teaches not only through programs that we have, but teaches not just through what we actually teach, but through what we actually do.

A few years ago, we decided to set off on a course to see if we could get a bunch of things spun up where we could take institutions of higher education and actually get them to start behaving differently, relative to sustainability. Twelve schools formed a coalition, and we were one of the twelve, a few years ago, where the presidents or chancellors of those schools got together and said, “Well, commit our institutions to moving to carbon neutrality.” Carbon neutrality, very challenging–very, very challenging, but we committed, and we got 650 other schools to commit along the way. Now we have millions of students attending a group of 650 or so schools, that have agreed as a part of what they’re doing, to what’s called the President’s Climate Commitment.

The Presidents’ Climate Commitment is driven by wanting to make certain that in new teach, it’s not just what goes on in the disciplines or the integrated disciplines, or the trans-disciplinary schools, or the outcome-driven schools, but also the speaking of the institution as an institutional teacher also. How many of you have noticed the solar power plants that we’ve been building all over the university? Anybody see those? They’re like all over the place. We’re building them as we speak. By this spring, our entire west campus will be completely solar powered. By–we’ll have ten megawatts up, I think, by the end of this year. I don’t remember for sue if that’s–Bonnie, what’s the right number?

Audience: March.

Michael Crow: March–ten megawatts by March. I think that’s more than anybody’s got anywhere. You say, “Oh, we wish these things would happen, so we decided to take our carbon footprint and reduce it.” We decided to change our business practices. We have done that and are continuing to do that. We decided to change where we bought food from, for the food service purveyor that we have, from as local a set of suppliers as we possibly could. We decided to change how we bought things and where we bought things from. Yes, there’s a long list of 1000 other things that we need to be doing. The point is that we’ve decided to teach in two modes: teach through our learning, teaching and discovery enterprise; and teach through what we do.

This smart aleck New York Times reporter calls me up one day, and she says, “Well, you’re the chairman of this thing, right?” I said, “Yeah.” She says, “Well, like who cares what the universities do? No,” she said, “you only have three percent of the carbon footprint.” I said, “Yeah, we’ve got three percent of the carbon footprint, and 100 percent of the student footprint.” She was such a genius, she says, “What do you mean?” I said, “We’re gonna find a way to teach through what we do. At some point, and we’re not there yet, we will be able to say that our campus is running as much as it conceivably can on photons; that we’re buying carbon tax credits, that we’ve changed how we deal with waste, how we acquire our property, how we acquire our supplies.”

It takes a long time and it takes a lot of money. You have to also be very creative, so to fully install the solar power plants that we’re installing is costing not us, but costing someone–we estimated this–Rick gave me this number yesterday–67 million dollars. You might have noticed we don’t have 67 million dollars laying around these days. We’ve got other problems, but we do need electricity. We do have places for people to build power plants, so we said to outside contractors, “Well, give you a contract to buy electricity at a fixed price over a long period of time, sufficient to motivate you and incentivize you to use our space to build your power plants, to provide us the solar generated electricity that we need to be moving toward our goal of teaching by what we do.” Guess what? Found a whole bunch of them, lined them all up, picked the best ones, and now we’re moving forward.

Guess what our biggest problem is now with advancing our solar power plants? Bonnie, what is it? Space, what else? What’s the second thing? It’s the supply of the actual materials. You can’t get them. For all that people want to do in this space, it’s very, very hard. Teach by what you do. Teach by what you teach. Then in addition to that, the third space that we’ve been working in is a space where we teach through action. We proposed to the Mayor of the City of Phoenix, “Why don’t we try to get Phoenix to the lowest carbon footprint that we possibly can?” The Mayor says, “How would we do that?” The team, some of whom are in this room, got together. We had a whole two weeks to think this through. In the real world, there’s real time, and in the academic world, there’s slower time. Sometimes we have to work in real time, so we worked in real time.

Real time is very similar to the rotation of the earth, it’s just absolutely–it’s really similar. My watch even simulates it; it just turns around and around. Teaching by building a design science, teaching by action and expression of action, and teaching by working on specific things like Green Phoenix, so a team from this Institute, with a few other folks from around the university, worked with the City of Phoenix, submitted a proposal to the Department of Energy, won millions of dollars to advance an entire process of beginning the process of greening the City of Phoenix. I’m just giving you examples. I could give you 10 or 15 examples in each of these categories, of everything that we’re working on now.

What we have done as a university is that we have decided–and then we, we can define that in different ways–it’s a very complicated process, that outcomes are important, social outcomes, technical outcomes, cultural transformation outcomes. The whole way that we are operating the university now, for instance, our transmutation of our goals, where we’ve decided that excellence should be a measure of who we include and what we do with them, as opposed to the standard university measure of excellence, which is you’re the most excellent when you are the most exclusive. We’ve turned that on its head and moved that in a new direction, so I’m just trying to give you a sense of an outcome. In that case, the outcome that we’re pursuing, is a differentiated outcome about what the university stands for, at least this university.

An outcome that we can work toward can be egalitarian access to a high level of university education, that’s an outcome. Another outcome is to work towards sustainability. Now you wouldn’t believe the extent to which we come under a mortar attack for focusing on outcomes, from every possible–one of the most interesting things I’ve learned in the eight and a half years of this job is that I wish that I had eyes in the back of my head. We’re basically–every step we take, someone’s attacking us from this position, this position, but politically, the right, the left, the center, academics from every possible angle because basically, there is a desire to do this.

This thing that we’re doing now, teaching, and these disciplines, and all of their wonder and their glory and the medals that people get as they advance all of their theories, and as we get new molecules out into the atmosphere and into the food chain and all that kind of stuff, it’s all good. It’s all fantastic, and there is a rigid fixation on tradition and the traditional model. In my view, it is that rigid fixation which is the primary stimulus for the vibrational training we have right now, called our society, related to sustainability. It’s vibrating very, very heavily right now. That’s negative because if it comes off the track, it’s gonna be very hard–it’s gonna be very hard in a world of seven, or eight, or nine billion people, to take a train off the track, at large scale, involving billions of people, and get it back on track.

It’s gonna be very tough. How do we move in a new direction, what we’ve been attacking is this line of rigidity, this line that says that this is the way things need to be. Who knows what the Sanhedrin is? In ancient cultures, Judeo culture and other cultures, there was a group of individuals–the name is principally in Judaism. It’s the priests who hold all the rules, all the rules. Well, what have all–not their rules, but these academic rules, rules about what disciplines should be, rules about what we should teach, rules about the fact that outcomes should be left to others, rules by scientist, “Well, we’ll just build the atomic bomb and someone else will decide whether or not we’re gonna use it.” When that someone else gets down to be renegade groups in Pakistan that have captured those weapons and sold them to someone else who had interests not similar to ours, we’ll see what we think about, “just let other people decide how to use them.”

I’m not trying to over-emphasize that too much. I’m trying to make that as a point. This rigid line is what we’ve been going after. We’ve been going after it by focusing on this because we think that this–I’m using just sustainability as an example–is one outcome that we’ve got to work toward, absolutely have to work toward. Now it doesn't mean, by the way, so don’t get me wrong, that there aren’t thousands of people working furiously within these constructs, to try to be helpful to produce this outcome. There are. That will be insufficient. That will be insufficient. It will take more than that. Imagine that you’ve built–that you have a place–bye Hal. Imagine that–nice to see you by the way. I’m glad you’re back from Turkey.

Imagine that you have a place with, I don’t know, like 70,000 students, like a lot of students. Then you’ve got another 500,000 people that have attended your university, 500,000–350,000 of whom have graduated from the university. You got 570,000 people right there. Then imagine you’ve got another 20,000 people working there, so that’s–and then you’ve got another–believe it or not, you might not agree with this number–you have a million people that track your sports programs. A million people track, on a regular basis, our sports programs. More than that are aware of them. When we played the University of Georgia a couple of years ago, seven million people watched that game–seven million people.

I can add these numbers up really fast. Now imagine that you’re then getting 22,000 new students every year, coming into this new teach enterprise, 22,000 new students. Then imagine in a few years, that you’re gonna have 100,000 students online in another category of learning, learning on a distant basis. Imagine you’re operating in a different way. You’ve got different values and different outcomes, and different ways that you’re working toward things. Imagine that you’re in a country of 310 million people, in a world of almost seven billion people. You’ve got to imagine all these things. It might be that it takes an institution of this size and this scale, doing these things, to actually have, among others that are trying to do this, impact on producing this outcome. That’s what we’re up to; that’s what this is all about; that’s what we’re working toward. I think we’ve got a few minutes for comments or questions, and so thank you very much.

Audience: [Applause] Hi. Thanks for speaking today. My name is Stacey Champion. I have a kind of a multiple part question mainly focused on downtown Phoenix. I’m curious as to why ASU keeps supporting the City of Phoenix in razing historic buildings and putting parking lots in their place, why the parking lots aren’t utilizing pervious concrete, and heat-reflecting materials for ozone emission and urban heat island effect. I would like to know if you personally consider land banking in downtown Phoenix to be a sustainable pathway.

Michael Crow: It’s an interesting question. You’re probably referring to the Ramada Inn site.

Audience: That, amongst others–I mean I think it’s silly that we spent all that money on a Light Rail in the city, and you guys, in particular, since you have such a strong force downtown, not being the leaders in promoting public transport. We have thousands of excess parking spaces downtown already.

Michael Crow: Right, so on that particular site, just to be clear about that site, is that site is a planned site for a 600,000 square foot LEED Certified building complex that will be called the Arizona Center for Law and Society. We don’t have–and I’m not gonna argue this point in this forum with you.

Audience: I’m not just referring to that space.

Michael Crow: Okay, that’s fine.

Audience: I’m talking about downtown in general. I’m wondering what happened to the 2004 vision for downtown becoming pedestrian friendly and attracting students who are gonna want to even actually live downtown.

Michael Crow: We have 1400 students living downtown right now. We’re moving to 4500 students downtown. That will be over half the downtown population in any of the neighborhoods that are down there. My answer to you is really time. It takes time and resources to implement the strategy that we’re talking about. All the buildings that we’ve built, all the buildings that we’ve renovated, all the things that we’ve done, meet these sustainable standards. Anything else that might be going on by third parties, fourth parties, fifth parties, are merely temporary positioning relative to where we’re going.

Obviously Light Rail is a key part. We have 8500 students per day using the Light Rail to move between the Tempe campus and the Downtown campus, and to move between their homes and either of those campuses. That’s a large number. That’s about a quarter of the ridership in its entirety of the Light Rail, which is just off to, I think, a good start. It’s got a long way to go. It’s a project that will take decades to transform the way people think. We’ve been very supportive of the Light Rail. We’ve taken political positions relative to the Light Rail. I agree with you that we shouldn’t be building anything permanent that’s related to facilitating parking. I think what people are looking at, at that particular site, is a temporary cover. I’m not gonna debate this.

Audience: It’s not a question of debate. It’s a question of okay, so even for temporary parking lots, wouldn’t it be a good thing for the School of Sustainability to shape and change people’s view of what a parking lot looks like?

Michael Crow: Absolutely, and so we have built, and have demonstration parking lots that have various ways to limit heat concentration during the day, and we’ve outlined that, and our hope is that whatever is built there on a temporary basis, will use the technologies that we’ve demonstrated in other places, and so that’s our hope. Now we’re not the final decision maker in that, but that’s our hope.

Audience: How do you propose that the ideas and knowledge–the consciousness of the old teach way of looking at things–how do you propose like taking and upgrading, so to speak, holistically, that consciousness to the new teach? Do you have any– ideas in mind?

Michael Crow: Yeah, I mean the–what I would say is we’re not sure exactly. I understand what you’re asking. We’re not sure exactly how to do that, other than by infiltrating as many new thinkers into the enterprises that we presently call disciplines or departments, or schools, and then allowing those new thinkers to be creative and innovative in how they teach and what they teach, and what they work on and so forth, and encouraging that and supporting that.

We’ve been taking an innovation model approach to things, and that’s basically the way that we’ve been doing that. The other thing that I think we’ve been doing is changing the traditional expectations for performance evaluation by faculty. We’re not interested in just a person’s contribution solely to a limited discipline, unless they tell us that that’s all that they are interested in. We’ve broadened out the criteria and the mechanisms by which people are able to advance, by saying we’re interested in a wider variety of advancement strategies relative to an individual faculty member’s performance evaluation.

Audience: You talked about the difference between some of the quantitative natural science traditions, and the design science potential. Where in the university do you see students being able to access resources, or faculty really promoting and being productive around the idea of multi-sector collaboration towards sustainability, and the idea of graduate level, intensive projects around that? We have opportunities here in the space of sustainability, so I guess I’m not asking you that clearly. There is this tension between the natural science and design science. Would you see as the elements that are sort of the front movers in making design science more accessible to future generations of graduate students, especially since a lot of the faculty haven’t been through this tradition themselves?

Michael Crow: Yeah, that’s a very good question, and it’s complicated because in fact, you give the limit. That is that the faculty themselves are coming–it’s only those faculty that have separated themselves, or allow themselves to be flexible in their own intellectual maturation, that will necessarily leave some of these rigid structures and go to this newer way of thinking things. How do we facilitate all of that? I mean I think the best answer that I can give you is in whatever way we find that works. I mean it’s–I don’t want to say it’s not purely ad hoc, but it is ad hoc. It’s like, well, this group of faculty members want to work in this particular realm, and it looks really like a new way to move forward, let’s help them.

People want to work in studio-based learning or studio-based problem solving, or that kind of thing, let’s help those faculty to work in that. Then let’s see what works. That’s the best way that we can approach it right now. It’s highly individualistic, but with resources being concentrated in new configurations, and resources being put on individuals who can move in new directions. That’s basically our approach at the moment.

Audience: Much of your talk today emphasizes the sciences. I wonder if you could speak to the roles and the responsibilities of the humanities, and where they fit into your model.

Michael Crow: Yeah, so it actually didn't emphasize the sciences. It talked about natural science, which is really the sciences. Design science, or the sciences of the artificial–those are his terms–Herbert Simon’s terms–are–let me sort of put it to you this way. The humanities focus on the deep understanding of our culture, our cultural heritage, our artistic expressions, our linguistic expressions, language, culture, expression, all of those things, which are, in fact, the basis for what–in fact, last night I designed around the notion of a sustainable city. I had a box that I drew, which was–a city was the articulation of–existed in a natural system. The city was a designed entity.

The natural system then was contained in terms of our perception, in a broader box that I called culture. Even our perception of what the natural system is, is derivative of our cultural core. Otherwise, we’d have different views of what the natural system is, and our interface with it. The design sciences and the sciences of the artificial are driven by a foundational body of knowledge, which is largely derivative of the humanities. It is, however, the case that a limited number of humanists, particularly in academia, are connected. There are some, including some here, that are, but it’s a limited number, and so it’s an area that we’re focused on. It’s an area that we want to work on. It’s an area that we’re very open to. It is a foundational thing, but it’s not something that is easy to articulate.

I’ll give you a funny story about Columbia. I worked for ten years building a thing called The Earth Institute at Columbia. I was its first director. We worked very hard to have classicists and other humanists involved in the things that we were trying to do there. We ran into these constant, almost overpowering cultural issues, and there was a funny one. The scientists would say, “Well, where is the–where’s the classicist?” Someone would say, “Well, they’re in Italy, or France, or Greece because they’re not at the university most of the time, and particularly in the summer.” There was this constant internal, even within the academic realm itself, timing difference and focus difference, and the way that they worked. We worked and worked and worked, and so it goes back to the earlier question about how you do this. It’s based on individuals.

You have to find individuals from whatever discipline they’re from, interested in this outcome. In our religious studies program and in our philosophy program, we do have faculty members at ASU that are very interested in sustainability as an outcome. In our history program, we have the same thing; in our literature group, in the English Department and elsewhere, we have the same thing. Among our creative writers, we have the same thing.

What we’ve tried to do is to find these folks and empower them and engage them, and we’re trying to do more of that. It also means working in a differentiated way, and so how many of you would call yourself humanists that are in the room? There’s a few? How many humanists are normative? How many? Somebody answer–not very many. They’re not normative. They can be, they just–it’s another way–it’s like another channel to operate on. This is a normative outcome. This is a normative outcome, and so we have a frequency problem, that we’ve got to find out way around, and we haven’t completely found it yet. We’ve found it with some individuals, but not more broadly.

Audience: You don’t think the Sanhedrins are the normative?

Michael Crow: Well, they are, but they’re normative frozen–frozen in the historical sense. He asked don’t I think the Sanhedrins are normative? Maybe I need a better word than normative for this, and so if someone has one, give one to me, but this is the notion of working toward a particular differentiated objective, rather than the maintenance of the present objective, but I understand your point.

Audience: A frequency problem?

Michael Crow: Well, what I call frequency–what I mean by frequency is that–how are we able to communicate? It’s like radio frequencies, and so getting on the same frequency, or finding a new frequency, or a new communication mechanism that allows these disciplines to come together in new ways.

Audience: Thank you, President Crow.

Michael Crow: Thank you.

[End of Audio]

The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.