Last month’s publication of the latest Times Higher World University Rankings triggered the usual flurry of activity by university spin doctors. And for good reason. As the influence of league tables grows on prospective students, their parents, policymakers and the wider public, universities are keen to celebrate their rise, or defend their fall, in an increasingly competitive higher education environment.

Debates continue about the merits and methodologies of such ranking exercises. Stephen Curry wrote recently in the Guardian about the margins of error involved, and argued that rankers should “explicitly acknowledge the uncertainties in their tables of aggregate scores.”

Another challenge posed by the power of rankings is that they encourage a cookie-cutter approach to university strategy. Fundamental questions of purpose and priorities are effectively outsourced to the number crunchers at the Times Higher or Shanghai Jiao Tong.

Against this backdrop, it is a brave institution which sets out to reinvent itself. But one university that has tried to forge a distinctive path over the past decade is Arizona State (ASU), under the leadership of its president Michael Crow. In a recent book, Designing the New American University, Crow and co-author William Dabars describe the “exhaustive reconceptualization” of ASU that occurred from 2002 onwards, as it changed from a “largely undifferentiated regional public university” into an “institution that combines accessibility….inclusiveness…and maximum societal impact.”

Crow and Dabars rail against a higher education sector they see as full of copycat institutions, hemmed in by routine, standardisation, inertia and conformity. Over 300 pages, they set out their journey towards a different model, in which traditional discipline-based departments have been replaced with more problem-orientated transdisciplinary structures, such as the School of Earth and Space Exploration, which includes engineers and computer scientists, or the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, where anthropologists sit alongside mathematicians, political scientists and epidemiologists. As these reforms have taken root, they argue, ASU has benefited from funders’ preference for cross-disciplinary approaches. From 2003 to 2012, ASU’s federally-funded research portfolio grew by 162 per cent, significantly outpacing increases in most of their peer institutions.

ASU’s charter calls for the university to be measured “not by whom its excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed”. This commitment to ensuring Arizonian students from diverse and under-represented backgrounds gain access has led to an impressive 38.3 per cent increase in student numbers from 2002 to 2013 (from 55,491 to 76,771), with minority enrolment up 124 percent over this period. Research efforts have also been directed towards the needs of the citizens of Arizona, through initiatives to improve the air quality in Phoenix, and increase the number of locally qualified teachers. Crow and Dabars argue that ASU’s model ensures that it is held accountable as a “public good” for its contribution to the economic, social and cultural health and wellbeing of its community.

Of course, ASU is not without its critics. Some argue that the university has achieved mixed results in terms of its academic outputs, while others question the uniqueness of its structures, given that aspects of traditional departments still lurk beneath the surface of newer, interdisciplinary units. And ironically in a book that lambasts conformity in the sector, Crow and Dabars fall back at various points on improvements in ASU’s league table performance as evidence for its success. This sits awkwardly with their call for new and differentiated models of universities “that more squarely address the needs of the nation in the twenty-first century.”

Minor quibbles aside, it is refreshing to hear at first hand from a university leader who is so willing to articulate and pursue a radical public and social agenda. Of course, Arizona is very different from Aston or Aberdeen, but this is a book that should be read and debated by vice-chancellors and university managers in the UK. As Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, has argued, universities are surprisingly poor at applying principles of research and innovation to their own operations, and their policies are too often poorly evidenced and tested.

We should not allow the annual merry-go-round of league tables and rankings to overshadow more fundamental debates about what and who universities are for, and the kinds of social transformation they should be aiming to achieve. If Crow has designed the ‘new American university’, who will be game enough to attempt its British equivalent?



Natalie Day (@NatalieDay1) is head of strategy and communications at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex. Previously she worked at the universities of Oxford and Melbourne.

