Michael M. Crow is an American academic leader and science and technology policy scholar who has served as president of Arizona State University (ASU) since 2002. He previously held senior academic roles at Columbia University and is known for advancing ASU’s “New American University” model.
[This interview was edited for length and clarity.]
How would you describe the current state of American science?
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I’m going to be very positive about American science. It’s almost unbelievable—the rate of production, the unbelievable enhancements by new technologies that are enabling science. I think the state of American science is that it is strong. It is integrated. It’s powerful. It’s emboldened by hundreds of thousands of graduate students and tens of thousands of research groups. It’s really going strong.
What needs to change in American science?
A couple of things: One, scientists speak gibberish, and we need to find ways to translate gibberish to English and Spanish and other languages so that more people can understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. So we have a deep translation problem that needs to change.
Second, I think that American [researchers] need to focus on how we portray what we’re doing to help the U.S. to be better in the future. It can’t just be “All science is good, and all science leads to good things.” Now it has to be “Here’s what we did, here’s what we’re doing, and here’s why we’re doing it.”
So I think that the improvement we need is more connections to what people want. For instance, in Arizona we have a project called the Center for the Future of Arizona, and we look for shared public values [that] more than 70 percent of the population believes in.... The highest shared public value is [having] blue skies, clean water and clean air. And so we need to figure out how to deliver that while, at the same time, not saying to people that the only way to get there is you never get to drive your car again.
What gives you optimism right now?
The optimism that I have is that scientists are still determining their own agenda. You know, we’re still chasing the inner workings of quantum entanglement; we’re free to develop new math theories, new ways of understanding the vortices of the stars and how they work.... So what gives me hope is that there’s no diminishment. It’s just go, go, go all the time.
Hope for me is also the progress that we’re making now with supercomputers and augmented intelligence—that’s what I call it instead of artificial intelligence because there’s nothing artificial about it. We’re going to be able to solve more quickly and move more quickly. A single Ph.D. student in the future may do the work of 20 Ph.D.s in the past.
What’s your best advice for an early-career scientist?
One: Be as aware of other disciplines as you possibly can be, if not actually being in an interdisciplinary field. Two: Understand who’s funding you and why they’re funding you, and be sympathetic to them. Three: Realize that you that you lived and you live in one of the most unbelievably privileged positions that humans have ever been able to live in. You get to determine your own problem. You get to work on your own quest. You get to define how you’re going to do it. Other people pay you to do this, and so you should realize that you’re in a gifted, gifted position.
How has your field changed in the past few years?
Well, I’m a weirdo—I’m a designer of knowledge enterprises, a science and technology policy management scholar—and so my field has changed because of the speed of change, the speed of knowledge production, the enhancement of computational tools, the enhancement of visualization tools, the enhancement of all that stuff. I mean, just the speed of everything is just infinitely faster.
And I think there’s also more competition. People are talking about the sky is falling because the Chinese have an elaborate scientific apparatus. I’m like, “Okay, what are you, afraid? Are you unwilling to compete? Do you think you’re going to get beat just because someone else showed up with their own bat at the softball field? Why don’t we get in there, and why don’t we start hitting more home runs? We’ll show them what home runs are all about.”
