Support at the Top for Sustainability

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By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

Four years ago, Michael M. Crow traded in New York City for the desert. Leaving his job as executive vice provost at Columbia University, he took over the presidency of Arizona State University with a headful of ideas about the future of higher education. One of them was to make sustainability a core principle of his university. It was an unusual, and perhaps necessary, choice, given Arizona State's location within the rapidly growing megalopolis of Phoenix, in a water-starved landscape.

Q. What motivated you to make sustainability a priority?

A. In 1992 the Rio conference that was looking at the future of the planet just convinced me — it was like a lightning-bolt moment — about the fact that academic institutions had contributed most of the technologies that were producing most of the sources of the problem. And we were unable to be adaptive enough to engage in defining new kinds of solutions.

Q. It seems like universities, with their focus on traditional disciplines and specialization, would be a tough place to sell a cross-cutting field like sustainability.

A. I'm not one to argue for the wholesale elimination of disciplines, because they do have many useful purposes. But they also serve as a barrier to the reorganization of our thought. And the reorganization of our thought is that this interface between the built environment and the natural environment requires more connectivity than anything we've ever done before.

Q. Given how much you've emphasized sustainability, what chances are there that this area will continue to flourish at ASU when you decide to move on?

A. I think the chances are very high because it's well grounded in dozens and dozens of faculty and many, many units throughout the university. Our location helps us to take this on. Here we are with this city of four million people built in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, a completely unsustainable thing. If you live here you can feel these issues very, very directly. We've increased the nighttime heat index by 12 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 20 years. ... There's an understanding within the local university environment that this is a problem that merits a lot of attention.

Q. In 2001 ASU's enrollment was 45,000, and now it's up over 63,000. So it has increased by more than one-third in five years. Is that kind of growth a model of sustainability in the desert?

A. We are expanding to provide educational services to the region. ... There are only three [public] universities in the entire state of Arizona, and Arizona is six million people. ... What we've decided to do is not take the no-growth mentality as the response and [instead] say how do you design — at the highest possible level — a sustainable city in this particular environment. ...

Every [new] dorm, every structure, every lab, even the building I'm sitting in right now, have all been designed and built under the notion that we would build all of our structures on as sustainable a basis as possible. Beyond that, we have recycling programs and water-conservation programs, some of which are easy to implement, some of which are hard.

Q. One of the hallmarks of sustainability is to focus on local problems. Do universities need to become local forces, more so than they have in the past?

A. Absolutely. If you look at our design imperatives ... one of them is exactly as you have articulated. It's called "leveraging place." ... We have to be engaged here. Right here. To make these kinds of things work. That has to be a fundamental part of the design of the institution.

Q. Which is somewhat of an about-face from the trend in which universities strive to become national presences.

A. Everybody is trying to be the same thing, and they're all abandoning their local places.

Q. As a close, I have to ask, how did you get to work today?

A. Today I drove. ... My problem is I have to move around many times during the day, but when I was in New York for 12 years at Columbia, I took the subway everywhere.