How is ASU responding to attacks on universities and colleges?

Michael Crow

President, Arizona State University

April 12, 2025

President Crow:

I have been focused over the last two days on a successful fundraising effort to support a student performance by ASU’s DBR Lab at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. As a recent ASU Emeritus Professor (HIDA) returned to NYC, I am delighted that a fund I helped form from a revered fellow artist’s estate will be supporting this effort bringing together ASU and New York.

My joy has been mitigated by hearing that in the past week fifty ASU students have had their visas revoked. Though I have not heard of any students being taken into custody by the rogue force that ICE has become, I fear that is the next step.

What is ASU doing to push back against the extreme authoritarianism and rights-trampling abuses of Trump/MAGA? I realize that a state institution such as ASU does not have the deep endowments of Harvard or Columbia, but all institutions must unite to resist these extra-judicial and illegal incursions into academic freedom, powered by the blatant blackmailing  of research funding revocations. As a former graduate student,  I am particularly ashamed of Columbia’s cringing response to the Trumpist threats to make America’s universities guilty (again), via the acceptance of a false and ahistorical equating of any and all critiques of Zionism as antisemitism. This is not what an institution dedicated to critical thinking (not to mention one with professors with deep grasps of history) should be signaling. I mourn Columbia’s caving, along with a distressing number of other elite private schools, and look to ASU for stronger leadership. Over the past two decades, ASU has offered visionary policies and programs,  facing the realities of our political and academic culture. I was particularly proud, coming to ASU in 2001 as a faculty member after earning my MFA from Columbia’s School of the Arts, to be part of a transformation of a middling state school into an exemplar of research and innovation.

Having recently spent time with a former ASU graduate student, a Fulbright from Mexico City who earned his PhD in Bioethics, and having as a member of my extended family a formerly undocumented ASU student (undergrad/grad) who is now an American citizen, I feel a personal connection to the recent threats against students. The former Fulbright student, having spent several years post-degree back in Mexico working for the government in research on sustainability, was hoping to return to the U.S. to work in a government funded position. That door has been slammed shut. Ditto for his Peruvian husband, who works in the diplomatic field. I can assume that many of the currently threatened ASU students also held the promise of contributing to our country and community. We have to assert not only their right to stay in this country, but their profound value to our very future.

I acknowledge the immense difficulty of running an enormous institution with multiple and often conflicting constituencies and responsibilities, not to mention funding sources. But it is the very complexity of our relationship to that diversity that demands deep critical thinking and creative vigor pushing back on the aggressive ignorance of entirely self-centered political interests grasping at, and currently clutching, power. We need to bar the door to these intrusions, physical, intellectual and political. Please let me know what your strategies are, and how we can help. With the capitulations of some of our most esteemed private schools, guarding their endowments over their freedom, our ASU can show a much prouder and productive path. This horror will pass, and we must be on the side that took the high road. It’s the only road leading anywhere we would want to be.