Danny L. Balfour and Stephanie P.
Newbold, Editors
Book Reviews
Jan L. Youtie is director of policy
research services and principal research
associate in Innovation Partners, a unit
of Georgia Techs Enterprise Innovation
Institute. She is also adjunct professor
in Georgia Techs School of Public Policy
and cofounder of the program in Science,
Technology, and Innovation Policy. Her
research focuses on technology-based
economic development, advanced
manufacturing, emerging technology
assessment, bibliometric and patent
analysis, and innovation and knowledge
measurement and evaluation.
E-mail: jan.youtie@innovate.gatech.edu
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 76, Iss. 5, pp. 816818. 2016 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.12614.
816 Public Administration Review September | October 2016
Jan L. Youtie
Georgia Institute of Technology
In Search of Relevance in the Twenty-First Century
Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars, Designing
the New American University (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 360 pp.
$34.95, ISBN: 9781421417233.
U
niversities have been criticized in recent
years for high tuition fees and inability of
graduates to obtain employment (National
Research Council 2012). In response, universities
argue that governments have reduced their support
to universities, forced additional and increased
fees, and added evermore burdensome rules and
regulations that require expanding bureaucratic
structures (Bozeman 2015). These administrative
strictures parallel the growth of expectations of the
roles of universities such that the university, according
to legendary former president of University of
California at Berkeley Clark Kerr (2001), has become
a multiversity. Proposals at the national level have
been made to reduce these regulations and improve
university administrative efficiency with little change
in the situation. It is thus reasonable to look to the
states to put forth novel solutions to these problems,
as they have been called laboratories of democracy
by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Making
the case for one such novel approach is Designing the
New American University by Michael Crow, president
of Arizona State University (ASU), and William
Dabars, a senior research fellow in the Office of the
President at ASU, and it indeed falls in this vein
(Crow and Dabars 2015). Many of the core ideas
of the book can be traced to the 2002 address that
President Crow made on his inauguration to the ASU
presidency, and refined during subsequent years of
experience implementing and expanding ideas. The
book is essentially a blueprint for how ASU has been
reconceptualized to better serve its diverse populace,
conduct research that responds to societal problems,
and connect more closely with its current and
potential clienteles.
The book has attracted much attention. For starters,
endorsements for the book are written by a collection
of elite political and academic leaders, including
former President Bill Clinton, Governor Jeb Bush,
and Mitchell Daniels, president of Purdue University
and former governor of Indiana. Although the book
was published in February 2015, it has already drawn
three reviews published in journals indexed by the
Web of Science (Boardman 2016; Hayford 2015;
Maienschein 2015) as well as reviews in magazines
such as the Los Angeles Review of Books (Newfield
2015) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (Dirks
2015). The book has also had an influence on
universities outside the United States (Shapira 2015).
One of the strengths of this book is its evidence base.
The book begins with three chapters that draw on
a broad history of U.S. universities, beginning with
Harvard and especially Johns Hopkins, which the
authors emphasize is the better model of the early
American university because it represents a merger
of residential campuses of Oxford and Cambridge
and the German paradigm of graduate research
training. The book chides the disproportionate
legitimacy awarded to the Harvard model as an
example of filiopietism and pairs this concept
with that of isomorphismthe tendency of other
higher educational institutions to try to become like
Harvard and other prestigious universities in their
pursuit of high-performing students and high-status
research grants. However, the authors argue that these
elite universities produce knowledge that is often
narrow and not always considered useful by society.
The book contrasts this view with the origin of the
Morrill Act, which sought to diversify the student
population through the creation of land-grant state
colleges and universities, some of which are elite
private and public universities and others of which
are for underrepresented groups including persons
of color, and the Hatch Acts funding of agricultural
research and technology transfer centers with their
emphasis on knowledge relevant to the development
of the agricultural industry. The book offers an
extensive set of data about the U.S. educational
situation in comparison with other countries. The
point of these analyses is to demonstrate that U.S.
universities dominate top 100 lists but are increasingly
losing ground to higher educational institutions
in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) countries on measures such as
educational attainment of tertiary degrees.
The middle of the book continues by summarizing
core literature about the importance of social and
economic returns from innovation coming out of the
entrepreneurial university. There is a discussion of
useful knowledge (Mokyr 2002), the relationship of
knowledge and technological progress to productivity
(Romer 1990), and the triple helix (Etzkowitz and
Leydesdorff 2000). The book discusses the role of the
BayhDole Act as well as the importance of serving
the local region, drawing on traditional regional
innovation clusters work by Porter (2000) and others.
The point of these texts is to show that designing an
institution to provide use-inspired knowledge is not
the work of a lone researcher in the laboratory; instead,
it occurs through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Chapter 6 provides a long discussion of the roots
of pragmatism, its central role in the founding
of America, and its implications for use-inspired
university education and research, with sustainable
development serving as a fundamental example.
The first six chapters of the book make a compelling
case for the need of the New American University, but
it is the seventh chapter that is particularly interesting
in that it describes how Crow and his ASU colleagues
and stakeholders developed and implemented its
vision. A foundational white paper was created to
put forth eight design aspirations for reorienting the
university to make it more responsive to socioeconomic
groups in Arizona, better able to solve social problems,
more supportive of entrepreneurship, better equipped
to conduct use-inspired research, more actively
accommodating of diversity, more restructured to
support transdisciplinary activity, and more directly
engaged with the broader populace in Arizona,
nationally, and globally. These design aspirations are
calibrated through eight measures of responsiveness,
three measures of research quality, four measures of
problem-oriented and interdisciplinary research, and
four measures of outreach. The chapter ends with
metrics that document the accomplishments and
statistical measures of effectiveness of these changes,
such as improved entrance requirements, student
diversity, financial aid, graduation rates at the same time
as growth in Nobel Laureates, members of the National
Academies of Science and Engineering, research
expenditures, patents, and changes in world rankings.
Christopher Newfields review points out that these
aspirations and metrics reinforce or add even more
to the expectations of university employees in an
environment of ever fewer resources. The book
embraces these new challenges as an imperative of
the New American University rather than proposing
a retreat to core competencies of conventional
research and teaching roles. The book also does not
mention the rise of boundary spanning organizations
in universities to address multiple missions by
facilitating connections among educational, research,
entrepreneurial, industrial, and public domains
(Tornatzky and Rideout 2014). In any case, the
diversity of missions and metrics will likely mean
greater managerial costs and complexity.
Designing the New American University is at its best
when it provides a thoughtful case for two hallmarks
of ASUs structure. The first is its focus on reaching
a broader pool of students rather than trying to be
more selective. It is impressive how the university has
explicitly targeted socioeconomically disadvantaged
students, including those whose families had never
gone to college. This expansion, which resulted in a 38
percent increase in student enrollment from the fall of
2002 to the fall of 2013 and a 68 percent increase in
graduates over this period, has taken place at the same
time as the university has dramatically increased its
research position and ranking, calling into question the
conventional wisdom that the university must pursue
elite students to raise its research reputation. Efforts to
increase access to ASUs courses have led to vigorous
pursuit of interactive online teaching via ASU Online.
Some of the metrics cited in the book, such as the
improvement in ASUs rankings, appear at odds with
earlier arguments against these reputational metrics
(Shapira 2015). Nevertheless, the universitys diversity
goal and results are impressive.
The second hallmark is the restructuring of
conventional academic departments at ASU in order
to better position them to address societal problems
through interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus, the
Anthropology Department became the School of
Human Evolution and Social Change, which also
houses faculty involved in global health, applied
mathematics, environmental social sciences, and
cyber infrastructure (http://shesc.asu.edu/). Similarly,
ASU has built up its sustainability focus through
multidisciplinary initiatives such as the Global
Institute of Sustainability, comprised of the Biodesign
Institute and the School of Sustainability. The
orientation of these academic units receives its footing
from the books sixth chapter about the tradition of
pragmatism as a basis for the problem-orientation of
these restructured departments. This chapter reminds
readers that pragmatism is not just about developing
knowledge to solve problems in the abstract but also
about debate and discourse to align the university
with public values such as sustainable development.
Some observers have referred to efforts to effect change
at a university as herding cats (Lohmann 2002;
Book Reviews 817
 Hammond 2004), and Crow and Dabars make clear
in their book that universities are among the most
conservative of social institutions. However, what
is missing from this book is an in-depth discussion
of the tensions raised during the restructuring of
these departments and other changes made at ASU.
It is not hard to imagine that conflicts would have
occurred given the structure of the typical university
with its tenured faculty, other researchers, varying
seniorities of students, and administrative staff.
Similarly, it would have been helpful to have a better
understanding of what has not worked, as well as
what has been successful. Designing the New American
University does provide useful insight into historic
university reform efforts, including the accounts of
Woodrow Wilsons attempts to reorganize graduate
schools while president of Princeton University, and
Charles Van Hises endeavor to promote a vision of
public accessibility while president at the University
of Wisconsin. Additionally, it would have been useful
for the authors to have provided comparisons with the
reform experiences at ASU. The book does mention
the role of the university design team in getting input
and support from across the university and from the
Arizona Board of Regents, but more details would
have been helpful, especially to university leaders who
are themselves coping with push-back from reform
efforts. To be sure, these omissions are understandable,
given that the book is more about the vision than the
mechanics of transformation at ASU.
This books call for greater connections to diverse
societal groups and needs, and its contention that
this mission will enhance rather than harm excellence
in education and research in U.S. academia, is its
heart. Whether or not universities can and should
do both and whether or not they are currently doing
are both open and perhaps controversial questions.
Many universities have social entrepreneurship,
global programs, and online course offerings, but few
have embraced the vision and rationale behind these
programs as completely as ASU, making the book
a required reading for those who study and serve as
university administrators.
References
Boardman, Craig. 2016. Designing the New American University
by Michael Crow and William Dabars: A Primer for
Technology Transfer Academics, Agencies, and Administrators.
Journal of Technology Transfer 41(1): 1738.
818 Public Administration Review September | October 2016
Bozeman, Barry. 2015. Bureaucratization in Academic Research
Policy: Perspectives from Red Tape Theory. Paper presented at
the 20th International Conference on Science and Technology
Indicators, Lugano, Switzerland.
Crow, Michael M., and Kerr, B. Dabars. 2015 Designing the
New American University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2015. Rebirth of the Research University. The
Chronicle of Higher Education 61(33): B69.
Etzkowitz, Henry, and Loet Leydesdorff. 2000. The Dynamics of
Innovation: From National Systems and Mode 2 to a Triple
Helix of UniversityIndustryGovernment Relations. Research
Policy 29(2): 10923.
Hammond, Thomas H. 2004. Herding Cats in University
Hierarchies: The Impact of Formal Structure on Decision-
Making in American Research Universities. In Governing
Academia, edited by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, 91138. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Hayford, Elizabeth. 2015. Designing the New American University.
Library Journal 140(7): 9899.
Kerr, Clark. 2001. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Lohmann, Susanne. 2002. Herding Cats, Moving Cemeteries,
and Hauling Academic Trunks: Why Change Comes Hard to
the University. Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the
Association of the Study of Higher Education, Sacramento, Los
Angeles, California.
Maienschein, Jane. 2015. Designing the New American University.
Nature 523(7562): 529.
Mokyr, Joel. 2002. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the
Knowledge Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
National Research Council. 2012. Research Universities and the
Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our
Nations Prosperity and Security. Washington, DC: National
Academies Press.
Newfield, Christopher. 2015. What Is New About the New
American University?. https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/
new-new-american-university, accessed February 27, 2016.
Porter, Michael E. 2000. Location, Competition, and Economic
Development: Local Clusters in a Global Economy. Economic
Development Quarterly 14(1): 1534.
Romer, Paul M. 1990. Endogenous Technological Change. Journal
of Political Economy 98(5): S71102.
Shapira, Philip. 2015. Designing the New American University: A
Review. Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University
of Manchester, Manchester, UK. https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/285769677_Designing_the_New_American_
University_A_Review, accessed February 27, 2016.
Tornatzky, Louis, and Elaine C. Rideout. 2014. Innovation U
2.0: Reinventing University Roles in a Knowledge Economy.
Innovation-U.com, accessed March 2, 2016.