By Eliza Collins and Douglas Belkin | Photography and Video by Reuben J. Brown for WSJ

TEMPE, Ariz. -- In October, President Trump asked a handful of top universities to accept sweeping campus changes in exchange for federal-funding advantages. Most schools rejected the proposal, fearing Trump would undermine their independence.

One college president, though, had a different response: Why wasn't I invited?

Michael Crow, the outspoken longtime leader of Arizona State University, was miffed he hadn't been approached. ASU's sister school, the University of Arizona, had been invited. Crow, who had long championed higher-education reform and had signaled willingness to work with the administration, believed he should have been included. He and his advisers wondered if officials had mixed up the two schools, people familiar with the matter said.

While schools like Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publicly refused to sign onto the proposal, Crow contacted the Trump administration and offered to provide input, the people said. Two weeks later ASU was invited to a follow-up meeting to discuss Trump's agenda.

Elite universities have met Trump's campaign to remake higher education with distress and resistance. ASU is pursuing a different strategy, one that involves leveraging its populist approach to work with the White House and serve as a model in the Trump era.

ASU officials have no problem being alone or in a group working with the administration; they believe this would position ASU to help redesign what they see as a flawed system -- and capture as much support and money from the federal government as possible, people familiar with the matter said.

"There's always opportunity," Crow said in an interview. "And there's opportunity now."

In recent months, ASU has communicated with the White House on a new financial-aid idea, offered to help vet international students and scrambled to calm Trump officials in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing.

Crow's efforts have won praise at the top levels of the Trump administration. "I'm incredibly impressed with a lot of the work he's done," said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, whom Crow has hosted on campus. "I think he's a really smart guy."

Crow's critics argue university presidents must defy Trump and build strong alliances or risk their independence. "Safeguarding the well-being of one institution at the expense of the future of higher education writ large doesn't work," said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors. "I don't think anyone who makes that call will be covered in glory when we look back at this moment in 20 years."

Christopher Fiscus, a vice president at ASU, sees it differently. He said Crow's longtime vision is to revamp the whole system, not just one university. "Much of traditional higher education is too elite, with too much student debt, and with poor student outcomes for employment. Not here," he said. "The [Trump] administration is right that some things need to change."

ASU hasn't emerged unscathed from Trump's cuts to research grants and international-student enrollment. But Crow likens this period to the Civil War, when the government supported the creation of land-grant universities: "an unbelievable opportunity," he says, despite "bloodbaths going on all of the time."

'Seize the day'

This pragmatic approach is a hallmark of Crow, who has led the school's massive growth over the past two decades. There is opportunity for the bold amid the Trump turbulence, he says. "Carpe Diem. Seize the day, call the play."

The son of a Navy sailor, Crow attended Iowa State on an ROTC scholarship before earning a Ph.D. in public administration from Syracuse. He worked at Iowa State before entering administration at Columbia, where he rose to executive vice provost before taking the helm at ASU in 2002.

In Arizona, he set out to create what he calls "the New American University." Traditional universities, he believed, had become too expensive, exclusive and self-serving. Instead, he sought to enroll and graduate as many students as possible with degrees aligned with the labor market.

Early in his tenure, ASU graduated about 900 engineering students annually, despite strong industry demand. Crow made it easier to get into engineering programs. Now ASU graduates about 7,500 engineering students each year overall.

Any Arizona teen graduating high school in the top 25% of their class or whose score in college entrance exams is roughly in the top quarter qualifies for enrollment at ASU. Out-of-state applicants face some slightly higher thresholds. The school has a 90% acceptance rate, compared with about 4% at Harvard.

Crow's methods have both generated some disdain from leaders of more elite universities and elevated him to near-godlike status in Arizona, where residents have reaped the rewards of his empire-building. Unlike the home states of most of the Ivy League schools, Arizona is a major political battleground that Trump won in 2024.

Even before Trump's November victory, Crow had taken a stronger stance against practices conservatives also criticized elsewhere. When protests over the war in Gaza erupted across campuses, including at ASU, Crow adopted a harder line than many other university presidents. After students set up an encampment that the university deemed in violation of its policies, they were arrested. Crow then dispatched an adviser to tell prosecutors: Don't go lightly on these kids, prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, people familiar with the conversation recounted.

'Every conceivable idea'

Since Trump's inauguration, ASU officials have held multiple conversations with the administration about reforming federal education policies.

With the Education Department, ASU has discussed operating a pilot program to distribute financial aid in new ways, according to people familiar with the conversations. Crow and his advisers proposed a model they believe would boost graduation rates and the return on federal investment. While conversations are preliminary, the school is seeking to be more involved in how aid is distributed.

"We're submitting every conceivable idea that we can come up with," Crow said.

ASU officials also offered to help the State Department vet international students. Unlike some schools that are fighting the administration's efforts to crack down on foreign student enrollment, ASU has asked how it can meet the new demands faster and bring students to campus.

The school offered to hire and pay for an administration-approved third-party vendor to help vet students seeking to come to Arizona for school, according to people familiar with the matter. Crow said the State Department rejected the proposal. Crow is concerned about the administration's proposed 15% cap on international students, according to people familiar with his thinking.

ASU has hired the lobbying firm Continental Strategy, whose team includes former Trump administration and campaign officials, plus the daughter of Trump's chief of staff.

The school also joined a network of major Arizona businesses that are each committing $250,000 annually to an organization run by former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent. She is touting her relationship with members of the Trump administration and GOP-led Congress. Sinema is a professor at ASU and has donated millions of leftover campaign funds to the university.

ASU hasn't entirely escaped damage. Funding cuts at agencies including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Institutes of Health have cost ASU roughly $200 million in awards so far, according to ASU. A pullback of semiconductor research money has put into question a billion-dollar facility that had been on track to open at ASU in 2028. And Trump's student-visa restrictions have driven a small decline in international enrollment.

Crow hasn't always aligned with conservatives, including clashing with Trump ally Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor and Senate in recent years.

But Crow has worked to de-escalate confrontations with the Trump administration. In September, a misunderstanding over plans for a vigil honoring Kirk, the conservative activist and Arizona resident killed that month, sent ASU staff and their consultants scrambling to smooth things over with the president and his Justice Department.

In the days after Kirk's killing, conservative ASU students were planning a vigil for thousands of mourners. Initial confusion about the location of the vigil and whether it would cost organizers money bubbled up on social media. That caught the attention of Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at DOJ, who posted a warning to the school on social media: "ASU needs to check with a lawyer asap."

ASU officials fanned out to try to calm the tension. They posted on social media that they were never going to charge students for the event and said it was all a misunderstanding. The school's lobbyists went to work talking to Republican lawmakers while the Trump-aligned consultants made the case to the White House and DOJ directly, according to several people familiar with the matter. Several hours later, Dhillon posted that the issue had been resolved.

Crow says Arizona -- barely a century old -- with its cowboy spirit, is the place to try something new.

"Because the state is young and its cities and institutions are not bound by the weight of tradition," he wrote in 2002, "like an unfinished canvas, Arizona still epitomizes the frontier."

Write to Eliza Collins at eliza.collins@wsj.com and Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 26, 2025 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.