Arizona State University

• 1. Introduction

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  Arizona State University began its life on the 12th of March 1885, as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe - a four-room schoolhouse on a 20-acre plot, largely donated by two Tempe residents named George and Martha Wilson. Classes started on the 8th of February 1886, with just 33 students. Nobody at the time could have predicted that this humble teacher-training institution would one day enroll more than 160,000 students, house five Nobel laureates on its faculty, and lead the planet in solar generating capacity among universities.

  What drove a small territorial school to reinvent itself again and again, across more than a century of name changes, budget crises, and presidential visions? How did a place once known simply as the Normals become a flagship of American research? And what does it mean to call yourself a "New American University" when the old model still dominates the rankings?

• 2. From Normals to University

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  Arizona State University was one of roughly 180 "normal schools" founded across the United States in the late 19th century to train teachers for the rapidly expanding public common school system. Most of those schools eventually grew; many became state colleges, and later state universities. ASU followed that same arc, but with an unusual number of name changes along the way.

  From 1889 to 1903 it was the Tempe Normal School of Arizona. Then Tempe Normal School until 1925, Tempe State Teachers College until 1929, Arizona State Teachers College until 1945, Arizona State College until 1958, and finally Arizona State University - a name approved by a 2-to-1 margin of Arizona voters. The name changes were not merely cosmetic. Each one reflected a genuine broadening of mission.

  Under the 30-year tenure of president Arthur John Matthews, from 1900 to 1930, the school achieved all-college student status and built its first dormitories in 1902 - the first dormitories constructed anywhere in the state. Matthews also planted 110 Mexican Fan Palms along what is now called Palm Walk, a century-old landmark still visible on the Tempe campus today.

  During the Great Depression, Ralph Waldo Swetman arrived from Humboldt State Teachers College and served a three-year term. Enrollment doubled under his watch, topping 1,000 students for the first time.

• 3. The Gammage Era

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  In 1933, Grady Gammage became president of Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe, beginning a tenure that would last nearly 28 years. His presidency guided the school through its most consequential name transformation and its most celebrated architectural commission.

  Gammage oversaw the award of the school's first Master of Arts in Education in 1938, its first Doctor of Education degree in 1954, and the Arizona Board of Regents' approval of ten non-teaching master's degrees in 1956. By the time he led the vote that renamed the institution Arizona State University in 1958, two other names had been considered and rejected: Tempe University and State University at Tempe.

  Gammage's most lasting physical legacy was commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to design an auditorium on the Tempe campus. Wright completed the design, but neither man lived to see the building finished. Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium - now known as ASU Gammage - was completed in 1964, five years after both Gammage and Wright had died.

  Harold D. Richardson, who succeeded Gammage in an acting capacity from December 1959 to September 1960, served only nine months but used that time to lay groundwork for recruiting well-credentialed research science faculty. That quiet preparation made the next decade's expansion possible.

• 4. The Research Turn

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  G. Homer Durham, ASU's 11th president, presided over a transformation in academic ambition. Under his tenure, the Arizona Board of Regents authorized doctoral degree programs in six fields in 1961, including the Doctor of Philosophy. By the time Durham's nine-year tenure ended, ASU enrollment had more than doubled, reaching 23,000 students in 1969.

  The presidents who followed - Harry K. Newburn, John W. Schwada, and J. Russell Nelson - pushed enrollment and academic stature higher still. The ASU West Valley campus was established in 1984 and its construction completed in 1986. By the 1990s, the institution's research identity was forming in earnest.

  Lattie F. Coor, president from 1990 to 2002, added the Polytechnic campus and extended education sites across Arizona. Through private donations, more than $500 million was invested in the university during his 12-year tenure. Among those investments were the naming and endowing of Barrett, The Honors College, and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

  In 2023, ASU was admitted to the Association of American Universities, an elite group of 71 research institutions in the United States and Canada. The university now spends $673 million annually on research and ranks 43rd nationally for research expenditures. ASU also ranks in the top ten for NASA-funded research.

• 5. The New American University

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  Michael M. Crow became ASU's 16th president on the 1st of July 2002, and at his inauguration outlined a vision he called the "New American University" - one built on openness and inclusion rather than selectivity. He described the goal as "one university in many places."

  Crow's tenure brought the Downtown Phoenix campus online, expanded the West Valley and Polytechnic campuses, and established learning centers in Lake Havasu City, Thatcher, Yuma, and Tucson. Since 2002, more than 1.5 million square feet of research space has been added, and the university's research expenditures have tripled.

  The economic downturn that began in 2008 hit Arizona particularly hard. ASU capped enrollment, closed roughly four dozen academic programs, consolidated colleges, and reduced staff. When recovery arrived by 2011, an article in Slate noted that research funding had nearly tripled to $350 million, degree production had increased by 45 percent, and enrollment of students from Arizona families below the poverty line had risen by 647 percent since Crow's arrival.

  In June 2022, the United States Department of Education designated ASU a Hispanic-serving institution, recognizing that Hispanic students had comprised over 25 percent of the university's total undergraduate enrollment during the fall semester of 2021 - the first time that threshold had been crossed in the school's history.

• 6. Research, Space, and Invention

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  ASU professor Donald Johanson, who discovered the 3.18-million-year-old fossil hominid Lucy in Ethiopia, established the Institute of Human Origins in 1981. The institute was founded in Berkeley, California, and moved to ASU in 1997.

  The Biodesign Institute emerged as a centerpiece of ASU's health research. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biodesign developed a rapid, saliva-based testing option and partnered with the Arizona Department of Health Services to make it available to the public. In October 2021, the institute announced its millionth test. Research conducted there by professor Charles Arntzen made possible the production of Ebola antibodies in specially modified tobacco plants, which researchers at Mapp Biopharmaceutical used to create the Ebola therapeutic ZMapp - a treatment credited with saving the lives of two aid workers. Arntzen was named the number-one honoree in Fast Company's 2015 list of the most creative people in business.

  In 2012, ASU built a LEED Gold Certified, 298,000-square-foot Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building at a cost of $110 million to house the School of Earth and Space Exploration. The building hosts work on the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer - the first major scientific instrument completely designed and built at ASU for a NASA space mission. In 2017, Lindy Elkins-Tanton of ASU was selected by NASA to lead a deep space mission to Psyche, a metal asteroid believed to be a former planetary core. The mission carried a price tag of $450 million.

  On the intellectual property front, Skysong Innovations, the university's exclusive IP management company, has fostered the launch of more than 180 companies based on ASU research and attracted more than $999 million in venture funding. The U.S. National Academy of Inventors ranks ASU in the top ten nationally and eleventh globally for U.S. patents awarded to universities.

• 7. Traditions and Identity

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  Gold is the oldest color associated with ASU, dating to 1896 when the school was still the Tempe Normal School. Maroon and white were added in 1898. The mascot, Sparky the Sun Devil, was named by student vote on the 8th of November 1946 - before that, the teams had been called the Normals, then the Owls, then the Bulldogs.

  The Sun Devil Marching Band was created in 1915 and became, in 1991, the first of only two Pac-12 marching bands to receive the Sudler Trophy from the John Philip Sousa Foundation. The band has performed at the Fiesta Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Holiday Bowl, and Super Bowl XLII. The fight song "Maroon and Gold" was authored by former band director Felix E. McKernan in 1948.

  The Lantern Walk is one of the oldest traditions on campus, dating to 1917. Originally, seniors would carry lanterns up the mountain while freshmen followed and repeated an oath of allegiance to the university. Today the walk ends with a fireworks display and is held the week before Homecoming, itself a tradition dating to 1924.

  The "A" on the slope of Tempe Butte has marked the mountainside since 1938. The original letter was destroyed by vandals using pipe bombs in 1952, and a replacement built of reinforced concrete was completed in 1955. The explosion also destroyed many ancient Hohokam petroglyphs on the site, though many archaeological features around the mountain survived.

  The Curtain of Distraction, a student-driven free-throw disruption ritual at basketball games, began in 2013 and has grown large enough that ESPN estimated it gives ASU a one-to-three point advantage per game. In 2016, former Olympian Michael Phelps emerged from the curtain wearing a Speedo during a game against Oregon State.

• 8. Scale and Reach Today

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  ASU enrolled 160,051 students at the time of its most recent count, with 81,541 of them attending online. That scale places it among the largest public universities by enrollment in the United States.

  The faculty stands at 5,679 members, including five Nobel laureates, eleven MacArthur Fellows, ten Pulitzer Prize winners, 26 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and 289 Fulbright Program American Scholars. The library system holds 4.5 million volumes and ranks 34th largest in the United States and Canada. Recent additions to the special collections include a privately held set of manuscripts by poet Ruben Dario.

  The Arizona State Sun Devils compete in 26 varsity-level sports in NCAA Division I as members of the Big 12 Conference. Sun Devil teams have accumulated 165 national championships, including 24 NCAA trophies. A total of 179 Sun Devils have made Olympic teams, winning 60 medals: 25 gold, 12 silver, and 23 bronze.

  ASU's sustainability program stands as the first in the United States to offer degrees in the field; its School of Sustainability was established in spring 2007 and began enrolling undergraduates in fall 2008. The university generated over 24 megawatts of electricity from on-campus solar arrays and added a 29-megawatt installation at Red Rock, Pinal County, in January 2017. ASU has set a goal of becoming the first large research university to achieve carbon neutrality across its Scope 1, 2, and non-transportation Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions - a benchmark that no comparable institution has yet reached.