“Beginning in 2002 we began setting aside $3–7 million a year for strategic investment, with the result of about 100 new projects being launched and $500 million in new investments acquired. These projects concentrated on ASU research expansion and initiatives in entrepreneurship, health transformation, sustainability and other areas.” — ASU President Michael M. Crow
One avenue Crow created for those advances was Arizona Technology Enterprises. Established in 2003, AzTE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ASU Foundation with a mission to manage technology ventures from ASU and its AzTE partner, Northern Arizona University. AzTE works with universityaffiliated inventors and outside industry to transform scientific progress into products and services by mining university research, prosecuting patents, marketing inventions and negotiating licenses. This technology transfer brought two benefits to ASU: It facilitated efforts to attract and retain superior faculty and graduates, and it returned income to inventors and the university to support ongoing research. In 2011, less than a decade after its creation, AzTE assisted faculty members in obtaining 18 patents and helped with the launch of 10 startup corporations. While the university was tearing down and dismantling academic silos in favor of transdisciplinary cooperation among colleges and faculty and reshaping the idea of what a public university should be, it also was constructing a bold and audacious plan that would double the size of ASU in a decade.
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ASU Foundation for A New American University
ASU retained Baltimore-based Ayers Saint Gross to create a master plan for the New American University. The plan showed that the Tempe campus would grow to 13.2 million square feet from about 8 million square feet, and would eventually evolve into a modern research campus focused mainly on scientific investigation and advanced study for scholars. ASU’s East campus in southeast Mesa (today’s Polytechnic campus) would be geared toward applied engineering and other professional careers, while ASU’s West campus in northwest Phoenix would focus on liberal arts, education and teaching. The proposed downtown Phoenix campus would offer a mix of colleges and degrees in journalism, communications, nursing, health management and public administration. Growth would be channeled away from the Tempe campus — bursting at the seams with 50,000 students — toward the other campuses. The East campus, which had a student population of about 3,600 students in 2002, would eventually grow to 15,000 students in 2012. The West campus, which had a student population of about 7,000 students, would swell to a like number, while the proposed downtown Phoenix campus, which started with 3,000 students in 2006, also would break out at 15,000 students.