ASU will stay committed to a strategy that ensures the success of Arizona, President Michael Crow said in a speech Tuesday night at the Tempe Center for the Arts.

Crow’s speech delivered what he called the University’s long-term strategic plan to about 400 members of ASU and the local community. The plan, which looks beyond the current budget crisis, calls for ASU to continue to produce innovative ways to benefit students and the community.

“Universities actually have some responsibility for the outcome of their communities,” Crow said.

For ASU to fulfill this responsibility, he said the University must focus its resources on improving all aspects of the community.

By reaching out to the community through efforts like educational partnerships with Arizona’s K-12 schools, medical and technological research, and global engagement in sustainability, the University can be an integral part of Arizona’s economic future, he said.

Crow said that the idea is not new, but it has not been effectively implemented in the past. He called his plan for ASU “the original idea of the old University.”

In the 1780s, the Founding Fathers created plans for a public university that would benefit the entire country, Crow said, but those plans were never carried through.

Several private schools like Harvard University or Columbia University were established around this time with similar goals but never successfully achieved them, he said.

“All of them had been created with a public purpose, and all of them served almost no one,” Crow said.

Those schools served only the elite and had very little effect on the surrounding community, he said. But ASU’s vision is to accept everyone who is qualified and to provide everyone with an excellent and accessible education.

“Why would we not be the genesis for … the kind of university that this country actually needs?” he asked.

Johnnie Ray, president of the ASU Foundation, also spoke to community members, saying the University needs to discover its role in today’s world and organize itself to meet upcoming challenges.

Ray said the new vision of public universities should be to act as central figures in efforts to bring change.

“Most large research universities have yet to tap their potential to serve,” he said.

The best way to actively serve the community is for universities to turn their enormous intellectual muscle outward and focus on solving major issues, Ray said.

Crow’s vision for the future involves a university that is socially embedded and socially responsible. The University is already involved in education and research to develop single-shot pneumonia vaccines and water-purification systems that could save millions of lives worldwide, he said.

Engaging in these types of social-responsibility activities requires a system that encourages risk-taking and promotes fast-paced change, Crow said. Those values will allow the University to succeed in the future, he said.

“We don’t transform society, but we produce people who do,” Crow said. “If we’re not doing that, we’re failing.”

Reach the reporter at adam.sneed@asu.edu.