If you’ve bothered to look at the featured articles on ASU’s homepage in the last couple weeks, you might have been pleased to see that President Michael Crow was named by Time magazine as one of the 10 best college presidents in the United States.

Or, if you’re a sourpuss, maybe you weren’t so thrilled.

From my anecdotal observations, many students at our lovely New American University don’t seem to like Crow very much. Yet when pressed for explanation, the anti-Crow bloc can never seem to provide any substantive rationale for their fear and loathing of our president.

Crow seems to get a lot of national attention these days, but I don’t see why this is a bad thing. He has been lauded by many as an innovator, an against-the-grain leader of higher-education reform and a radical for believing in the virtue of access at a time when exclusivity correlates directly to prestige.

Those sound like good things, right? So what, exactly, has Crow done to incite such great scorn?

Yes, ASU has fallen from the No. 1 spot for best party schools in America under Crow’s tenure. I know, I know — it’s rather upsetting we no longer have that infamous claim to fame.

But there are other, much more worthwhile, things to be proud of at ASU. Since Crow took the helm in 2002, many important University indexes have drastically improved.

“During [Crow’s] tenure, the university has more than doubled its yearly research spending, boosted its roster of National Merit Scholars 61 percent and claimed a spot on three separate rankings of America’s best colleges,” Time writes in its feature. “Meanwhile, the number of low-income Arizona freshmen enrolling each year has grown nearly ninefold and the population of minority students has jumped 62 percent.”

I’m sorry, but what about those numbers speaks to Crow doing a miserable job?

In times of hardship, people often find it easy to point the blame at those in power. Tuition has soared and faculty members are getting fired, so it must be Crow’s fault, right?

Such a conclusion ignores reality. Crow had nothing to do with the economic collapse of the state of Arizona — and he certainly had nothing to do with our state legislators putting education at the very bottom of their list of priorities.

The phenomenon of misguided blaming isn’t special to ASU. President Barack Obama is regularly blamed for the poor economy and for not getting the job done (so far) with health care reform, even though it’s a stalemate in Congress that’s marginalizing his attempts to overhaul the system.

Maybe the commonality between Obama and Crow — that is, being senselessly blamed for things not their fault — is what convinced Obama to deliver the commencement address at last semester’s graduation.

Or maybe Obama saw that Crow was doing, all things considered, a pretty decent job. His speech touched on many of the philosophical underpinnings of the New American University, after all.

When the chips are down, it’s easy to blame those in high-profile positions of power to ease frustrations.

But don’t blame those who are legitimately doing a good job.

Dustin is creating a top-10 list for why Crow is a good president. Help him out at dustin.volz@asu.edu