Arizona State grew from a four-room teacher school into a 160,000-student giant
In 1886, 33 students started classes in a single four-room schoolhouse in Tempe, on land mostly donated by a local couple. Today Arizona State University counts 160,051 students, over half of them online, alongside five Nobel laureates on its faculty and Sun Devil athletes with 60 Olympic medals.
On March 12, 1885, the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature voted into being a Territorial Normal School in Tempe, one of about 180 normal schools founded in that era to train teachers for fast-growing public schools. Its campus was a 20-acre plot, largely a gift from George and Martha Wilson, and classes opened on February 8, 1886. The name kept changing as ambitions grew: it became Tempe State Teachers College in 1925, offering four-year education degrees, and Arizona State Teachers College in 1929.
Long presidencies shaped it. Grady Gammage arrived in 1933 and stayed nearly 28 years, building up the campus and launching graduate programmes. Under G. Homer Durham, the 11th president, the Board of Regents approved doctoral programmes in 1961, and enrollment more than doubled to 23,000 by 1969. A West Valley campus followed in the 1980s, and Lattie Coor, president from 1990 to 2002, added the Polytechnic campus and raised over 500 million dollars in private gifts.
In 2002 Michael Crow became the 16th president with a plan for a New American University, open and inclusive, operating as one university in many places. Donations funded major research centres such as the Biodesign Institute, and the university set out to meet the criteria of the Association of American Universities, which it has since joined. The 2008 downturn hit Arizona hard, forcing enrollment caps and the closure of some four dozen programmes. Later came the absorption of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in 2015, joint programmes with Mayo Clinic, and a law school move to downtown Phoenix in 2016.
The scale now is striking. ASU holds the top research classification, offers more than 400 undergraduate degree programmes, and in fall 2024 had 5,679 faculty, including 11 MacArthur Fellows and 10 Pulitzer winners. Its Sun Devils play 26 varsity sports in the Big 12 and have won 165 national championships.
Source: Arizona State University
