Arizona State University (commonly referred to as ASU or Arizona State) is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the U.S. state of Arizona. With a 2011 enrollment of 72,254, ASU is one of the largest universities in the United States by enrollment.b
Founded in 1885 as the Tempe Normal School for the Arizona Territory, the school came under control of the Arizona Board of Regents in 1945 and was renamed Arizona State College. A 1958 statewide ballot measure gave the university its present name.
ASU awards bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, and is broadly organized into 15 divisions and various institutes spread across four campuses: the original Tempe campus, the West campus in northwest Phoenix, the Polytechnic campus in eastern Mesa, and the Downtown Phoenix campus. All four campuses are accredited as a single institution by the Higher Learning Commission. The University is categorized as a Research University with very high research activity (RU/VH) as reported by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, and with a research expenditure of $310 million annually which has doubled since the fiscal year of 2003.
ASU's athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are collectively known as the Arizona State Sun Devils. They are members of the Pacific-12 Conference and have won 23 national championships.
Read more about Arizona State University: Organization and Administration, Campuses and Locations, Athletics
Famous quotes containing the words arizona, state and/or university:
“The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The longer a woman remains single, the more apprehensive she will be of entering into the state of wedlock. At seventeen or eighteen, a girl will plunge into it, sometimes without either fear or wit; at twenty, she will begin to think; at twenty-four, will weigh and discriminate; at twenty-eight, will be afraid of venturing; at thirty, will turn about, and look down the hill she has ascended, and sometimes rejoice, sometimes repent, that she has gained that summit sola.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)