The idea of ASU Farm originated in spring 2024 with a group of core ASU faculty members, staff, and Maya Dailey from Maya’s Farm in South Phoenix, which is approximately 6 miles southwest from ASU’s Tempe Campus. ASU Farm aims to realize ASU’s most recent design aspiration: Practice Principled Innovation. Principled Innovation (PI) places character and values at the center of decision-making and expresses ASU’s deep commitment to promote human flourishing within the communities we serve.
Why ASU Farm?
A growing number of universities and colleges in the United States and beyond have begun to focus on the cultivation of character and virtue among undergraduates in universities and colleges. For example, there is the Oxford Character Project, Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues, The Program for Leadership and Character and The Human Flourishing Program. However, no one to our knowledge has proposed to establish a robust network of farms with the explicit mission to cultivate both plants and people. ASU Farm aims to fill this gap by creating shared space for the cultivation of civic, moral, and intellectual virtues among ASU students and community members.
This project aims to achieve a variety of goals that are consistent with PI, such as integrating this design aspiration into our various initiatives that will reach ASU’s faculty, staff and students; introducing faculty, staff and students to the PI framework; creating novel and experiential classes for ASU students that are designed to develop character, which results in individual and community flourishing.