Michael Crow The president of Arizona State on handling campus protests, embracing AI, the future of college sports, and partying

Since Oct. 7, protests and conflicts over free speech have erupted on college campuses and beyond. It seems that the job of university president has become one of the more stressful occupations in America. What's your stress level right now?

- SEAN GREGORY

The stress levels have gone up because we have to take leadership positions, we have to make decisions in a very difficult and challenging moment, call hate speech "hate speech," and at the same time protect the right to free speech. The stress is how do we do that and not get sucked into the political whirlpools that are bent on some kind of negative outcome?

The pro-Palestinian protests and occupation of a building at Columbia University generated worldwide attention. What grade would you give Columbia's president, Minouche Shafik, on her handling of the crisis? I'm not going to give grades to other university presidents. What I can say is it's important that universities be bastions for free speech, but it's important, in being a bastion for free speech, that we not be a bastion for anarchy.