Ep 86: How to Design a STEM Curriculum for the 21st Century with Dr. David Ruth

0:00When I was a submarine officer, we spent a lot of time trying to train on these very technical systems that are involved in operating the reactor. what is called the protection and analysis system. It's how the reactor protects itself from either humans doing stupid things or the environment doing harmful things to it. And one way you can teach that system is to have a trainee just sort of memorize all this stuff. Another way to teach it is you challenge them to beat it. See if you can - Not in actual real life. No, so not have them do it, but give them the challenge. How would you beat that system?

0:31If our goal were to do - How would you blow up the nuclear? To be very clear to all of your audience, nobody out there is trying to blow up our reactors. But boy, you challenge a young, sharp kid. Think about how it might happen. How would you break it? Because what they have to do is they actually have to know the system. It's just like in warfighting. The way you beat your enemy is you understand how he operates. 100%. Well, the way you do cyber defense is you play a game to try to break in. It's a game. And so the break-in game, I had more learning happen about how P &A worked than ever just droning through, oh, here's this interlock, here's the system, whatever.

1:01Challenge them to beat it and they'll learn.

1:10Why is STEM important? Well, STEM is actually critical. Science, technology, engineering, and math. This is the foundation that's behind the innovation world. And frankly, the innovation world is going to be where a lot of the most important leaders come from in the next generation. And how do we teach innovation? How do we teach STEM for the 21st century? What does a leader of our society need to know about STEM? What's the leader who's going to build in the innovation world need to know? How do you take from the best of the academic world and from the key lessons from the innovation world to solve real problems, to actually build things in the world that are going to drive the future?

1:40Dr. David Ruth, our new dean of STEM at the University of Austin, is here today to discuss with us. Dr. David Ruth worked on attack submarines, aircraft carriers, was a war planner in Asia. He taught some of our best and brightest minds in the Navy. Now he's helping craft the curriculum to teach some of the best and brightest minds in our country. Let's hear from David what it would be like to be one of these founding students in our STEM program. I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to American Optimist. Dr. David Rue, thank you for joining us today. Thanks a lot for having me, Joe. Dave, you are the Dean of the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, or STEM, at the University of Austin, the new university we're building.

2:12And before that, you concluded a 31-year career in the Navy. That's absolutely right. Thank you for your service. So you grew up in a military family. Your dad was a Vietnam-era Navy pilot. What motivated you to serve? Yeah, so my dad loved what he did. He came home from work every day saying, I can't believe they pay me to do this. So it made me attracted to that kind of work. And my mom and dad inculcated in me this sense of service. And I lived, you know, I was in high school in the Cold War. I was living overseas. And I just had the sense that serving was the right thing to do. And it was a great way to follow after my dad's footsteps.

2:41Why'd you decide it was time to join UATX? Yeah, that's a great question. I had a great gig at my last gig at the Naval Academy. And it would have been great to stay there, but I had this opportunity to do a new thing. And my opportunity to look for new stuff arose at exactly the same time as UATX was launching. and that it was just too great an opportunity not to throw my hat in the ring. And then here I am. Another way to fight for our country. That's right. You know, tell us about your early naval career. You worked on an attack submarine, right? An aircraft carrier. You were a war planner in Asia.

3:09Tell us about this a little bit. Yeah. So it's kind of amazing to have already sort of had that chapter of life. So I started as a nuclear engineer and submarine warfare officer. And what can I say about that? Well, it's the silent service. So we don't really talk much about what we do, but I get to work with amazing sailors. And I got to go to places that I can't even talk about, but it really felt like we were directly contributing to national security issues by serving in all corners of the globe underwater. How long would you spend underwater at a time? So my longest time underwater is only six weeks.

3:38So still a long time to be underwater. Yeah. Yeah. So is it kind of cramped in there? So you're so busy. I don't think you even notice I would way rather be on a submarine than in office space with cubicles, but yeah, you get used to it. The food's good. People are great. and it's important work. Are there people who get claustrophobic? Those people don't join. Yeah, I probably wouldn't join. Sorry. I mean, I love to serve different ways. Those people don't join. It's like a tight space still. Yeah, it is. What were some of the highlights for you? Yeah. So working with amazing sailors, you know, most of these sailors I worked with on a submarine, they could easily have gone to college and done something that wasn't turning wrenches on a submarine, but whatever their family background was, they signed up to serve.

4:16The Navy recognized how smart they were and they made them nuclear engineers and sonar techs and things like that. So I got to serve with great people and go to amazing places. So you've been in a submarine for a while and you're doing something secret, then you pop up at a port and get to go visit another country. That's exactly what it is. Secret and then liberty. And the more secret than liberty. Yeah. So seeing a ton of the world, my first visit to Israel was actually on a submarine. Oh, wow. A quick sea story about that. We were pulling into Israel. We'd been at sea for five months, not underwater for five months, but away from home for five months.

4:42And we're pulling into Haifa. we're a month from coming home and the port of Haifa, they're on strike. The front gate, like there's a stack of tires and they're on fire and there's no power to the base. And so normally what you do is you pull in a port. And the first thing you do is you plug, essentially you plug your ship in so you don't have to run the reactor anymore. They called us and said, can you provide us power? So like our first day in the port was a, here's a pitch for nuclear energy. Why their power broke? So they had a power outage, they'd had a strike. And I think there was some, I don't know exactly why their power was out, but they needed it from us.

5:17So our first 24 hours in Haifa was as a portable nuclear power plant for the port of Haifa. It's pretty exciting. So I have to ask, cause you know, I read all these old books and there's all these metaphors about being like a drunken sailor and being crazy. Like there were some of the guys, big partiers when you finally came into port, is that, is that still a thing? So it's less a thing now when I had about five or 10 years in, there was this effort to de-glamorize alcohol, which I think is, is well intentioned for sure. But I mean, just imagine you put 130 guys in a metal tube six weeks at a time, and then you spring them loose in a Liberty Port where all the closest shops offer alcohol and other things.

5:54It's just going to - So there's still parties going on. Is there just the nature of the business? It's the nature of the business. I think we're doing it in a safer way. In some ways, the more safety you put in, it kills some good fun, but it also gets rid of some trouble. So it's a trade-off. It's good to know that traditions that are hundreds of years old haven't entirely changed. They have, and I have a, on my office wall, I have my shellback certificate, which is when I cross the equator on an aircraft carrier. And that involves a, I don't want to call it hazing, but some sort of friendly fraternal activity.

6:22And so I have that proudly on my wall. It's called a shellback certificate. Shellback, yeah, shellback certificate. Everybody that's crossed the equator in the Navy gets one after they survive the fraternal. The challenges. Challenges, yeah. That's funny. And so after all of this, you taught for 13 years as a military professor of mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy in 2009 to 22. you. Can you share a bit about your academic career and the classes you taught? Yeah, sure. So I had the great privilege to teach at my alma mater for 13 years. I was a professor of mathematics, but I taught mostly upper level probability statistics, optimization courses, some machine learning, kind of current things that students would be able to go put to work out in the fleet.

7:01And then did research in those areas as well. I want to ask your scholarship expertise is in non-parametric statistics with multivariate change detection applications, nonparametric statistics with multivariate change detection applications. What does that mean? Yeah. In short, so if you think of statistics as using data to understand systems that involve uncertainty, a lot of the ways that people approach that is that they assume that the uncertainty is following a certain model. And in one or two dimensions, that assumption is not bad. Once you get into really high dimensional spaces, you think about monitoring a machine.

7:35Say a flying helicopter has got 20 ,000 different things you're measuring and you want to know is something going wrong. So there's no simple models you could put. Yeah, there are no simple models. And so if you strip away distributional assumptions, the math gets much harder. That I found challenging and interesting. So nonparametric statistics goes after those tough problems. So it's like super chaotic problems for things to go wrong in all sorts of random ways. Yeah, right. I mean, my interest was making sure that pilots that are flying helicopters learn that something's going wrong before they're flying the plane.

8:03That was really what drove me to that. There still must be certain like vectors or certain things you your breakdown as a common way as things go wrong, right? Even there's lots of those variables. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So specifically on the reliability side, you're right. You can find modes of failure and things like that. The part where my research focuses is on when you're looking at time varying measurements in say 20 ,000 directions, sometimes things will subtly change where everything's changing a little bit. No one is changing enough to give you the high temperature alarm or the low oil pressure alarm.

8:33But if you look at all of them. without the assumptions that people typically use. If you apply some sharp math, you can find changes. That's really interesting because like a really great experienced pilot might have like intuition, like something's slightly off here. That's exactly right. So this is trying to have machines help him do it. It's essentially AI-ing some of the things that you've relied on pilots' guts to do for a long time. Got it. So everything changes, but nothing's an alarm. You still know something's off and you should be able to detect that. That's the point. That's it. That's cool.

8:58Let's go to 21st century STEM here. You're now the Dean of UATX's Center for STEM. Before we get into UATX specifically, let's talk about designing a STEM curriculum for the 21st century. Why does it require a new approach to do STEM? There's lots of things that are the same as they've always been. What's missing in universities today? Yeah, that's a really good question. And there are some great things going on in universities now, but there are some things that we want to reclaim. Our provost often talks about the Roman god Janice, who has a face pointing backwards and has a face pointing forward.

9:27And so we want to develop students who think about STEM built upon a study of kind of the great human questions. Like the reason that you study STEM at all is because you have some oughts that you'd like to approach or some great human questions. So that's a foundation that some STEM programs will just omit and they'll kind of race straight to the STEM. So it's like vocational versus actually like the philosophy. Yeah, that'd be one way to think about it. We'd like these folks to have some philosophical underpinnings for sure. But the other thing that I think is the big problem is that particularly in STEM, things are advancing so, so quickly.

10:04And certainly in some research areas like PhD programs at the greatest schools, they may be on the cutting edge, but undergraduate curriculum is just stodgy. The lesson plans that my colleagues were teaching at the Naval Academy in 2020 were the same ones that I received in 1987. And some stuff doesn't change, but there are a lot of things that ought to be refreshed. And so we're going to do what you would do if you're starting over, refreshing so that you can meet today's challenges. Because then imagine you still want to learn a lot of the same math and physics and other things that you taught 30, 40 years ago.

10:37But you want to teach them in different ways based on what's possible now, or you want to teach certain parts of them that are more useful? Or how do you think about that? Yeah, that's a really good question. So there are some things that a scientifically minded person should just know. things like newton's second law you know the second law of thermodynamics in fact there are some folks who skip all of the basics will try and come up with these innovative ideas where effectively what they're trying to do is make cold things go to hot or balls roll uphill i mean not that literally but they've missed the foundation they miss what's possible reality is always going to win and so and so uh identifying the things that are crucial for scientific understanding are things that we're going to do and that's going to be baked into the core of every stem students' education.

11:18And then the trick is to figure out when you wean from that into the cutting edge stuff, where they're racing to the front and looking at today's really challenge. I guess you want to jump back and forth between the basics and the really exciting things at the front. Because I imagine sometimes those things get students really engaged, but then they have to keep bringing back to the basics. Yeah. I think one good pedagogical model is when, as you're teaching these foundations, you're looking forward to really exciting applications. And then as you're starting to focus on the applications, you keep reaching back and and finding these transferable concepts.

11:45You know, here's an idea we talked about way back whenever, uh, here's how that's actually showing up. I always felt I would have appreciated differential equations more if I was like, you know, partial differential equations, if I was exposed to like exact uses while I was learning them. Cause it's really hard and abstract sometimes. I'm so glad you brought up Divi-Gues. I taught a Divi-Gues class once and I had a physics student in this class. And, uh, I remember we were talking about an idea of resonance, which is important in all sorts of physical applications. And I was given this before we went through unleashing the math, we did this kind of discussion about ideas about resonance and he put his hand in the air and he said, he didn't call me professor, it was Captain Ruth.

12:20This doesn't sound like math. It sounds like ideas. And I thought to myself, I'm so glad you said that, but it's depressing at the same time that students would think that math is an ideas is a sad feature of the current system. And so ideas and math go together. We're going to make that happen. I love it. Well, I could, I could use some refreshing on some of these things. Sit in anytime. Looking forward to it. We won't even make you pay. Oh, yes, you will. In recent years, we've seen, obviously, identity politics, wokeness, even into the sciences, something that a lot of us thought wouldn't happen.

12:50How do you guard against that? And how do you cultivate authentic curiosity and openness among students without going into those areas? Yeah, it is surprising to me. I'm surprised. I was looking at a paper recently in what would be considered a quality journal in an area of biology. And at the end of the article, they had these identity statements where the authors listed these features about themselves, which, quite frankly, are completely irrelevant to the study. And there are these Mertonian norms and science goes all the way back to the 40s. And one of them is called universalism, which I will paraphrase as scientific validity gives not a rip about your personal preferences.

13:28And that 60 years ago, nobody would have argued with that. Today, that's coming under fire. So here's how you get at that. One is that you repeat that mantra over and over again. You model that in the work that you do. You model it in the teaching. And then you just keep telling students, you know, reality is going to win. Reality wins. And as you continue to demonstrate reality winning in STEM, I think students will start to believe it. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Well, hopefully we're able to keep the nonsense out of things and focus on what matters. As long as I'm here, we won't have any nonsense.

13:56Let's dive more into STEM at UHCX. First, what does it look like to build a STEM program from the ground up? Where do you start? That's the most daunting thing about my assignment here so far is to build from the ground up. So the first place you start is you surround yourself by great people. I have advisors across the spectrum of math and sciences who have helped me think about what does great STEM look like today. So great advisors is the first step. The second is just taking advantage of the fact that when you're starting over, you don't have to hold on to stuff that is long overdue to be expired.

14:27And so thinking innovatively, thinking about how to take advantage of new starts has been a big part of developing the curriculum. And then one thing that we're going to do that not everybody's doing is I have some colleagues that use the phrase, let's teach STEM assuming that computers exist. That kind of sounds silly. And I don't just mean computer programming. What I mean is that so humans are amazing beings. They have innate dignity. And I think humans are really special. But as computers, they're third rate. And so STEM should spend less time having folks do the tedium of computation and more time on modeling problems, interpreting solutions, validating sensitivity analysis.

15:09So we're going to redistribute where the focus is so that students are employing computers where they ought to be doing the work and doing more of the hard human thing. Know how to do computation, but don't spend a ton of time. That's exactly right. Our first concentration is actually computing and data science. Can you give us a course overview on what knowledge and skills students are expected to learn from computing and data science? Yeah. So like all STEM students, the computing and data science students will get a rigorous core that involves quantifying uncertainty. They'll have physics, they'll have programming, you know, this kind of core that every STEM person I think ought to know.

15:39But in this particular concentration area, it's a bit of a blend of what the, we essentially looked at what are the best computing science programs doing out there and what are some great analytics programs doing out there and how can we combine those sort of the best ofs in a way that is going to enable students to do great projects. So it's going to involve a lot of programming. It'll have data structures and algorithms and these things that you are probably familiar with, with some cutting edge analytics techniques and things like that. And then a ton of elective space for them to really do things like projects and kind of player support and things like that.

16:13So around the University of Austin, we have a lot of people who've built big innovative companies. A lot of our friends are eager to be helpful, who are kind of the founders who can know what skills are necessary. How are you integrating that into things like the computing data science area? Yeah. So one is just asking them and taking some of our curriculum is directly an output of talking to folks in Austin that are saying, these are the things that are really important for kids to know. So that's an important bit. And then a thing that we may get sucked a little later is actually making connections with those people to have our students engaged with those companies.

16:43I'm actually really excited about the degree to which I think our students are going to be embedded in Austin and doing some kind of learning and doing together. There's some pretty cool, pretty cool companies here. Amazing. Yeah. The Boring Company and SpaceX are here, obviously. And I think our friend who's the CEO of Boring Company wants to help us with mechanical engineering, which is exciting. That's exactly right. Yeah. In fact, I'm meeting. So he and I were corresponding this week, in fact, and his lead talent guy and I are meeting next week at Boring. We're going to start talking about what this is going to look like.

17:09By the time students are ready to engage in that, we're going to have the lights are going to be on. The gears are going to be turning. And I wish I were a student at this time. Definitely. Well, I bought some land nearby there to build a little place for university as well. Awesome. I love it. have a big place we can go practice building things. This is the way to do it. Obviously, we have other companies in town in the defense world and the computer science world. And I guess the idea is expose them to the hardest problems going on there. And hopefully, some of that could tie back into what they're learning in the advanced coursework.

17:35Yeah. And if I can add just a little bit of that, it's one thing to expose students to ideas. And there are a lot of companies say, oh, that's an intro shape. You just haven't come in. It's more than that. So these companies are going to actually get the feedback to the curriculum. When I talk to CEOs of other companies, one of their complaints is that they don't think what the students are learning or what these CEOs value. Imagine if you had a university that had the agility to listen to industry, listen to the doers and start to shape the curriculum with that. I think companies are excited to be involved in shaping what these students are learning and then embedding these students, not just for a summer, but for a full two-year period.

18:08I mean, obviously they won't be over there every day for two years, but sort of a steady strain where they're seeing the problems, we're feeding the problems back into our curriculum. And these kids are going to be ready to do good work right when they walk out the door. It's very interesting dialectic because historically you either had schools that were more philosophically minded about basically the intellectual foundations, which we have and those sorts of things. And what it means to be a citizen or a public and all of this highfalutin stuff, which is important. Or you had like technical vocational schools iterating.

18:36And I think so some of these other schools, like what you'd think like Harvard and Yale and et cetera, they'd be like, well, we're too highbrow to care what business thinks. And besides, if you go back 200, 300 years, business wasn't really that sophisticated. it. It was kind of seen as like the Cretans, basically. And I think that's the way it was, like, very arrogant attitude against it. Whereas now, fast forward to today, you still want to teach people to be a citizen. That's actually not even being done in these schools anymore, you know, to teach them to be courageous and have those values and principles and intellectual foundations.

19:02But you also, I think, for the smartest people in the world in STEM, my impression is a lot of those are in the companies now. So you have to work with the companies if you want to do well. Absolutely. It is really, to think of the ivory, so ivory Tower used to be kind of this not pejorative. It was this notion that scholars would retreat and they'd think big thoughts without sort of the noise of the background. And now it's a totally pejorative term. It gives a sense of disconnectedness and no awareness of what's going on out in the real world. So we're looking at kind of a wean where they go from this very deep philosophical intellectual foundations underpinning.

19:33And while they're still with us, we deliver them out to doing great things. Interesting. So the first two years are a little more Ivory Tower. with starting to learn some of the STEM and everything else, then you go into the really hardcore real world. Yeah. And if I can be clear, we haven't done a great job marketing, even though the two year, first two years focuses on intellectual foundations, students are going to be able to right out of the gate, start taking their STEM courses. So, so, so the IF is the dominant thing in their first term and it weans down over the first two years and then their focus area starts to grow.

20:02So they aren't going to have to wait is what I'm getting at. You recently wrote a blog about three features of STEM at UATX, starting with a curriculum grounded in wisdom and motivated by practical application. Let's touch on the project courses. I think it's really important for talented students to learn together. One of the best things at Stanford that I really enjoyed was CS248 was one of the courses. We had to make a 3D video game, which was pretty cool 20 years ago to have to learn how to do. Are there going to be similar types of challenges for electives? And how are you thinking about it?