Hello there. This is Mark Bowerline with another conversation.

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David Ruth is dean of the University of Austin Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Previously, he was military professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy.

He joins us to talk about the University of Austin, the project, which is an interesting experiment in higher education that promises to develop in interesting ways in years to come.

Dean Ruth, welcome.

Mark, thanks so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

When did you first tell us the history of the university, Why did it come into being? Who were the players?

Sure. So almost two years ago today, Mark, on November 8th, night of 2021, Panos essentially publicly launched the University of Austin through Barry Weiss's substack at the time

called Common Sense. And that connection was based on the fact that Pano, Barry, and a few other

leading thinkers, intellectuals, and doers. That also includes Neil Ferguson, Joe Lonsdale,

who's the chair of our board currently, folks who recognize that higher

education was vitally important also had this sense that something was terribly wrong with higher ed.

And so those folks is a very, very small group of people with big ideas and big aspirations

publicly launched the idea of a university.

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