We intercepted Sanjay Sarma before he took off for Logan Airport and meet in building 35 to discuss his book, Grasp - the Science Transforming How We Learn, education, and MIT.
Professor Sarma recently stepped down as MIT Vice President of Open Learning where he led MIT initiatives, such as MITx, edX, OpenCourseware, the Integrated Learning Initiative, and many others. He is now heading to Malaysia, to take the tiller as President and CEO of the Asia School of Business.
https://asb.edu.my/
Another Lock the Quill Global Challenge winner is announced, and we reset the meter for March. Email your address to lockthequill@mit.edu. The farthest listener in March will win a Lock the Quill sticker, and *may* be a contender for a coveted T-shirt, though the competition is fierce.
Thanks to Professor Evan Ziporyn for the MIT Gamelan track!
https://arts.mit.edu/cast/
Podcast specific:
Podcast Instagram: @lockthequill
Comments or questions: lockthequill@mit.edu
The Lab at MIT:
Pappalardo Lab Instagram: @pappalardolab
Comments or questions: pappalardolab@mit.edu
Pappalardo Lab website
We intercepted Sanjay Sarma before he took off for Logan Airport and meet in building 35 to discuss his book, Grasp - the Science Transforming How We Learn, education, and MIT.
Professor Sarma recently stepped down as MIT Vice President of Open Learning where he led MIT initiatives, such as MITx, edX, OpenCourseware, the Integrated Learning Initiative, and many others. He is now heading to Malaysia, to take the tiller as President and CEO of the Asia School of Business.
https://asb.edu.my/
Another Lock the Quill Global Challenge winner is announced, and we reset the meter for March. Email your address to lockthequill@mit.edu. The farthest listener in March will win a Lock the Quill sticker, and *may* be a contender for a coveted T-shirt, though the competition is fierce.
Thanks to Professor Evan Ziporyn for the MIT Gamelan track!
https://arts.mit.edu/cast/
Podcast specific:
Podcast Instagram: @lockthequill
Comments or questions: lockthequill@mit.edu
The Lab at MIT:
Pappalardo Lab Instagram: @pappalardolab
Comments or questions: pappalardolab@mit.edu
Pappalardo Lab website
[music]
Speaker 1: Lock the Quill.
Danny: In this episode, we spend some time with mechanical engineering professor and entrepreneur, Sanjay Sarma, right before he boards a plane. Most recently Sanjay was MIT's vice president of Open Learning with a decade of service running MIT's digital learning and education initiatives. Think MITX, the Integrated Learning Initiative, J-WEL, Open Courseware, the list goes on and on. Sanjay and I talk about his book, Grasp, teaching and learning, MIT, and his new adventures as president and CEO of the Asia School of Business in Malaysia. We also get to the bottom of a little incident in a campus parking garage.
[music]
[foreign language]
Danny: You got that, Scott?
Scott: Oh yes, I got all of it.
Danny: [laughs] Congratulations to John of Tangerang, Indonesia. He's the winner of February's Lock the Quill Global Challenge.
Scott: Tough to get further away than Indonesia.
Danny: That's far, Scott.
Scott: Oh, yes.
Danny: That's 9,934 miles, 15,987 kilometers, or 9,394,281 smoots.
Scott: We need to come up with a unit of measurement here at Papalardo.
Danny: Any proposals?
Scott: A quill. What else could we use?
Danny: We could do it.
Scott: Lay it all across the Harvard Bridge, mark it all down, and become famous.
Danny: More famous than we already are?
Scott: Way more famous than we already have. That'll send us over the top.
Danny: We start fresh for March. Email us your address to lockthequill@mit.edu to enter. That music, it's from MIT. You think we're just a bunch of science nerds, didn't you? The piece is Tire Fire composed by MIT's Evans Ziporyn, Director of the Center for Art Science and Technology with our Music Theater and Arts Department. It's performed by Gamelan Galak Tika, an MIT-based Gamelan of students, staff, and community.
Scott: It's awesome. I'm loving the music.
Danny: I'm totally with you.
Scott: Absolutely.
Danny: It's good driving music.
Scott: Go ripping down Mem Drive, this blasting, arm out the window. Nice summer day. [pause] Who's on this episode Danny?
Danny: [laughs]. Thanks, Scott.
Scott: I was still rocking up to the music. [laughs]
Danny: We've got Sanjay Sarma, he's taken leave from MIT to be president and CEO of the Asia School of Business in Malaysia, and he boards a plane tomorrow.
Scott: Oh, I know Sanjay. Yes. Good luck. Congratulations to him. Isn't he the guy that backed into Billy's car?
Danny: [laughs] I don't know. We'll investigate.
Danny: Thanks, Scott.
Scott: You're welcome, Danny.
[music]
Danny: In your book, Grasp the Science, Transforming How We Learn, you write about the education system we have now and how it's predominantly shaped by the philosophies of Edward Thorndike and Lewis Terman.
Sanjay: Yes, Terman.
Danny: You then compare and contrast them to John Dewey and Maria Montessori. Can you talk about their different approaches?
Sanjay: Look, the summary is this, first of all, a model that we need to understand is our ability to learn comes from being a child. Even as adults. That's our instinct. Cats don't learn. Human beings do. Cats don't teach. They do, but not in, in the way that human beings teach. It's an evolutionary trade-off, which is they're not grown up until you're in your teens. But you can adapt from anything to anything from the Sahara to the North Pole or to the Arctic. We are a very adaptable species.
If you take childhood as a model for learning, that isn’t what college or high school is today. Our model for learning today is fundamentally flawed. We assume that the professor has a pen and the student's brain is a sheet of paper, you just write and declare victory. That's not right. You think of it as the learner, adult, or child formulating a model of the world. It's like a tree growing. You have to give it sunshine when the child or the tree wants it, not when it's convenient for you, damn it.
You give it nitrogen or potassium when it needs it. You can't give it a lifetime supply of water and sunlight and nitrogen potential in day one and declare victory. What we have is that is the fundamental fallacy and the Thorndikes of the world, what Thorndike did was he didn't understand the science completely. He was premature. He said, "Ah, human beings where we just like animals, you just need to train them." It's not just Thorndike, it's also not just Terman, it's also people like Pavlov. Which is you just condition. That was their thought of what learning is, and that's not correct. They paved the way for what is called scientific racism.
Danny: Sure. Eugenics and everything else.
Sanjay: Eugenics came from Galton who was a cousin of Darwin. I don't think he meant it that way, but I don't know if he was a—
Danny: It was used in that capacity.
Sanajy: What these guys did was they also said that the brains of some ethnicities were less prepared than the brains of others. This continued all the way to the '70s, by the way. If you look at college and school today, it is based on the half-baked scientific views of Thorndike. Dewey understood about the emergent properties of the brain. Maria Montessori understood. MIT, John Barton Rogers understood it. It's very core to our values. It was about letting the person grow and giving them what they need and creating a system that wraps around them rather than wrapping them, playing them around the wheel of education.
That's the basic essence. Then, of course, the cognitive psychology and the brain science we are learning all backs it up.
Danny: In your book, you call a Thorndike approach, an Inside out model versus the outside-in model of Dewey.
Sanjay: That's right. The inside-out model is, "Oh, we'll figure out how things work at a low level."
Danny: The reductionists.
Sanjay: The reductionists… and therefore we should be able to predict everything about the outside world. About how they behave, their emotions, their logic, their interests, their idiosyncrasies. It's very interesting. A cat has about 250 million neurons. I'm sorry for cat lovers. Dogs have about 500 million neurons. Human beings have 86 billion neurons. Somewhere between 500 million neurons and 86 billion neurons, Shakespeare happens, and Martin Luther King. Da Vinci happens, the pyramids happen, the Taj Mahal happens.
Danny: Do you think you can reduce it to neurons? This is a very different conversation.
Sanjay: I've got to believe that. That's why, by the way, I'm not too impressed with ChatGPT despite all the explanations of-- People are like, "Oh my God, it's sentient." No, it's not sentient. You can convince me of something. We've done that over the years. You can't convince ChatGPT of anything or persuade it or change its mind. There's no mind. Can it be done with neurons? I believe that it's neurons. Maybe there's something else, but it's neurons.
Danny: We'll find out maybe one day. I know that a lot of people are talking about consciousness.
Sanjay: I don't think we've figured out consciousness. It's a fundamental question.
Danny: You seem to be promoting the outside-in, Dewey model.
Sanjay: Absolutely.
Danny: I'm wondering how you reconcile the challenges of scale with digital learning or open education and the intense interaction that's required with a Dewey model.
Sanjay: That's a great question. I'm glad you asked it. I said this morning, and many great thinkers have said. I was talking to the MIT Sloan faculty member, amazing person, Nelson Repenning. He was also saying to me that when you have an “or” and you change it to an “and”, that's when a revolution happens. We always said scale versus quality. Scale or quality. Pick one. You can have not both, but one. You can do scale and quality up to point, and that's a revolution. This is not the first time this has happened.
When American auto companies were making cars before the Japanese showed up, you could either have cost or you could have quality. You couldn't have both. The Japanese gave us both and that's the lean revolution. Education is on the cusp of a revolution. The way you create the “and” is you use the technology not to replace the teacher, but to enrich the teacher. A 90-minute lecture is 90 minutes squandered. In-person time squandered. Nature confiscated in-person with COVID, and we clawed it back.
Do we want to squander those 90-minute lectures with the professor talking and the students dozing off or looking at Instagram? It turns out a 90-minute lecture is a 20-minute video. Now you've released 1 hour and 10 minutes for pure groups, discussion, coaching, motivation.
Danny: You're talking about the flip classroom?
Sanjay: Yes. It's a flip classroom. It's basically what it is. It is fundamentally-- If you'll walk down the Infinite Corridor of the main group of buildings at MIT, all the ceilings are very high. The reason is when MIT moved from across the river based on a gift from George Eastman anonymous gift, which is now valued about $350 million, and this building was built, we made all-- they made. I wasn't there, you weren't there. The ceiling's very high. The reason was the workshops were supposed to be the classrooms. Now if you walk through the Infinite Corridor, it's a bunch of offices.
Danny: The model was very different back then, was it not? We were founded as part of land grant school with emphasis on the mechanical arts and agriculture and that meant metallurgy, steam power, heavy industry. We just needed those large studio spaces.
Sanjay: We regressed. What happened was it was mechanical arts and we started rightly injecting science into the technology and then injecting math into the science and getting abstract. At some point, we lost the plot and the mind in hand became separated and the hand got forgotten and those rooms became lecture halls. The truth is in the middle. Of course, you want to get the abstract stuff, but the science shows us, and we talk about it in the book, about embodied cognition. It's called embodied Cognition.
When you do something with your hand, the motor cortex is woken up and the motor cortex is woken up, you learn better. Mind and hand do need to come together. Here we are in Building 35 where you got your PhD all those years ago and the machine shop is in the heart of Building 35. You can smell the coolant you can smell the burnt chips and it turns out that that's-
Danny: That's because Dan runs his machines too fast.
Sanjay: That's true. He should probably be using more coolant. If you can do the theory and then you apply it, it's such a beautiful formula and the science backs it up. Just imagine if you learn cycling through lectures, only lectures. Of course, you're going to have to get on a bike at some point.
[music]
Danny: You say that it's imperative that we shed the myth that serious learning must be difficult and find ways to make construction far more cognitively user-friendly. You also describe how you cringe a little at the display in the Stata Center of the water fountain and the fire hose. I get it, but can you differentiate the difficulties associated with systemic difficulties and difficulties associated with the challenges of learning? I think learning ought to be hard.
Sanjay: Absolutely. Look there are desirable difficulties. Björk, the famous scientist in UCLA talks about it and there's undesirable, or what I call idiotic difficulties. Idiotic difficulties, when you don't explain those things properly and the student has no idea what you talked about. You go so fast that they have, have no idea what you talked about. Well, that should not be the case. Desirable difficulties is, for example, if I tell you how to invert a matrix or if I tell you how to solve a differential equation.
You're doing it right, but you're missing something and you're struggling to explain to yourself what you got wrong, and then you get that aha and then you figure it out, that's desirable difficulties. Undesirable difficulties is you learn about-- you're trying to solve a differential equation, but no one told you why it's useful, why matters, and it was done so rapidly that you're just mechanically going through it. You have to focus the learning on the desirable difficulties and that turns out. The difficulty helps you. It's like exercise.
Danny: This reminds me of the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi all about flow and reaching the state of flow when we have the greatest opportunity for growth, spiritual, intellectual, athletic, whatever, generally will occur when the challenge is high and requires all of our faculties.
Sanjay: That's right, Csikszentmihalyi. I had to practice to pronounce that amazing name, and you got it right by the way. I'm very impressed. Flow is when you're doing something, it's output like you're programming and you're doing something challenging and you're solving a problem and you start programming and three hours go by and you go, "Wow, I just missed lunch." I hope it's a privilege to have been through that. Many of us have been through that. I'm writing a paper coding or something.
Input is different though. Input is teachers in total flow mode and the students completely lost. You want to give enough to the students that they get into the flow in doing stuff with the material they learned, and they get into a flow with it and it's joyous. Then you want to give them most stuff and that's what we do with 007. We give them these little flow experiences, they struggle with it, so it's desirable difficulties and then they master it and then they enjoy it. It's like learning to do moguls when you SKI. Something clicks.
Danny: It hasn't for me yet. Csikszentmihalyi, also…. I guess the zone where we don't want to be in is certainly apathy or anxiety. Anxiety is the undesirable mode that you're talking about where we're presenting a challenge without perhaps providing any context or putting it in front of a student who doesn't have the required skills to be able to do whatever it is we're putting before them.
Sanjay: That's the judgmental side of education. Again, I come back to the model of children. A parent doesn't want to make their child anxious when they're trying to teach them something. Most parents don't try make it fun and you'll back off space retrieval. Then you come back, which is you can see your child's eyes, child roll her eyes from the back of your head when they're in the car. I don't understand this bizarre drill sergeant, "Oh, we've got to create anxiety," nonsense.
We do it all the time. Anxiety is a symptom that something's gone wrong. They got to be having learning and having fun. Now, sometimes there'll be things that they don't get, and you are motivated. Why do I have to learn to invert a matrix? Well, trust me, and let me show you right away why you need to trust me, because here's what you can do with it.
Just take a leap of faith with me, but I assure you, and this is a key. We're going to apply it. We'll solve some equations, which if you did it by the Kramer method - took you half an hour. If you use matrices, you can invert the matrix - you can solve it -in five minutes. That's beautiful.
Danny: This is a curiosity piece you wrote about--
Sanjay: Yes. I like to say that just as when you're hungry, the mouth generates saliva. The equivalent of hunger in the brain is curiosity. When you're curious, the brain generates a neurotransmitter called dopamine and the dopaminergic circuit activates learning. If you focus on the curiosity, the rest follows. If you make people curious and then given the video, they'll take the lecture from video. In fact, it's better because they can pause, they can rewind if they don't get something, and then the classroom is a studio and the playground.
Danny: As long as you maintain the studio and playground.
Sanjay: You must maintain it. You must tend to it. You must create scaffolding. You must create exercises. This is why 2.007 is such a beautiful orchestra.
Danny: Awesome.
[music]
Danny: An orchestra? Well, all right. I've mentioned 2.007 on a few occasions, and if interested, Alex Slocum talks about its history in a previous episode. It's a class that has had many names and a few numbers. If I said the robot competition, you'd know what I'm talking about. It was the brainchild of professors David Wilson and Woodie Flowers, and the program that launched First Robotics and all its worldwide derivatives. It encapsulates MIT's mind and hand philosophy.
[music]
Danny: You use 2.007 as an example throughout your book. You weave that throughout the entire story and use that as a superlative example of this mind-and-hand approach.
Sanjay: Absolutely. It's very MIT and it's very chaotic and it's very difficult to do, but we did it and there was even before online.
Danny: How do we scale that?
Sanjay: Now, 007 is a very unique class. I do believe that if you take the maker movement around the world today…3D printers are everywhere. We can buy a Raspberry Pi or a Arduino for a few bucks. Students could learn through projects with a lot of scaffolding, make something - make a bird feeder that refills itself, make…pipes freeze, make an IOT device that tells you your pipes are frozen and tells you on your cell phone.
There're so many problems. If we could give enough instruction for students to do stuff and then give them additional instruction after that and leaven the bread a little bit, it would completely change it. Instead, we sit them in a classroom and teach them for like 13 weeks without ever applying it. We keep telling them, "Trust me, it's going to be useful." Is it?
Danny: Alex Slocum talked about that. You mentioned that student trust has been eroded.
Sanjay: Look, that whole thing about, "We'll give it to you this way. Trust us, it's useful." Well, trust but verify. Students again, "Okay, show me." We go, "No, no, no. When you go work”, but by that time they've forgotten it because it never gelled. To Alex's point, there is in fact a lowering of the trust barrier that needs to occur between professors and students. Professors have to wade in the territory they, themselves are uncomfortable with, and show students how they deal with it. That's what 007 did as opposed to staying in your comfort zone, and writing on the student's brain and wagging a finger at them if they didn't remember. By the way, did you know that forgetting is an essential part of learning?
Danny: Sure. That's all related to spacing.
Sanjay: Exactly. Space retrieval, exactly.
Danny: On the issue of scaffolding, Prof., Mahajan at Olin -
Sanjay: Yes, Sanjoy, yes.
Danny: - Sanjoy commented that reflecting on 007, he was saying, that, well, wait a minute. This is too much. I read that this was too much scaffolding. This isn't the learning that we're talking about.
Sanjay: Sanjoy and many people-- Actually, no, he went the other way. A lot of those folks think that. There's the hippie extreme which is, "Oh, I just give them a bunch of stuff, they'll learn." That turns out not to be true either. There's a middle ground. You don't want to be authoritarian and strict. You don't want to be, to use Sanjoy's words, it's like parenting. You don't want to be an authoritarian parent. You don't want to be a permissive parent. You want to be an authoritative parent. That's his analogy.
The problem with pure discovery learning is, "Oh, here's some stuff. Go figure it out." Is they learn bad techniques. It's very inefficient. They may not learn the right tricks in fact. If you crumple a piece of a paper into a ball and drop it in this room, it won't follow F = mg, it won't accelerate at g because of drag. You're going to draw all the wrong conclusions. The abstract is important. His point is you want to scaffold and leave enough gaps for discovery that you have those a-has. The person who in my view has done magical work with this is Ely Sachs.
Ely's guided discovery stuff, it hits exactly the right note, which is you set up these a-has, and you discover stuff, but you're not lost. A lot of discovery learning streams get lost. It's easier for, especially during the novice period, getting lost can be very inefficient. In graduate studies, we let students get lost a lot more.
Danny: Then it's perhaps required.
Sanjay: It's a lot more apprenticeship. In fact, we want them to wander into territory that no one's explored, but they're having the basics. They know enough survival skills in the wilderness, but very young students don't have the survival skills. Total discovery, the other extreme is probably not a good idea. You want to scaffold just enough and give them enough that next leap they take, the next leap they take, they're likely to succeed. If they make mistakes, it's no problem. It's a learning experience, right?
Danny: Sure.
Sanjay: Over scaffolding is bad. Under scaffolding is bad, particularly for a novice. For grad studies, we want our students to-- They have the survival skills, we want them to get past.
Danny: Right. At that point, already they've done the line cook and the sous chef.
Sanjay: That's right.
Danny: We're asking them to be the head chef-
Sanjay: That's right.
Danny: -but they already know about the ingredients, the technique, the tools.
Sanjay: Yes, and they know how to burn themselves or cut their fingers with their knives, right?
Danny: Sure. That's a challenge we have for 007. We're asking them to synthesize something, but they don't yet know what the ingredients are or how to use them.
Sanjay: That's right. That's why 007-- that's why I use it as an example scaffolds them through it. It's like a Greyhound race, there's a mechanical rabbit, and so we use that to keep everyone going. Then we introduce enough scaffolding that and enough coaching. It's a big effort to make sure that they learn to use the machine right and they learn to think about it right and so yes, they go through the sous chef and the other stages efficiently. Then we say, "Go cook up something amazing," and that's grad school."
[music]
Danny: On the pandemic, I want to talk about this a little bit. I know that with open education and digital learning, it forced upon us remote work.
Sanjay: Yes.
Danny: What have you learned from that experience that either supports or refutes some of the work you've been doing?
Sanjay: Yes, but a month into the pandemic, so the pandemic started March. In May I wrote a screed, an article saying, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. What we're doing here ain't good, online learning." Let me explain. Good online education is when you make asynchronous videos. Bad online education, which has neither the benefit of good online education, which is pause, rewind, go at your speed, nor the humanity of at least been in person. That online education is when you stick people in front of a Zoom lecture.
It's strange. What happened during the pandemic was like the three little pigs. What are the three houses, straw, wooden, bricks?
Danny: Yes.
Sanjay: The ones who created asynchronous video, they are the ones with the brick houses and the big, big bad wolf, which was COVID, huffed, and puffed and it couldn't blow the house down because they flourished. The ones who didn't prepare at all, and I don't blame them because there was no reason to. I suppose they were all maybe getting to it, and everyone's got life intervening, had to go straight to Zoom, and we all paid the consequences.
High school students, college students, bleary-eyed. It's tiring because you're trying to read the expressions of 40 students on a Zoom panel, it's exhausting. My view is that having said that, we understood the benefits of flexibility. Students being able to go back and review a lecture - life intervenes. Students watch the lecture later with another student and they're like, "What did she say there? What did he say there? What did that mean?" Group activities.
We learned a lot of things from COVID. We also learned, for example, that students love chat. It's more anonymous. Students who never speak up in a class were quite sometimes active on chats. We also learned that recitations are better done at night. If you're a teacher and you have kids who go to bed at 8:30, and if you can spare an hour, 8:30 to 9:30 - do a recitation with students they'll love it because that's prime time for them rather than 8:00 AM. We learned all these tricks. We're emerging or we have emerged from COVID.
Unfortunately, in some cases, we've recreated the Zoom classroom in our regular classrooms, and that's a tragedy. In some cases, we have taken these lessons back. MIT wrote a very nice report about it, and we are trying to implement them.
Danny: I hear you, and I have no evidence to suggest any of that is wrong. What I do see sometimes is on the teaching side, people will rely on the conveniences of electronic content delivery and it's expeditious. They miss out on that interaction that's required for the special learning.
Sanjay: I used to rock climb a long time ago. I was a very mediocre rock climber. When you rock climb, you have a rope to hold you up in case you fall. The person who's teaching with rock climbing said, "Listen, man. That rope is there in case you fall. It's not there to support you all the time. I put the rope at in high tension."
[crosstalk]
Sanjay: You can abuse anything. “Online” is meant to play offense on this wonderful thing and achieve student-centricity, student joy. Great learning of course can be abused. If you want to phone it in, you can Zoom it in.
Danny: Yes, you can phone it in live.
Sanjay: You can mail it in, yes. Of course, that's absolutely vulnerable to that issue. You can use the safety rope to help you with rock climbing. It's not supposed to be.
Danny: Can you extend some of these thoughts to the workplace?
Sanjay: Yes. The workplace is a whole other shebang. I mean, first of all, I will say that learning is now becoming central to the workplace as well because-- Look, last three months, everything changed with chat GPT. Entire jobs are changing. New job categories are emerging. We're in a very weird thing. First of all, learning is going to be central. It's like the oxygen of the future of work. Now, leaving that aside, I do think we are grappling with a number of things. There is flexibility when you work from home. You save commute time. It's better for environment.
People work harder is what we find, but then the in-person, the serendipity that makes some of the magic happen goes away. How do we recreate it? Another big question is we haven't quite figured out how to have some people in a room and some people not and have equal citizenship for all. That's the hybrid meeting.
Danny: Sure.
Sanjay: We haven't figured it out. The best we can do is to owl or one owl camera and speaker, which is pretty good by the way, but it's even the playing field somewhat it's not the same. How do you do a conference if people are in five different locations? Maybe you just go back to your offices, and everyone does a Zoom rather than three people in a room and two people remote. We are in the early stages of figuring out in a post-COVID era what work means, what creativity means, what teamwork means, what interaction means, what social commitment means.
Of course, there are people who as we just talked about, dial it in. They're multitasking. They're doing Amazon shopping as they're in a meeting. It's early days, but I will tell you one thing. I would not bet on commercial real estate right now.
[music]
Danny: You and I arrived here at roughly the same time from Berkeley. How do you go from computational geometry to VP of Open Learning?
Sanjay: [laughs].
Danny: Okay, I came back. “What happened to Sanjay?!?” [laughs]
Sanjay: Well, the lab is still here. [laughs]
Danny: The lab, sure.
Sanjay: We're still doing a lot of the same stuff. We did RFID, we still did machine tools, all that stuff. My approach to research has been very problem-centric, you take on a problem, it's like grabbing a tiger with a tail, and you go where the tiger goes. Tiger goes into the brush, you are going to go in the brush, you'll get scratched, but you got to hang on. If you're problem-centric, you're just going in different directions. The all-learning thing was different. What happened was that then I'd done my startups, I left MIT, did my startup came back. I was having a lot of fun, and the provost said, "Listen, man, you need to grow up and do some service."
Danny: Was this Marty Schmidt?
Sanjay: Yes, that time it was Raphael was a provost before he became president, and Raphael Rife, President Rife. He said, "Look, can you lead up this thing we're doing in Singapore?" Philip Khoury was the provost.
Danny: Ah, yes.
Sanjay: I did that, it was a lot of fun, and so I started looking at the science of learning. I also realized that going back and forth is-- for a bunch of faculty, it's disruptive. Why don't we just use online, so I wrote a proposal. Meanwhile, EdX had been launched, (I didn't launch EdX. Then the same provost had become president, President Reif said, "Would you mind heading up learning?" That's how I became VP for Open Learning, and meanwhile, the lab continued. I've always had this split personality, and I always kept this office, and the research has continued, so I live two lives, it's a double life.
Danny: How about some a-ha, moments? You talk about your time in Schlumberger, back to the book. I'm wondering if you've had any similar a-ha moments during your time here.
Sanjay: Oh, lots. Lots. I'm not making this up, this is an amazing place. I haven't seen much of you, Danny, but we've had so many conversations where all sorts of interesting ideas emerge and connections. It's almost like a continuous aha, you know? Like this morning I was in a Zoom thing with a bunch of my colleagues and like, "Oh my god, that's a beautiful way to express this," right?
Danny: Yes.
Sanjay: The aha is the permanence of the aha. There's a bizarre thing. It is such a joyous, trans-like state where curiosity isn't something that strikes and goes away, but curiosity is a state of being. I truly believe that I have indulged myself in that scene.
Danny: This leads to the question, you are moving away from MIT?
Sanjay: Yes.
Danny: How did this come about?
Sanjay: I've been thinking about education a lot. I'm not leaving MIT, I'll be on leave, but I'm excited. I'll be on leave from MIT to lead an existing business school, which is only established six years ago. It's established in collaboration with MIT, by the Central Bank of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, and its business education. Southeast Asia and the ASEAN countries are in a very interesting period right now because of geopolitics and the energy economy, supply chain, so the ASEAN countries, whether it's Malaysia, where I'll be, or Singapore, where I spent a lot of time, Indonesia, Vietnam.
A lot of manufacturing is moving to Vietnam, and they're right in between the behemoths, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. An opportunity came to lead up this business school. Curious mind…. I thought, "Huh, I'm a businessman, I'm not a business caller," I've written a few papers on business, but I'm an engineering professor. I went there, I was blown away by both the faculty, the students, the opportunity, so why not? I'll be back and forth. My family's here, are going to stay here, they'll visit, I also have family in India, so it's not as dramatic as it may seem. I have to say, I'm super excited by the opportunities for the Asia School of Business and by all the faculty and the students there.
Danny: You're leaving in a few days. [laughs]
Sanjay: I'm leaving in four days. [laughs].
Danny: I am so glad I got you when I did.
Sanjay: [laughs] I told you, I said, let's make sure of it.
Danny: Perfect timing.
Sanjay: Yes, I said, let's set this up before I leave.
Danny: You're excited by this?
Sanjay: Absolutely.
Danny: You wouldn't be doing it if you weren't.
Sanjay: I'm not excitable, I don't think, but I'm pretty excited, I'm pretty positive, so this one I'm excited about. What's particularly interesting for me in this is business education. As an entrepreneur, as a businessman, that's very interesting to me. The second thing is, it's also they have a Master's of Central Banking, which is, with the Fed, like the US Fed or central banks around the world, they'll have to deal with monetary policy and things like that. It's a very fascinating learning experience.
Danny: What's the first thing you do when you get off the plane then?
Sanjay: There's so many things, but first of all, the opportunity is huge, so I've got to pick two or three things, whether it's focusing on ASEAN, which is the Asian Coalition there, The Southeast Asian Coalition, building relationships. I want to meet the faculty, I want to meet the students. I have a roadmap of things I want to do, but I also think that there's an opportunity to introduce more technology, both in the education, but also in the curriculum, FinTech is booming. There're so many things to do, and I'm going to start pondering that on the plane ride.
Danny: Ponder how finance people need a maker space and who you need to draw from, say-- I don't know, in the east coast to build up these fantastic maker facilities in Malaysia.
Sanjay: Danny, it's funny, Alex was-
Danny: Oh, Alex! [laughs], oh, he's beat me to it!
Sanjay: He sent me like 18 texts this morning saying, "I want to go, I want to go,” but you guys come. I really want to put some MIT magic dust there, so trust me, you're going to be there, man.
Danny: All right, well, I'm vying for a Hawaii gig, as well as Indonesia and now Malaysia, so this is pretty good.
Sanjay: [laughs].
[music]
Danny: How have you seen MIT evolve over the years, and where would you like to see the Institute head?
Sanjay: It's evolved in many ways, we've become much more-- in many good ways. For example, we've become more diverse, that is an amazing thing. We've become more diverse also in our fields, we've become more biology and biotech, and thank God for that. Moderna exists, and Moderna made an impact on the planet, right?
Danny: Yes.
Sanjay: We have expanded physically, we've expanded in our ecosystem, if you just walk around just north of the main campus or just west, northwest of the main campus, or northeast of the main campus, you see this explosion of buildings, and that's the ecosystem, that's magical. I see entrepreneurship expanding in different directions. It's not just the hardware startups, it's the tech startups, it's the biotech startups, it's the computer science startups, it's the social startups, right? So there's amazing stuff. When I say “social”, I don't mean social networking, things about society, societal through things like SOLVE and so on. It's all amazing.
These are all great changes. If you look at the history of MIT, it's about positivism, technology, positivism. It's a Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David Mendel, one of our colleagues, gave a talk many years ago to Open Learning. In that talk, he described to us how the word "technology" was actually quite new when MIT was established, that's how high-tech we are. In our logo, we have a person with a book and a person with a sledgehammer, a little concerned that we're forgetting in the sledgehammer.
I really want to make sure the sledgehammer comes back because the “doing” part is very central to us. I don't mean “doing” like machine shops, which of course I love, but also “doing”, like, if you do political science – and actually MIT is very good at that, applying the political science. We do economics, applying it, that's what JPAL is, right?. Nobel laureates’re in that space because they apply it. I want to make sure that we don't lose that, and I'm a little concerned that that's easy to forget and easy to lose. Let's not forget the hardware, let's not forget the impact.
Danny: The sledgehammer.
Sanjay: The sledgehammer. It's expensive, it's grungy, it doesn't return your money quite as quickly, but it reshapes the planet. And especially with things like climate change, of course, we have to reduce power consumption and be more efficacious in the way we marshal our resources. But I have a feeling technology is going to be part of the mix, and that means building iron.
Danny: As will policy.
Sanjay: Of course, policy, but technology is going to be part of it.
Danny: Sure.
Sanjay: No, certainly policy, absolutely, right?
Danny: Yes.
Sanjay: The policy and the technology are tied, right?
Danny: Yes.
Sanjay: For example, if you can figure out how to electrolyze and create hydrogen more inexpensively, then the policy supports it, and then they're more fuel cell cars, or if you do electrification, but then you distort the power from non-dispatchable sources like wind, it's all sort of tied. It's a multi-dimensional space, and one dimension MIT is very strong in is in its roots, which is the sledgehammer. I'm a little concerned that it's easy to forget that, and I hope we don't. Bring the sledgehammer back, [music] that's my parting the message. Let's not forget the sledgehammer.
[music]
Danny: What advice would you give our students?
Sanjay: There so many dimensions to it. The most important thing I would like for our students to take away from MIT is - it's sort of like 2.007 - which is you have the skills, the knowledge, and the license, and perhaps even the duty to think big and act. Don't let society shape you, you have the right and the ability to shape the future.
Danny: What advice would you like to offer Sally Kornbluth?
Sanjay: Sally appears to be-- I haven't met the president, but I've seen her speeches. She comes to a great institution. She seems like a wonderful person. Very sympathetic, I think, to what MIT needs, and what MIT ought to be. My advice to Sally is to really understand, and every institution is different. MIT has a very special ethos, and she's doing that already, which is to listen to people and figure out the MIT ethos, and just flow the gas pedal in that direction.
She has to form a sense of what MIT is, and I think she will. I don't think MIT should be something MIT's not. MIT to me is a verb. It's a vector. You got to figure out the direction of the vector and move in that direction. You know this Danny, You’ve been talking to people around MIT, you can figure that vector out very easily. And I think Sally has the leadership to figure it out. But we shouldn't be something else. We are what we are.
[music]
Danny: Albany Street Parking garage is a splendid MIT structure, nestled between MIT's power plant and two construction sites. Once those projects are complete, I predict the garage’s demise. But while a structure still stands and testimony is available, I have to get to the bottom of a campus rumor.
[music]
Danny: A couple things in closing. Did you back up into Billy's car in Albany Street Garage?
Sanjay: I did. How do you know?
Danny: You whacked the guy from Papalardo Lab?
Sanjay: Yes. Oh, really? That was Billy?
Danny: That was our guy.
Sanjay: Oh, it was Billy? Oh, okay.[laughs]
Danny: Yeah, he said, “someone left a note on my car.”
Sanjay: Yes, that was me.
Danny: That was you? He said, you handled it so well and he loved that. You were so honest about it. [laughs]
Sanjay: Oh, yes.
Danny: It sounded like you felt horrible.
Sanjay: I felt terrible. I left a note saying, "Hey, Billy, man, I'm sorry." I didn't know who it was. "Dude, I'm so sorry. Here's my number. Please call me."
Danny: He did. So you cut a check and came clean…
Sanjay: Yes. I did. I wanted that.
Danny: He wanted to tell you it wasn't enough.
[pause] [laughter]
Sanjay: Oh, really? [laughs]
[laughter]
Danny: He said whenever he turns his neck to the side, he's got a pain.
Sanjay: It's a pity because he wasn't in the car. [laughs] The car was parked. I hit it.
[laughter]
[music]
Danny: I just wanted to thank you for sitting down with me for this and also leave you with a little gift.
Sanjay: Oh, wonderful. Thank you.
Danny: Go ahead and open that up. Of course, we wrapped that ourselves.
Sanjay: I can tell. [chuckles] Oh wow. That's fantastic. Oh my God. You know the craziest thing. What I got is Darth Vader.
Danny: That's not Darth Vader. Look more closely.
Danny: That's my scanned head, 3D printed and skillfully attached to the action figure. That's Darth Braunstein.
Sanjay: Oh, that's Darth Braunstein. [laughs]
Danny: You might remember. I want you to have that, because that's a memento from the theme from 2.007 in 2017.
Sanjay: 2017 yes.
Danny: One of the competition tasks was to knock over Darth Braunstein.
Sanjay: Oh, yes.
Danny: That's from that competition table, the one that you wrote about in Grasp.
Sanjay: That is awesome. This is going to go on my desk in the new university.
Danny: Good. I figured you need more tchotchkes.
Sanjay: I do, I do.
Danny: Thank you, Sanjay, so much.
Sanjay: Thanks, man. This has been lovely.
Danny: Good luck, abroad and-
Sanjay: Thank you.
Danny: -make a point of stopping by keeping in touch.
Sanjay: Of course, I will.
Danny: So appreciate it.
Sanjay: Pleasure.
[music]
Danny: Thanks to Sanjay Sarma, for carving out the time to chat. By the time this episode drops, he'll be on a plane to Malaysia. Congratulations, Sanjay. Good luck and we'll miss you. Thanks to Russell, our Indonesian translator for announcing this month's Lock the Quill Global Challenge winner, and to Prof., Evan Ziporyn and everyone involved with Arts at MIT. Most of all, thank you for listening. The days are getting longer and warmer in our part of the world. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[music]
[00:44:20] [END OF AUDIO]