Ruis.A.2904_6.24.2025_Transcript Troy Reeves 0:00 Okay, so Andrew, for sound quality purposes, let's start by having you say your name and spell your last name. Andrew Ruis 0:05 Sure. My name is Andrew Ruis. R, U, I, S. Troy Reeves 0:10 Thank you, Andrew. So my name is Troy Reeves. This is a follow up interview. We are back in Andrew's office, and this interview is being done for our Academic Staff Award Winners Oral History Project. Andrew, we got through the list of questions the first time, but there are some follow ups I'd like to do. I'd like to talk about, dive into a bit of your grad school experience here. We talked about why you ended up in grad school here. So I want to start with your memories in general, of the coursework, particularly, maybe classes that stood out. Andrew Ruis 0:44 Yeah, so it's been a while now. I started grad school almost, well, let's see, about 23 years ago. But yeah, there's a few things that I that definitely stick in memory. One is, it was an incredibly collegial department. We were a small department. Obviously, History of Science was not a large department, but we had a weekly brown bag that pretty much everybody came to regularly. That was a big sort of social component of the department. And that meant that, like when you were taking classes or doing other sort of work to advance through the degree program, like, you kind of knew everybody. Like, I knew all the faculty, even faculty I never had a class with. I knew them pretty well, interacted with them regularly. And so in that sense, like the coursework was great. Because you felt like you were, even if you were the only History of Science person in in the class, not for graduate seminars so much, but for some of like the 4 or 500 level, 600 level stuff. Even if you were the only History of Science grad student there, you in general had a pretty good relationship with the faculty already. And so you kind of got a really nice experience of that. In terms of courses that stuck out, I had an early seminar with Judy Levitt who was eventually my advisor, that was on sort of the history of American healthcare and public health that I really enjoyed. And later, actually, when Ron Numbers had, I think, already retired and Judy was either about to retire, or had just retired, the two of them actually did a seminar. Or they did sort of like kind of classic books and American medical history, a history of public health, which was fantastic. It was fun. I was already dissertator at that point so I didn't need the class, but it was a really fun class to take. It was great to get to work with the two of them. And wonderful classes with Tom Broman and Mike Shank on like classical/medieval medicine and science. Andrew Ruis [cont.] 3:23 I really just quite enjoyed my time. Actually, the two of them, Tom and Mike, taught a seminar together on semiotics. This was also right after I became a dissertator, so I didn't need the class. But as a side note, that's the class I met my wife in. And it was funny because she was a grad student in the French department and was doing her PhD minor in History of Science. And I was sitting in because I knew it was going to be a fun class, and so that's how we met. But yeah, it was a very fun department to take courses in, and it was also, I did a lot of teaching as a grad student, and it was a great department to teach in as well. And the salaries were terrible, but intellectually it was really fantastic. My first experience teaching was with Dave Lindbergh, who was a very, very big name in ancient/medieval science and medicine. And he was a fantastic lecturer. And the thing that I most remember, besides that, is that number of the TAs who were working with him all sort of said "We don't really get much training and teaching." Like, you just kind of get thrown in and it's sort of assumed that you'll figure it out. And he was like, "Okay, what would help?" And we were like, can we meet with you once a week, not just, if not separate from the meeting where it was about course management, and actually just talk about teaching and talk about like that. And he was like, oh, yeah, sure, let's just, you know. And so he absolutely just took time out of his week to sit down with us. And I need to say, open it up to anybody who wanted to come and. I was like, Yeah, let's talk about teaching. And so we sort of ran this kind of informal teaching seminar that none of us got credit for, and he didn't get paid for. But it was a very, one of those things that really, I think, speaks to how collegial that department was and how supportive it was, in that sense. That that was not an unusual sort of occurrence, and it was a really, it was a very nice way to kind of enter into teaching. And looking back, obviously, there's a lot I would have gotten out of more formal support and training and like how to teach. But the fact that that kind of stuff was available was a lot more than any other grad students I knew at the time really got. It was a really, it was just a really nice experience. So those are some of the things that I think I remember most vividly about sort of the teaching and curriculum side of grad school in those days. Troy Reeves 6:00 So and again, I know it was a long time ago, but were there things in this non-credit teaching course that you feel like you've been able to apply throughout your time here and your work here? Andrew Ruis 6:13 The funny thing is, I don't know that I could tell you one thing specifically that I know came out of that discussion. My memories of it are of having really great conversations and sort of being able to talk about teaching challenges and that kind of thing. But it was so long ago that it's now just sort of impressionistic, right, like, nothing from the advice or anything, nothing like really stuck as, "oh, that's like, this one thing that I'm really gonna take forward." It was more like this collection of perspectives and conversations and whatever that really just helped shape my thinking about teaching and sort of my engagement with it, and the fact that this was something you even really could sort of talk about and learn how to do. I don't even know if it had occurred to me before that moment that teaching is something you should get trained in and should sort of be constantly reflecting. Again, because I'd never done never really done it before. I'd done some tutoring and I'd coached sports. There were things that I had done that were sort of adjacent, but I'd never done any classroom teaching before that semester, and so it was, I think, just very helpful in that, in that aspect. And Dave was a really, he was a very, very good lecturer, because he taught these classes to 350-400 undergraduates. And they would hang on every word. And so I learned a ton from watching how he structured lectures, like how he used humor, how he sort of moved between representations, sometimes, slides, sometimes---and they were usually actual slides, like in a carousel. Sometimes he'd be drawing things on the board. Sometimes he'd just be talking. Sometimes he'd like, read something or whatever. Other times it was very clearly off the cuff. Andrew Ruis [cont.] 8:25 And I just I learned a ton about how to lecture from just watching his pacing, how he read a room, how he physically engaged with the space, how he how he structured the narratives. And he had these sort of mini arcs that built into larger arcs. He always ended right on time. Everything was so well crafted and constructed that I learned a ton just from experiencing that. I don't know that I had ever before. I'd had some good lecturers as an undergraduate, but I don't know that I'd ever had one that was as good as he was at sort of crafting a lecture into something that was like, truly spectacular, and that you learned a lot from and that you remembered a lot from. Most of the research on teachings is that lecturing is not a very useful format, because you don't retain very much. But I think partly that's just that it's not done very well. And when it's actually done really well, it's not a bad format. I mean, there are certainly better ones. But in terms of conveying information to 400 people in a relatively short period of time, like if it's done well. I was impressed at how well he was able to do that, and I could see the results. And the kids that I was teaching in discussion sections, but they also got a lot out of it. I could see that. And so that was a that was always a very cool experience. I felt like most of the teaching in the department was pretty high quality. I really got a lot out of the coursework that I did. And obviously a lot of the things that you have to learn to do as a scholar and a teacher, you don't get from your courses. In fact, most of the important things are not in your coursework, but it did provide a very nice foundation. And history is one of those fields where you still kind of need to know stuff, right? Like, and so, in that sense, it was a very good department to me. Troy Reeves 10:19 Thank you. I think we talked about this in general terms in the first session. But I want to ask it directly. I wonder if you could talk through the process of the dissertation, from sort of idea through being done. Andrew Ruis 10:32 Yeah. So when I was doing my prelims, my preliminary exams, I had started sort of thinking about what I might want to do for my dissertation. And I'd written my master's thesis on diphtheria testing and the development of cheap, easy to distribute testing kits. And this was before the vaccine was available. And I sort of had, I really enjoyed that project, but I sort of knew that I didn't necessarily want to do something that was in the kind of classical history of medicine, like on disease, in that vein. There was a lot of work in that space, and it felt like it was very crowded, but it also felt very limited, in a way. Like, I didn't feel like I would get to do a really interesting dissertation in that space for where I was entering and what I was kind of interested in doing. And so as I was doing my prelim reading, I was also sort of reading around and trying to get a better sense of like, where were the areas in the history of public health, in particular, and the history of medicine more generally, that just really hadn't received a lot of scholarly attention. And I sort of realized that there had just been very, very little done on the history of nutrition And I started sort of reading around it as best I could, sort of reading books and articles that sort of touched on history of nutrition. There was at least some scholarship in the field. And I was very lucky that Rima Apple was here, because she had done some of that sort of early work. And so I ended up working with her on my dissertation, in addition to Judy Levitt. But there just wasn't a lot in that space. And so as I was sort of reading through things, every now and then I would run across just like a reference, like a sentence or two, or maybe a paragraph on school lunch programs. And I was like, Oh, well, I had never really thought about a school lunch program as a public health program. I'd always sort of thought of it as a social welfare program. And of course, it's both, right? Those aren't mutually exclusive. But just in one of the things that I always liked about social history is that it got you into thinking about these kind of day-to-day things that just become part of the background otherwise. Andrew Ruis [cont.] 13:05 And I realized that, for me, school lunch programs were exactly that. They were just this kind of infrastructural thing that we sort of took for granted as being there, really thought of as this kind of social welfare program. But as I started investigating a little more realized, it actually started out as a health program, as a public health program. And really, the visions for those programs were much more expansive than what they eventually became. And so I got more and more interested in sort of researching the origins and development of public health nutrition as a field, but also in particular like school lunch programs, which really sat at this very interesting intersection of education and public health and politics and public policy and agriculture and all these different fields. And it just ended up being a really interesting space to work on. A dissertation allowed me to sort of read widely and really think of public health in a different way than I had had been thinking about it. Allowed me to really investigate an area where there hadn't been much historical scholarship. Susan Levine's book and hadn't come out yet. She was working on it at the time, and it just, it just sort of fit. Like, there was just a lot of things that I could get out of it. And it was exciting to me as, also, before the sort of big federal push to kind of rejuvenate school meal programs that Michelle Obama really took on when she was first lady. So, like, I kind of hit that right before everything started to kind of take off in that space. And so that also made it a really fruitful place to kind of be doing scholarship. And to this day, I've enjoyed kind of keeping up with that, that literature, and still occasionally write things that are sort of related to public health, nutrition, and school meals. But yeah, that's sort of how I ended up in that in that particular corner of history. Troy Reeves 15:05 I'm gonna drop a couple names here. I don't usually do this, but we'll see how it goes. So since you have sort of been keeping up with school lunch, have you done any work, or know about the work of Jennifer Gaddis? Andrew Ruis 15:15 Yeah, yeah. Jen Gaddis and I know each other pretty well. We talked a lot while she was working on her book. And I've guest lectured in her class before. And during the pandemic, we didn't keep in touch as much, just because it was a tough time for everybody, I think, and we're all sort of focused in but, but, yeah. But she and I have talked quite a lot about school lunch stuff. I haven't really found a project to collaborate on at this point. But yeah, we've definitely talked quite a bit about that. And for a little while it was, there was sort of a kind of hot spot here of school lunch scholarship at UW and Wisconsin was a pretty important state, and the development of school meal programs that sort of fitting, that you know some of that is happening here. Troy Reeves 16:13 And to go back to maybe one more thing about history of science, a couple other people who I know taught and/or helped were Robin Rider and Michaela Sullivan Fowler. Andrew Ruis 16:27 Yep, yeah I knew both of them- Troy Reeves 16:28 Did you end up working with either of them or just knew them because-? Andrew Ruis 16:32 Yeah, so I worked mostly with Michaela, because I did mostly Eastern medicine and public health. So when, when the library was still on this end of campus over in the- What was the building on Linden next to the Medical Sciences Center? I forget the building now, but like, used to be basically, you could get there from the Med Sciences Center without having to go outside. When the library was over there, I was doing my master's work, and so I was over at the library probably, like four or five times a week, like looking at source material, pulling stuff. So I got to know Michaela really well while I was doing that project. And then over years, I did a lot of work in her collections. And so we got to know each other pretty well. The dissertation, since it was less medical, I didn't actually, I ended up working a lot more in Steenbock and in the Historical Society and Memorial Library, like a lot of the sources I needed. When I needed to look at, like the congressional records, or I needed to look at state records and things like that, I tended to be at other places or the University Archives. So I didn't actually use that library, Ebling Library as much. But I always kept in touch with Michaela. And Robin, I knew fairly well. She would come to brown bags pretty regularly. Again, like I mentioned earlier, that sort of sense of community in History of Science, History of Medicine was pretty strong. I went to exhibits that she had put on in Special Collections at Memorial Library, and at other events there, colloquia were often hosted on the ninth floor of Memorial Library. So I would see her pretty regularly, but I worked mostly with Michaela, just based on sort of expertise and that kind of thing. Troy Reeves 18:26 Thank you. Thank you for all of that. So we're going to fast forward now about a decade to Act 10 and the Capitol protests. Since there was a campus component of that, I like to ask people who were here during that time their memories and or any activity they had related to it? Andrew Ruis 18:45 Yeah, so certainly, my now wife and I, we weren't married at the time, went pretty much every day to protest for several weeks while that was happening. Pretty much would get there, and we'd sort of walk up State Street, and you'd see, like, all the people gathered around the Capitol. And we kept thinking like, "How is this not going to be effective?" We would see like, tens of thousands of people, sometimes, coming out and protesting. And the counter protests would have like 100 people, 200 people at most kind of thing. And so like, to me at the time, I'm thinking, Well, I mean, this is a pretty clear demonstration of what people think should happen. And I even remember making a history of science themed protest buttons for the department. I'm sure I have them, some of them, somewhere. But we also as a department, a lot of the graduate students in History of Science would go and protest. So a number of us were there most days. One of other people in the department was in the TAA, and I knew, I had friends who were in the TAA, so, like, we were kind of plugged in that way. And I think there was just generally a lot of support for public sector unions and so everybody was out protesting and demonstrating, and I would pretty much go whenever I had the time. I was a dissertator at that point. And so I had pretty good flexibility if I wasn't teaching. I more or less just was working on my dissertation. And so I could grab an hour here or there and just head up and show up. And so I think there was this real sense that that was a powerful thing to do. And I think there was a pretty big let down when it didn't matter, right? And Walker just pushed stuff through anyway. And didn't seem like he cared about whether it killed his political career. Didn't seem like he cared about whether it actually represented the will of the people. None of it seemed to matter. He was going to do it, and he did it. And so that was, I think a big let down too. I mean, I knew people who were in the TAA, and they were just like, crestfallen, because it was like, well, this was supposed to work, right? It was supposed to work. You sort of hear about a policy you don't like, and you do the grassroots organizing, and you get everybody to go and demonstrate and protest, and you make very clear, this is the will of the people. And polling was pretty supportive statewide. Andrew Ruis [cont.] 21:47 This wasn't just some kind of like Madison slant on things. Like, it was generally an opposed measure. And just none of it mattered. And so I think that was certainly for me, and I think for a lot of people I knew at the time, a kind of awakening to the fact that politics were now different, right? Like, politics didn't work the same way. And you can blame Citizens United, or you can blame whatever you want, but it really just felt like it kind of didn't matter. I've never been one of those people that was like, oh, you know, my vote doesn't matter because it's only one vote or anything like that. Like, I've always taken civic participation very seriously. Like, my dad was a lifelong union member and was a union facilitator for the teachers union in California. And like, I've always sort of believed strongly, and kind of, sort of, I guess I'm effectively a socialist, but like, I've always believed in a sort of strong role for the state in social support, and I've always believed strongly in unions, and so like to have experienced all of that, like, was just a really, I think, a really tough thing to go through. And now, it seems almost tame compared to what we're dealing with but, but it was certainly a warning sign for what was to come, that it would be very hard to effect change with sort of traditional mechanisms of effecting change. Troy Reeves 23:25 Thank you. Before I ask my next question, my pen just died. You happen to have a pen I can borrow- [AR: Sure] -just take notes for the rest of this. Oh, it's a good one. I'll make sure I get it back. All right. So really, the only other thing I wanted to ask is sort of a segue now to what you were just talking about, because that when we last left, one of the things we were going to talk about is the current significant decrease in federal funding, and how that has, or you think will affect the work that you're doing? Andrew Ruis 23:57 Yeah, well, so all of my work is funded by federal grants. So I have NSF grants, and that basically covers everything that I do. So I'm deeply dependent on there being a research enterprise that there is significant funding for. But in many ways, the effects are already taking place, right? We received an email yesterday from the chancellor's office about the imposition of across-the-board budget cuts as a result of both experienced and expected shortfalls due to changes in research funding. So I think it's somewhere around 90 grants that were canceled at UW. And I know people here who've had grants canceled. It's personal. And on top of that, the amount of funding that's coming out has significantly reduced. I think agencies like NIH and NSF are also eyeing all the continuing grants. And since they don't know what their fiscal year '25 budget is, let alone their budget after that, they're just not awarding as many things. And then we don't know what the budget is going to be. So there's all these uncertainties, but pretty much everything is pointing to some diminishment in federal research funding. And it's not like federal research funding has been keeping pace with costs for the last two decades. It's already sort of grown at a much slower rate than actual costs have. So the same grant we would have gotten 10 years ago, just doesn't go anywhere near as far now. And so you add all that, plus the fact that a lot of us are still digging out from the pandemic and the challenges of staying funded during the pandemic, and there's going to be a significant shortfall in research dollars, even if the ship gets righted in some way. Even if Congress says, nope, we're going to keep funding NSF and NIH and other grant agencies at approximately their current levels, there's still going to be a huge effect. And as I've talked to, like colleagues and program officers and whatnot, I've always mentioned that, like, even if they cut the budget by 10%, 10% is a huge budget cut. It's almost a billion dollars at NSF. That's a lot fewer grants that are going to go out the door. Andrew Ruis [cont.] 26:23 And there's no reason to think that that will be evenly distributed, right? So fields like mine, like STEM education, may well get hit harder than other fields. And so, it's very, it's very unsettling and uncertain right now, because it's a world where all of us are sort of accustomed to never really knowing if we're going to get that next grant, but at least having some sense of understanding how the game is played and how the rules work. And we don't even have that right now. So we have the regular uncertainty that's just, you don't get most of the things that you propose on top of now we don't even know if we'll have a place to submit them, or if we do submit them, how many they're actually going to award. And all the calculus about how much time you spend writing grants versus doing the work that you need to do, to do the projects that you already have funding for. You know, all of the sort of ways that you think about balancing your workload kind of go out the window, and you don't know. I mean, I don't know at this point what the best thing to do is, because there's just so much that's unpredictable. So it's a very challenging time for researchers, particularly for those of us who depend on grants for our salaries, but even for anybody doing funded research at this point, it's challenging. And there aren't really alternatives. I know people at foundations. I go to sessions at conferences or other places where they'll do a foundation funding panel and that kind of thing. And the one thing that is crystal clear, is that foundations don't have that kind of money to invest in research that the federal government has, and they also don't have, in most cases, they don't have the openness to letting the research field determine what are the most important areas to be doing research in. They usually have funding priorities. So if you don't happen to fit with the things that they want to fund them, they're not they're not going to be very useful grants to get anyway. Now the federal government is starting to change in that respect, too, but at least historically, there has been the sense that, like NSF and NIH sort of have generally left it to the fields themselves to determine what were the most important areas to fund. And they did that through advisory boards, through the review panels, themselves, through their staff of people, most of whom are current and former scientists. And that was that was really important, because it allowed them to kind of keep up with changes in the field, even rapid changes in the field, but also be responsive to what those fields thought were the most important questions or the most important issues to be researching. And it's not clear that that's going to be true moving forward. It's unclear that it isn't just going to be sort of much like private foundation, where they're just going to say, well, these are the things that we think are important. You know, we're not going to fund anything else. Troy Reeves 29:21 Just one more thing on this. And you talked in the first session about, I'm going to use the word tight, kind of how tight this group is. So I'm wondering how you all are dealing with all this uncertainty. Andre Ruis 29:38 Yeah, it's an ongoing conversation. So we have a weekly leadership meeting, leadership team meeting, and it's a pretty much constant topic, where we're checking in to see kind of how people are doing, how the vibe is, are there things, are there specific things that we need to be paying more attention to in terms of developments? So far, there's just not very much we can actually do. And so we've generally mostly focused on trying to be supportive of each other, trying to acknowledge that things are kind of not okay right now, trying to reassure people that we will be as communicative and transparent as we can possibly be about any changes that are happening. We're working hard, obviously, to bring additional funding in, we're basically, kind of doing all the things that we can do, but also trying to, like, not have it be the thing that dominates everybody's life. Like, it's part of my job to worry about that stuff, so that other people don't have to, right, like, and so even though we are not a particularly hierarchical group and are generally pretty horizontal, there's like a couple of us that really are the ones sort of that deeply worry about these things and try to kind of shelter everybody else from it, so that they can just focus on getting their work done and doing the things that like getting the science done, doing the things that they that they do. And then we sort of take on the burden of trying to just keep everything going. But again, we don't want to hide the truth from anybody. So we are also pretty clear about funding shortfalls and things like that that are things that are going to affect, potentially, future funding shortfalls. Andrew Ruis [cont.] 31:36 But it's really one of those things where, like, since things could change from one day to the next, we're not, our strategy is basically to stay as loose and responsive as possible, and that's the sort of proactive thing that we have decided to do, is write as many proposals as we can this summer, with the assumption that there will be somewhere to submit them to, right? That maybe the internal structure will change, maybe the RFPs themselves will change. But that there's stuff that we know we want to do there, there are projects we know we want to try and get funding for, and we're going to write those proposals. And then once we know, have a better sense of what the actual RFPs look like, or what new developments are happening around the time when things would get submitted, then we can make any sort of adjustments that we need to make in order to kind of fit them to different programs. But there really isn't much of an alternative at this point, because we don't have the luxury of just like waiting it out and seeing what happens, because then we won't get anything submitted for sure. At least this way, we have a chance to submit some things in the fall, which is when most of our deadlines come up, and then we can go from there. So we're really sort of focusing on that. And again, I'm just trying to do good science. That's what we, it's what we want to do, and, and that's what, I think, not only speaking for myself, but I think all my colleagues would agree with this, right? Like it's part of the thing that really motivates us. Like we're trying to put good stuff into the world. We're trying to improve knowledge. We're trying to build tools that will help other people do better research. We're trying to build tools that help kids learn something and maybe learn it better than they've been able to, or learn different things than they've been able to, and we don't really want to stop doing any of those things. And so this is what we have to do, to do that. And we can, we can only, at that point, sort of hope that there will still be a research enterprise to do that in in the end. And that's the part none of us can say for sure, obviously, but I'd much rather work from the assumption that there will be than that there won't be. Troy Reeves 33:49 Andrew, that's all the questions I have. Is there anything on your mind that you would like to say about your time, any part of your time here at UW-Madison, before we shut down the recording? Andrew Ruis 33:57 No, I'll just finish by saying that it's been a very good intellectual home for me for the last 20, 23 years. There's a lot of uncertainty, obviously, here in the near future, and so maybe it won't be past this point. But it has been up to this, up to this point in my life. And I really appreciate the opportunity to chat about some of the experiences that I've had here. Troy Reeves 34:26 Thank you, Andrew. So this concludes the oral history for the Academic Staff Award Winners Oral History Project.