On University of Advancing Technology's (UAT) Founders Day, we're looking back at a conversation between UAT founder Dr. Dominic Pistillo and Robert Walker on UAT's Tech Respect Podcast, where he talked about how UAT got its start. From an engineer frustrated with outdated tools to the founder of a university built to stay ahead of change, this is the story behind UAT, in his own words.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Pistillo was working at Litton, doing classified engineering work for NASA and the U.S. military. The IBM PC had just arrived, personal computers were exploding onto the scene — and yet the engineers around him were still calculating everything by hand.
“We can't be designing things on paper with slide rules,” he remembers thinking. Trained in digital electronics, he saw an obvious gap: nobody was connecting the emerging power of computers to the discipline of engineering design.
So he and a few partners did what founders do. They quit their jobs, pooled their resources, and started not one company, but five — a consulting firm, a computer manufacturer, a software company (which eventually became part of AutoCAD), a professional development center for architects and engineers, and — the one that stuck — a school.
That school, originally built for working professionals rather than incoming students, wasn't meant to become a university at all. But as UAT's ties to industry deepened, employers started asking for something more: graduates who were already trained for the work. A certificate program came first. Then a bachelor's degree. Then, eventually, the master's degrees UAT offers today.
“That's kind of the progression of how it happened,” Dr. Pistillo explains — less a single lightning-bolt moment, and more a steady climb, one demand from industry at a time.
It wasn't easy. As he puts it, UAT's biggest and most consistent struggle has been that its products and services almost always outpaced the market's readiness for them. The team wasn't just building an education — they were building an audience for it, again and again.
If there's a phrase that captures UAT's DNA, it might be this one, which Dr. Pistillo says he heard early in the university's history: we're a year ahead and a week behind.
Higher education, by design, moves slowly. Curriculum in most engineering programs changes maybe once a decade. UAT does the opposite — updating its curriculum nearly every year to keep pace with the industries it serves. That's not the academic norm. It's uncomfortable. It draws scrutiny. But it's also, in Dr. Pistillo's words, the whole point.
“If we started today, we're a year late,” he says of how he's always approached change. Standing still was never an option — not for him, and not for the institution he built.
UAT's founding wasn't a single moment; it was part of a bigger system — computer equipment, consulting, software, training, and industry integration, all evolving together starting in September 1983. Over the decades, most of those original ventures were eventually sold off. The university was the one Dr. Pistillo and his partners never let go of, because, as he says, “we had a mission in mind.”
That mission attracted attention well beyond UAT's campus. Dr. Pistillo describes being recognized instantly at higher-education conferences, and recalls a moment sitting at a roundtable with the U.S. Department of Education where officials leaned in, eager to hear how UAT operated. Academia, he says candidly, is “very, very stuck in yesterday” — and institutions willing to step outside the flock rarely go unnoticed.
Within his first seven or eight years as president, Dr. Pistillo estimates a couple dozen universities across the country were attempting to copy pieces of what UAT was doing. After visiting roughly 60 institutions himself as an accreditation evaluator, his verdict is simple: UAT remains the most unique one he's ever seen.
Ask Dr. Pistillo what he's proudest of, and the answer isn't the technology — it's the teaching.
“It's fairly easy... to teach the leading edge of technology,” he says, “but to teach in a way that's the leading edge of learning — that's very difficult to do.”
That pursuit led UAT to partner with Stanford's Center for Learning Research, trading UAT's extensive database of personality-profile testing for Stanford's research on how people actually learn. The finding that shaped everything that followed: traditional lecture-and-lab instruction is one of the least effective ways to teach anything.
What emerged instead became the four-step method still used at UAT today — share the information, demonstrate it, practice it individually, then rebuild and apply it in a group. Dr. Pistillo argues that this last step, group recollection, is the most powerful part of the whole system. It's where scattered, half-remembered pieces of knowledge get pieced together through conversation — and where real understanding clicks into place.
He illustrates the idea with a story about UAT Da Vinci Award recipient Garrett Lisi, a physicist who spent years trying to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity — and who says the breakthrough came to him while watching waves as a surfer, when two completely unrelated ideas suddenly connected. That, Dr. Pistillo says, is exactly what happens in group recollection: separate threads of thought, wired together, becoming something far stronger than either was alone.
Alongside the learning system, he points to something even broader: teaching students how to think. Systems thinking, in particular — the practice of focusing on the relationships between the parts of a system rather than the parts themselves — is, in his words, one of the most valuable and most overlooked skills in higher education.
Ask any longtime member of the UAT community about the campus, and the story of its Feng Shui design usually comes up. It's one of the more unexpected chapters of the university's founding — and one Dr. Pistillo tells with total sincerity.
His reasoning was straightforward: any practice a culture has relied on for 5,000 years deserves genuine consideration, not dismissal. Feng Shui, as he describes it, comes down to sensory cues — visual and auditory signals that shape how safe, secure, and capable people feel in a space, which in turn shapes how they think and act.
When it came time to design the university's campus, UAT ran a design competition among five architecture firms and required each to incorporate Feng Shui principles, with a certified practitioner on staff throughout the process. The site itself — nestled at what local tradition holds is the tail of South Mountain, the most prominent of Phoenix's “dragon mountains” — was chosen deliberately, valued as one of the most auspicious locations in the area, and conveniently just minutes from the airport for the steady stream of visiting architects, engineers, and industry partners.
Asked about Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Pistillo draws a direct line back to 1982, when nobody could have predicted exactly what the internet would become — only that it would be profound. He sees AI the same way: impossible to fully forecast, but certain to matter enormously, for better and for worse.
His advice for using it well echoes the thinking skills he's championed all along: set guardrails. Tell your AI what sources to trust, ask for peer-reviewed information, and request the counterargument along with the answer. Thinking clearly about a tool, he suggests, matters as much as the tool itself.
Looking ahead, he points to another concept he believes higher education still hasn't cracked: instant feedback — the same mechanic that makes video games so intuitively easy to learn without ever opening a manual. If UAT (or any institution) could build that kind of real-time feedback into how students learn, he believes it would be transformative. It's a challenge he says he's raised at every board meeting he's attended, without yet arriving at the answer — but it's the frontier he'd point toward next.
Near the end of the conversation, Dr. Pistillo is asked to boil down his legacy to a single sentence. He doesn't hesitate:
“Innovating higher education.”
Not a specific technology. Not a single program. A commitment to proving that a university could be built differently — and to showing the rest of higher education a better way to do it.
More than four decades after five companies were started on a shoestring, that commitment is still the thread running through everything UAT does. On Founders Day, it's worth remembering: UAT didn't start with a plan to build a university. It started with a question about why the world wasn't keeping up — and the willingness to build the answer.
Curious what a university built to stay a year ahead looks like? Explore programs at uat.edu.