I’m doing a demonstration you’ve never seen, and if you don’t see it by me, you’ll never see it by anyone else.’ ” “He used to call me and say, ‘Sam, you’ve got to to come to my classroom today. Sam Schauerman, vice president for instruction at El Camino, was Miller’s dean when he was at the college. Miller taught for a time at UCLA, but said he opted for El Camino in 1952 because he did not want to be in a big, remote institution. Today, Miller has a collection of Einstein memorabilia that includes a copy of the great thinker’s birth certificate. There he became a student, and friend, of Albert Einstein, who became an idol. He formed the most important intellectual association of his life when he went to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., in 1950. Army Signal Corps during World War II, held fellowships in physics at the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and was a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA. Miller was a civilian physicist with the U.S. He said he wrote 700 letters trying to land a teaching job, and when he got one, at a private school in Connecticut, the pay wasn’t much better: $20 a month. “That’s 50 cents a day each, washing pots, pans and toilets.” So he and his wife became butler and maid for a wealthy Boston doctor. He left Boston College with degrees in philosophy and theoretical physics, but it was during the Depression and there were no teaching jobs. Miller says that by the time he was 16, he had “read the library dry” in his hometown of Billerica, Mass. “You’ll see a darkness putting the Middle Ages to shame. It’s easy to be mediocre, it’s hard to acquire excellence.” “The young will inherit the republic, and what do they know of academic rigor? Intellectual integrity is the highest virtue, and there is little of that today. Nowhere in the classroom is the joy of learning cultivated. “The intellectual life has started to decay. Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor.” We don’t have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or calculate. Last week, he said: “We are approaching a darkness in the land. Culture is so diseased, I can but hope that the few students who leave my hands will be different.” “Students are exposed to more knowledge, but they are not equipped to think. “I am sorely disturbed by the intellectual decay I see around me,” he told The Times when he retired in 1974. Many years ago, he already was saying that the intellectual life was in trouble. Miller calls himself an old-fashioned academic, brought up by his mother-”She was a Lithuanian peasant who spoke 12 languages”-and his teachers in the the rigors of precise, disciplined thinking. “Why do they send someone who has never seen me?” “Demonstrations of physics, that’s been my business for 50 years,” he said. The reporter, who is 48, passed the age test, but Miller was angry when the reporter confessed he had never seen him in the classroom or on television. He asked the reporter how old he was before he would see him, saying he does not talk to young people because they don’t know who he is. Miller told a reporter that he never has been “a kindly old man,” and he did his best to prove it.
He said the trip was cut short when he became “violently ill.” He said his leukemia was diagnosed early last month after he returned from what was supposed to be a three-month trip to Australia, where he has become a celebrity over a 25-year period of lecturing, appearing on television, publishing books and even doing splashy advertisements for a candy company. “But I can still stir to the bird on the wing-to the gurgle of a brook-to the rain in my face. “The outlook is disquieting and the uncertainty a burden-a halt to my pace and a finality athwart my way of life. Last December, after another attack, he wrote a letter to friends, reporting that he was feeling “the usual ravages of the flesh.” Some interpreted it as a goodby. Miller, who was a professor at El Camino College for 22 years, nearly died after a heart attack in 1964.
JULIUS SUMNER MILLER BOOKS SERIES
He made 40 appearances on the Mickey Mouse Club and did a series of Walt Disney children’s records on great scientists.
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