Professor Profile: Milling For A Differently Colored Perspective

"There are some people that are called to teach - they're sort of like born teachers - I'm not one of those persons." Karen Miller, a professor in the Boston College history department, may not believe she was born to teach, but underneath her modest words is an even more interesting story. For instance, she prefers coffee over tea, but at one point in her life, the agricultural product of the Camellia sinensis plant was her drink of choice. "I used to love tea until I had a kidney transplant. My sister, who gave me her kidney, is a big coffee drinker and a big shopper. Now, for some reason, I love doing both," says Miller, sharing the anecdote with a smile.

Born and raised in San Diego, Calif., Miller is one of four daughters. Originally from what she describes as a "nice, black middle class community," Miller and her family were pushed to move as a result of structural changes to her town. "They built a freeway and a lot of the families, including my own, had to move to another part of San Diego," Miller explains. The move brought her to a community that was significantly different from her previous one - she was the only person of color in her school, Chollas Elementary. In the early years of her education, Miller would have experiences that later influenced her decision to become a teacher.

"As the only African-American in my class, my history teachers would ask me questions such as, 'Why was slavery good for black people?' At that point, I decided if I ever became a historian, I was going to find enough information so that those types of questions wouldn't ever be asked," Miller says.

Miller's two favorite subjects were math and history, though she didn't really start to like history until high school, and once calculators became common, her affection for math faded. Reading was one of her favorite things to do in elementary school, but she wasn't a big fan of essays - she preferred to be tested in a way that required her to supply a concrete answer, either wrong or right.

At one point in her life, Miller thought she was never going to leave San Diego. "It wasn't a hopeful thing - I didn't want to stay in San Diego my entire life, but I just never left the city until I went to graduate school. I wanted to see how other people lived." Miller went from San Diego to Santa Barbara and then ended up in Milwaukee, where she began her graduate program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and first started teaching. "I starting teaching in the early 1980s as a teaching assistant as a part of my graduate program," Miller says. "Right before I finished my degree, I got a class of my own, and then when I finished, I went right into teaching at the university."

Miller remembers applying for her first teaching job and not expecting much of it. "It was that job that you go to interview for when you think, 'Okay, there aren't any jobs out there and I'm going to interview for this job to show that there aren't any jobs out there and I need to be serious about what I'm really going to do' and to my surprise, I got the job," she says.

At first, Miller made the journey to Boston with other intentions in mind, but an opening in BC's history department prompted Miller to join the University's ranks in 1990.

"The thing that interests me most about history is that it makes such an impact on how people think about themselves in the world and how they construct other people in the world," Miller says. "I wanted to be able to do work that allowed me to have evidence that talked about the way in which people are in the world - especially people of color and people from varying perspectives - so that you can have one world, but depending on where you were situated, you can see different things about it."

Miller teaches African American History I and II as well as a section of the major-restricted Study and Writing of History. "It's a course in which history majors study both a specific topic and the way that historians and others have written about it and then they get a chance to write about the topic themselves," Miller explains.

Though Miller primarily teaches African American history, she was unable to specialize in it while she was at school. "Back at that point, you couldn't just study African-American history," she says. "You could do either ethnic history or American history and then try to find ways to get access to other works that dealt with African American, Hispanic, and other cultures."

One of the things Miller says she likes about BC and its students is the prominence of culture clubs on campus. "It is structured so that it's not necessary for a student to be of a particular culture to be involved in that respective culture club," Miller says. "I just like the idea that people have places where they can go and be and celebrate." She believes the culture clubs, however, serve an additional purpose on campus. "Culture clubs have been helpful in challenging the University to be better in terms of diversity and knowing and understanding that when you live in a diverse world, you're not just getting a diverse education to learn how to be tolerant, but also you have to know how to work in a world of a variety of people," she says. "The students have been particularly instrumental in that."

Citing her participation in events for the AHANA Leadership Council, Miller believes that professors should work to see their students outside of the classroom.

"If you as a faculty member have that wall up, you're not getting a good sense of the population you're working with - grown up, fully formed people with ideas and abilities." she says. "You don't see the stresses and the strains as well as the talents you can try to bring out in the classroom."

When she's not teaching, knitting, watching 24, or championing her fantasy baseball league, Miller finds herself reading constantly.

"I love to read," she says. "If I wasn't a professor and had all my time to myself, one of things that I would like to do is to just read my favorite books."