From ROTC to the physics department, there isn’t much Joe Miller ’59 hasn’t done in his 70 years at John Carroll University. Since arriving as a freshman in 1955, Miller has scarcely spent any time away from the school and has seen a lot throughout his career.
As a student, Joe Miller was primarily involved in ROTC and The Carroll News. He enjoyed his time at JCU enough that, two years after graduating, he came back as a professor.
He describes the university in 1961 as being in “expansion mode.” The university was growing and needed to find “junior faculty members to accommodate basic courses.” Despite beginning as an adjunct professor in the speech department (which would later evolve into the Tim Russert Department of Communication), his role at the school expanded greatly over the years.
Miller was the assistant dean of the communication department from 1985 to 2003 and wore many other hats during that time. As Miller described it, whenever there was a “faculty emergency,” he would be the go-to person to fill in a position. These positions included dean of the graduate school and acting chair of the physics department. He did, however, stress that this latter job was not his strong suit. “If you need to know anything about physics,” Miller said, “don’t ask me.”
His presence at JCU has eased up over time, with his official retirement in 2014 leaving him as a part-time professor in the communication department, where he continues to work to this day. Miller has noticed a lot of changes to JCU over the past seven decades, one of the main ones being the sheer size of the campus. Both in terms of physical campus space and enrollment numbers, he has seen a significant increase over the years.
One change he lamented was the decreased Jesuit presence on campus. As he recalled, Jesuits were “all over the place” when he attended John Carroll, but he saw their numbers decrease significantly following the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s. Though he mourned this “mass exodus,” he did acknowledge it as a global trend not exclusive to the university.
Overall, though, he has seen “more depth in the classroom… better quality education… [and] better facilities” on campus. He recognized the necessity of changes to a college campus. When looking at a school’s history, he said, “If it’s the same, it’s time to go out of business.” Change, as tough as it may be, has proven essential to John Carroll’s growth over the past 70 years.
After nearly a quarter of a century at JCU, Joe Miller has no plans to slow down. He wants to continue teaching and learning as long as he can.
