Andy Miller has dedicated his career to education, retiring earlier this year after 42 years as a professor in the geography and environmental systems department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he is now an emeritus professor.
A New Jersey native, Miller moved to Baltimore in 1976 when he came to Johns Hopkins University for a graduate program in the geography and environmental engineering program.
In the decades since, Miller has made a home for himself and his family in Baltimore and has become heavily involved in the Jewish community, joining the board of Chizuk Amuno Congregation and eventually becoming the congregation’s president.
Miller has also been involved with Jews United for Justice since 2016 and chairs JUFJ’s Social Justice in the Synagogues Roundtable.
Tell me about how you came to Baltimore.
I was looking around for a graduate program that interested me and came across the department at Johns Hopkins called Geography and Environmental Engineering. And it was a pretty unorthodox way to apply to graduate school. I did not do it the way I would have advised any of my students to do it. I basically just made a decision. I applied to one place only, and I was not, let’s say, into long-range planning at that point. I just made decisions and acted on them.
What were your early years in academia like?
[In grad school] I was in a department called Geography and Environmental Engineering, which was actually a combination of all kinds of different science, environmental science, environmental engineering. There were people studying ecology, water and wastewater engineering and transportation. In that program, one of the things I learned that basically affected everything I thought ever since was that interesting problems don’t necessarily follow disciplinary boundaries.
How did you get your start at UMBC?
I completed my dissertation and graduated in 1983, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. I applied for some jobs, and I actually got an interview and was hired as an assistant professor at UMBC back in 1983. UMBC was a pretty new campus at that time.
I was hired in a small geography department, and we had, I think, only six faculty, and they were a mix of social scientists and natural scientists, a completely undergraduate program. And over the ensuing years, the department grew, and I spent a while as department chair back in the late ’90s, early 2000s, and we eventually weren’t just a geography department anymore.
We’re actually called the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems because we wanted it to be interdisciplinary. The thinking was very much related to the way I had been educated as a graduate student, that interesting problems cross disciplinary boundaries, and you need to talk to people from different backgrounds.
Can you tell me about your commitment to social justice?
I view anything that I do in terms of social justice as really governed by my understanding of what Jewish texts tell us we’re responsible for doing. I have heard of some Jews who say, ‘Oh, social justice. That’s not really a Jewish thing.’ And my answer to that is, why is it that the Haftarah on Yom Kippur afternoon is all about social justice and says, what is your fast worth to me, if you don’t treat people justly? So all the work we do, we do through a Jewish lens.
What was the process like getting started with social justice at Chizuk Amuno?
It took us a while to get organized, but we eventually took what had been at the Tikkun Olam Advocacy Committee and we basically renamed it and reformulated and called it the Social Justice Advocacy Committee. [The committee] has a goal of advocacy for making change in policy, because you can fix the really big problems only by directly serving people. You can only reach the people you actually work with directly.
So our goal became to become involved in doing work where we would advocate at the local and state level, where we actually have a chance of making an impact, to advocate for change in ways that had some chance of actually making a difference.
How did you become involved with JUFJ?
During the period before the [Social Justice Advocacy] committee fully got going. It just so happened that Jews United for Justice, which was pretty new in Baltimore, had just asked Chizuk Amuno to allow them to hold a meeting [at the synagogue]. I didn’t know anything about them, but it was a meeting on police accountability, because this is related to the whole Freddy Gray issue and how this could have happened.
I happened to find out about it, so I went in to listen to what people had to say in this meeting. And that’s when I first met folks from JUFJ, as did some other people at Chizuk Amuno, and decided to start going to some of the programs that they ran to become better educated about what was going on.
What does the Baltimore community mean to you?
We’re not natives, but I would say we have pretty deep roots in the Baltimore Jewish community. And yes, we did find a home here. And Chizuk Amuno has been our home now for quite a few years.
