Torah Umadda, Quantum Physics and Poetry: Getting to Know Professor Matt Miller
In 1970, when he was but a few months old, SCW English department Chair Matt Miller was adopted. He became a member of a loving Christian family, one that encouraged his childhood infatuation with literature and creative expression. He took to reading at an early age, consuming nearly a book a day. For Miller, reading provided “an escapist fantasy.” Perpetually occupied with “little books like ‘Hardy Boys’” and science fiction, Miller found that books could serve to help him transcend the geographical upheaval and familial tragedy that punctuated his childhood. A formative move from urban Los Angeles to rural Nebraska in fourth grade and the death of his father in 10th grade oriented Miller to worlds other than his own. Books like “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” by C.S. Lewis shaped his young mind and laid foundations for later intellectual pursuits by introducing him to novel ideas about the fungibility of time, religion and ontology. As he grew older, Miller shifted toward more historical, traditional literature, but his early sense of moral and scientific wonder would endure.
After high school, Miller completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Nebraska. He then earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the oldest and arguably most prestigious program of its kind in the country. There, he developed his poetic skills with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jory Graham, who enchanted Professor Miller with her “intuitive sense of poetry” and pedagogical ability to make the “art form feel like it’s like the most important thing that you could be doing with your life.” It was a lesson that he’s kept ever since.
As a result of his adoption and elements of a “tragic childhood,” Miller often feels like “a stranger in a strange land.” The circumstances of his early life rendered his biological heritage opaque, severing his attachment to personal history. Instead of pining for the inaccessible past, Professor Miller strives to live in a state of honest, unmediated encounter with the present. “There is a spectrum within which we exist in relation to the past. I do my best to try to live as little bound and dictated by it as I can because I feel like I’m a better person when I’m not,” Miller told The Commentator.
This approach to life nurtures creative writing. Miller explained, “Feeling like a stranger is more likely to encourage you to write than feeling comfortable in your environment. I think most writers, either through the force of writing or through their disposition, see the world more afresh.” Writing, spirituality and meditation aid Miller in an experience of life similar to that of a child: full of wonder and curiosity.
Because of his being adopted, Miller explained that “tradition is not the default, but rather the strange new thing.” It is striking, then, that Miller leads the English department at Stern College for Women, a community defined by its constant communion with history and tradition. Since his arrival in 2008, Miller has found the religious culture at Stern “very eye-opening,” teaching him “about the value of tradition and why so many people invest their lives in it.”
Miller believes that he shares with the YU community a fundamental faith. “My view of religion is far less orthodox and determined by any kind of textuality than most Stern students, but the faith is the same, I think. There’s no lack of confidence for me in the nature of creation as creation.” Miller’s religious worldview is informed by an Emersonian understanding of natural law, or the idea that the divine wisdom embedded in nature generates an imperative to cultivate human understanding that suffuses life with purpose and meaning. For Professor Miller, the world is “a wonderful invitation to better understand the mind of God.”
Professor Miller is a student of science. Consuming hours of science-related content a week, he is interested in the latest discoveries in the fields of cosmology and quantum physics. Miller can speak intelligently about those topics, as long as you “don’t ask [him] to do the math.” Miller extends his philosophy of curiosity to human wisdom, too. “It’s all creation, ultimately. If God created humanity, then humanity’s creations are de facto also creations of God.” For him, human intellectual achievement is an enrichment of creation itself.
It is on this basis that Professor Miller affirms the relevance and enduring vitality of a classical liberal arts education. Education that cultivates the mind’s capacity for critical thinking, problem solving and creativity improves and expands students’ potential, endowing them with skills that are transferable to future professional endeavors. Miller resists the sentiment that education should be valued strictly for its vocational and financial utility. While programs like the Sy Syms School of Business provide worthy academic options for some students, their status as default or even the ideal prevents students from being exposed to the edifying quality of the liberal arts, which is “not just a world of esoteric and difficult things like historical poetry, but a world of curiosity.” Professor Miller appreciates the unique opportunity that Yeshiva University affords both students and teachers — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — to explore some of “the most important matters in life” through the vision of Torah Umadda.
“[Torah Umadda] is a way of bringing in one of the most important elements of life to the overall academic discussion and including it in the same kind of rigorous, open-minded, rational, and curious conversation that other matters are seen through or worked through,” Miller said. “I’m moved by Rabbi Soloveitchik’s writings on a spiritual and religious level as a non-Jew, and I feel welcomed by this community, for the most part. It allows me to be more myself, even though I’m not Jewish, because I can present a part of myself that I would otherwise be encouraged to not discuss; to not bring out that religious side of me.”
One manifestation of Miller’s humanistic philosophy of education is his conviction in the fortitudinous value of the English major in the age of artificial intelligence. Though he acknowledges that “there is going to be a change in the workforce and its relationship to language-related skills,” Miller believes that human literary expression will remain unique because of its fundamental superiority to AI. AI can imitate human work, but it lacks an imaginative faculty and a consciousness — an exclusive “expression of living beings.”
At the same time, Miller recommends that students looking to derive vocational benefit from their humanities education “not take a technophobic attitude toward AI,” but instead harness it to further their own work. “I think you need to learn about it, use it, open it up, but don’t use it as a substitute for your own learning. If students substitute AI for their own thinking, then they’re robbing themselves of … that self-improvement element, which is so important to all education,” Miller shared.
Professor Miller thanks the Stern community for the trust they’ve shown by making him chair of the English department and hopes that trust is well placed. He would like the community to know that he is working hard to make the English department a welcoming environment that empowers students to occupy the “driver’s seat of their own minds.”
Photo Caption: Matt Miller at a Walt Whitman Conference in Brazil
Photo Credit: Matt Miller
