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Duke grads Open Letter to Stephen Miller
To Stephen Miller, Duke University Class of 2007,
Our class’s upcoming ten-year reunion serves as an occasion to reflect on how much has changed since we left campus. After graduation, some of us remained in Durham and some of us moved to Dar es Salaam. Some embarked on medical school and some started novels. We can now be found in every type of professional field in every corner of the globe—but no matter who or where we are, we’ve striven to embody the ideals instilled in us by our Duke education.
You have also accomplished much. As a Senior Advisor to President Donald J. Trump, you have ascended to the very peak of American policy-making and have gained the power to influence not just hundreds of millions of Americans, but the lives of people around the world. And yet we find it impossible to see in your words and actions any glimmer of the university values we so cherish, nor the slightest suggestion that you spent four of your most formative years at the same dynamic, diverse institution of higher education we did.
Surely you lived, as we did, in the same Duke quads as migrants and refugees, people who came to our school after childhoods of horrific hardship, people who sought American shores for the promise of safety and opportunity their native homes could not deliver. How is it, then, that as a global refugee crisis continues to unfold you can play such a central role in the executive order banning innocent refugees and the citizens of seven majority Muslim countries?
Surely you had classes where young women were the leading lights of seminars and discussions, women who have now gone on to achieve success in the law, in business, in academia, in the arts, in medicine, in politics. How, then, can you contribute to an administration that overlooks women for cabinet posts, advisory roles, and judgeships, that speaks and acts as though women lack sufficient agency to make decisions about their own families and bodies?
Our class’s upcoming ten-year reunion serves as an occasion to reflect on how much has changed since we left campus. After graduation, some of us remained in Durham and some of us moved to Dar es Salaam. Some embarked on medical school and some started novels. We can now be found in every type of professional field in every corner of the globe—but no matter who or where we are, we’ve striven to embody the ideals instilled in us by our Duke education.
You have also accomplished much. As a Senior Advisor to President Donald J. Trump, you have ascended to the very peak of American policy-making and have gained the power to influence not just hundreds of millions of Americans, but the lives of people around the world. And yet we find it impossible to see in your words and actions any glimmer of the university values we so cherish, nor the slightest suggestion that you spent four of your most formative years at the same dynamic, diverse institution of higher education we did.
Surely you lived, as we did, in the same Duke quads as migrants and refugees, people who came to our school after childhoods of horrific hardship, people who sought American shores for the promise of safety and opportunity their native homes could not deliver. How is it, then, that as a global refugee crisis continues to unfold you can play such a central role in the executive order banning innocent refugees and the citizens of seven majority Muslim countries?
Surely you had classes where young women were the leading lights of seminars and discussions, women who have now gone on to achieve success in the law, in business, in academia, in the arts, in medicine, in politics. How, then, can you contribute to an administration that overlooks women for cabinet posts, advisory roles, and judgeships, that speaks and acts as though women lack sufficient agency to make decisions about their own families and bodies?
Read the whole letter here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf9JDRbGYhkAEMJ3hFlypzanVEi9lFEYQfDXD1XX3g_3RInDw/viewform?c=0&w=1
29 replies
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I expected to find on the list. Sure enough...they stood up.
?w=300&h=217 What a marvelous tribute to an outstanding University - way to go, Alumni!!!!!!
Surprisingly, as a profile in the Los Angeles Times last month pointed out, Miller is a graduate of Santa Monica High School, the almost comically left-leaning enclave of California-style Californiaism. Even back then, Miller's politics as "the student body's best-known and least-liked conservative activist" were retrograde and unpopular, only without the imprimatur of the office of the presidency behind them.
The inclusive, multi-cultural atmosphere of the school irked Miller, as many of his fellow classmates at the time have said, and it was something he wasn't afraid of making known. A video from the spring of 2002 that uncovered by Unvision shows Miller running in a student body election, expressing an attitude toward the largely Latino support staff that would serve as foreshadowing for this administration.
"Hi, I'm Stephen Miller, some of you may or may not know who I am," he begins. "We're not talking about that right now. I'm the only candidate up here who stands out. I would say and I would do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do. Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up our trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?"
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a53213/stephen-miller-cobrasnake/The inclusive, multi-cultural atmosphere of the school irked Miller, as many of his fellow classmates at the time have said, and it was something he wasn't afraid of making known. A video from the spring of 2002 that uncovered by Unvision shows Miller running in a student body election, expressing an attitude toward the largely Latino support staff that would serve as foreshadowing for this administration.
"Hi, I'm Stephen Miller, some of you may or may not know who I am," he begins. "We're not talking about that right now. I'm the only candidate up here who stands out. I would say and I would do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do. Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up our trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?"
