Duke grads Open Letter to Stephen Miller [View all]

[DesertRat]

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?

Read the whole letter here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf9JDRbGYhkAEMJ3hFlypzanVEi9lFEYQfDXD1XX3g_3RInDw/viewform?c=0&w=1