MILLER, James G(rier) 1916-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 17, 1916, in Pittsburgh, PA; died November 7, 2002, in La Jolla, CA. Psychiatrist, educator, administrator, and author. Miller, a former president of the University of Louisville at Kentucky, was at the forefront of the creation of a new discipline: behavioral science, a term he himself coined. Although he initially studied to be a minister at Columbia Bible College, his love of science caused him to switch majors and attend the University of South Carolina, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University, where he earned his medical degree in 1942 and his doctorate in psychiatry in 1943. During World War II Miller served in the Army Medical Corps as a captain and was involved in evaluating potential agents for the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency. After working for a year at the U.S. Veterans Administration, he joined academia as a professor of psychology and chair of the department at the University of Chicago. The late 1950s and most of the 1960s were spent at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was a professor until 1967. From 1967 to 1971 Miller was a professor at Cleveland State University, where he was also vice president of academic affairs until 1970 and provost from 1970 to 1971. He then moved to the University of Louisville as vice president of academic educational development, becoming president in 1973 and leaving in 1980. As president of the university, Miller helped set up the nursing college and significantly increased enrollment while transitioning the school from a private to a public institution. While working as a university president, Miller's influention book Living Systems (1976) was published. This work thoroughly explains the discoveries in behavioral science up to that time, a discipline that he and others had been working on since the 1940s and that is intended to uncover common principles governing everything from the smallest living cell to complex organizational systems, such as political states and business corporations, as well as the organization of nonliving things. In 1980 Miller moved to California to become president of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions until 1983; and during the early 1980s he was also an adjunct professor at the Universities of California at Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Los Angeles. He worked as a psychiatrist at Brentwood V.A. Hospital from 1981 to 1988, and at the La Jolla V.A. Hospital in 1989. In addition to his teaching and psychiatry work, Miller was the founder of the journal Behavioral Science (now Systems Research and Behavioral Science), which he edited from 1956 to 1986, and created the online education network Educom, which later became part of Edunet. Miller's other publications include Unconsciousness (1942), the coauthored works Assessment of Men (1948), Computers and Education (1967), and Measurement and Interpretation in Accounting: A Living Systems Theory Approach (1989), as well as several edited works.

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PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2002, p. B14.