Editor’s note: Arthur MacArthur “Mac” Miller died on Aug. 28, 2026. A beloved professor emeritus of British and American literature at New College, he started teaching when the school opened its doors in 1964 and retired 41 years later in 2005. Smart, witty, irreverent and generous with his time and encouragement, Miller was a mentor to generations of New College students. He welcomed debate, every kind of creativity and loved the liberal arts and his students. Until the moment he died, Miller was engaged in discussions with alumni and the current college administration about preserving the liberal arts and the essence of what made New College rare and special. Here, novelist, journalist and New College alum Michael Armstrong remembers Mac and his impact.

In that whirlwind of a first week when I started at New College in the fall of 1974, I met my first academic adviser. He had steel gray hair, floppy bangs, a neatly clipped mustache and a voice that, to mix metaphors, twinkled. I remember looking at his name tag—Arthur M. Miller—and thinking, “Whoa, the playwright and ex-husband of Marilyn Monroe teaches here?” But he wasn't that Arthur Miller, just plain “Mac.”

It was academic love at first sight.

Mac started teaching at New College at age 27 in 1964. We chatted, and he asked about my aspirations, and I told him I wanted to be a science fiction writer. His eyes lit up. Mac, it turned out, loved science fiction. At New College, if no set program existed, you made things up as you went along. Over the years, Mac helped me devise a program of classes, Independent Study Projects and a senior project that came down to three words: “Fill your brain.”

I now realize that was the essence of what Mac called “the secret sauce” of a liberal arts education and of New College. You took a lot of different courses in a lot of disciplines with an area of concentration, with the goal of just learning.

Fill your brain.

As it turned out, because I published science fiction and became a journalist, “fill your brain” provided the perfect academic plan. I ask a lot of damn fool questions. My magpie mind gathers information and then assembles it into a tangled nest of ideas.

As New College’s list of basic maxims (or at least the old New College guiding principles before the 2023 conservative takeover by Gov. Ron DeSantis) says, “True liberal education requires an appreciation for the unity of knowledge.” It also says, “Each student is responsible, in the last analysis, for one's own education.” Understand that, and you understand New College. 

Mac systematically devised a plan to fill my brain. My first term I took “Introduction to the Aesthetics and the Arts.” Mac asked me to be on the staff of New Collage, the poetry magazine. I took a literature class and a class in logic and rhetoric. I cranked out papers on my Sears manual typewriter, and I was ecstatic.

If a course came up in the catalog designed for, say, non-science majors, Mac encouraged me to take it. In my second term I took computer programming and bombed on the final. My teacher suggested I quit while I was ahead, but I still got a satisfactory—New College had no grades before 2023—that counted for my contract. Because I took computer programming, though, I got a job a few months after graduation as a night computer operator at the EMR (Electro Mechanical Research) Telemetry plant in Sarasota. See how that works out?

Whenever I called his office, Mac answered the phone with a terse, “Miller here.” I'd set up an appointment, and he would handle whatever latest crisis had come up in my life. Or he'd suggest new projects that led to more weird learning. I took a lot of Independent Reading Projects with him, like “The Story of Utopias” or “19th Century Literature of the Fantastic.” In the summer of 1975, Mac and I worked out an ISP, attending the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at Michigan State University. That workshop changed my life almost as much as New College.

In my last year at New College, when I thought everything had fallen apart, inside of one meeting Mac turned everything around and helped me craft a senior project, “Environmental Themes in Science Fiction.” I dedicated my senior project to Mac and New College “because, I, too, love this goddamn crazy place.”

When you develop a relationship with a professor like that, you go beyond teacher-student and become something else. I think it's like being an X-15 bolted to the belly of a B-52 that takes you to the edge of space and lets you go. Mac let me go. Along the way, we became friends.

It took me two more years living in Sarasota to fulfill the other part of the New College experience, which is that you have to leave. I moved to Alaska because, as Mac would say, “Why not?”

I kept in touch with Mac over the years through sporadic emails and letters. A month ago, out of the blue, he sent me a tattered Ace Books double science-fiction book with two short novels back-to-back. I realize he might have been doing a bit of Swedish death cleaning.

Here in 2026, New College is slowly being whittled to death by what Mac called the “conquistadors,”a reference to the brutal Spanish colonial conquerors who obliterated civilizations. Since 2023, when the DeSantis “conquistadors” arrived on campus, Mac worked to protect the New College concept of a liberal arts education in all its messiness.

Now that I'm 70, I sometimes think about death. People think that by dying something is lost and destroyed. That is not the case with New College. Though some might think the college I loved is gone, I believe it endures in the vast experience of thousands of alums and the education we got from professors like Mac.

That was not the case with Mac, either. We shared a profound experience that changed our lives in ways the conquistadors cannot understand or imagine. For me and for others, Mac led us into the stratosphere and let us go. His spirit is in every word I write, in every question I ask. He gave me permission to be intellectually curious. He gave me the passion to fill my brain.

I love that goddamn crazy place and I love Mac.

Michael Armstrong started at New College in its last private academic year, 1974-75, and graduated after the merger with a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities from New College of USF in 1977. The author of five published novels and dozens of short stories, he retired in 2022 as editor of the Homer News in Homer, Alaska, after working in journalism for 42 years. He came out of retirement in 2026 to help found the Homer Independent Press, a locally owned, locally managed nonprofit newspaper. He lives in Homer with his wife Jenny and an incredibly adorable dog.