W. Miller Brown
Dean of Faculty

Miller Brown is most comfortable when he’s asking questions. That inclination, the result of his training as a philosopher, has served him well during his many years as a member of the Trinity faculty and, for the past five-plus years, in his role as dean of faculty. Being an effective dean, however, also involves another staple of philosophy: balancing the interests of the individual against the interests of the community at large. “I have found that deaning has deeper challenges and opportunities than I had imagined,” Brown said recently at a reception in his honor. “For one thing, it involves a variety of non-trivial moral issues that I have found challenging—questions of fairness across the faculty; of individual and personal difficulties that can have profound affects on one’s professional and personal life. For another, there are always epistemological puzzles that are fascinating and often difficult, puzzles about how to bring many people, many needs, and many choices into optimal arrangements that will preserve and enhance the interests of our students and faculty. These, too, are often non-trivial puzzles that can affect the quality of learning and teaching at the College, not to speak of the professional lives of individual people.

“Before I took the job,” he says, “I had a rather avuncular image of the dean, as a person whom the faculty could kind of go in and chat with. That was my understanding of the office, on the basis of my familiarity with previous deans. But I discovered that, in actuality, it’s an extraordinarily complex administrative position with a multitude of managerial responsibilities. I found myself having to learn pretty fast.”

Brown came to the College in 1965, when he was finishing his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. He says that teaching at Trinity was an opportunity that was “too important for me to pass up.” He had previously been a teaching fellow at Harvard and a lecturer in French at Boston University. He has since written and lectured extensively in the areas of philosophy of science and philosophy of sport, was a visiting scholar at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, and was a member of the Society of Fellows at the University of Durham in Durham, England.

“To state the obvious, we will do better if we work together, talk with, not at, each other, and respect each other’s differences and good efforts to make the College an even finer place to teach and learn. We have a great faculty, a superb administration and staff, and trustees who are dedicated to providing the resources we need to excel. I hope that in the next few years, with stable leadership, we can move steadily ahead … together.”

Brown is stepping down as dean of faculty, effective June 30, 2004.