Murray Miner, Jr. passed away in November 2019.

Murray Milner, Jr. was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Virginia and was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He received B.Sc. from Texas A & M, and M.A. from the University of Texas, and M. Div. from Union Theological seminary (New York), and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. For three years, he directed a relief and rehabilitation program in Bangladesh.

He wrote an array of articles and was a co-author of Police on Campus, an analysis of the mass police action at Columbia University in 1968. He was the author of The Illusion of Equality: The Effects of Educational Opportunity on Inequality and Conflict; Unequal Care: A Case Study of Interorganizational Relations in Health Care; and Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture, which received the 1996 Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association, and Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption (Routledge, 2004), which applies the theory of status relationships that was developed in Status and Sacredness to the behavior of adolescents.  He also authored Elites: A General Model (Polity Press, 2015), which proposes a model of the common patterns of cooperation and conflict between different types of elites and between elites and non-elites, and then uses the model to analyze ancient India, Classical Athens, and the contemporary United States.  His latest book was a revised and updated version of Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids.  This edition was subtitled "Teenagers in an Era of Consumption, Standardized Tests, and Social Media".  Based on additional fieldwork, it identifies the changes that have occurred in high schools in the fifteen years since the original study.  Special attention is paid to effects of new technologies and social media on teen culture, and the intended and unintended consequences of extensive standardized testing.

He was completing work on a book entitled "Understanding Sacredness: A Sociological Theology".

His Fellowships included: NIMH Training Fellowship, NEH Summer Institute for Cross-disciplinary Study; Senior Fulbright Fellow to India; American Institute of Indian Studies Fellowship. He had been a visiting scholar at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, the Delhi School of Economics, and London School of Economics, and Downing College, Cambridge. In 1997, he was the American Sociological Association Sorokin Lecturer at the Eastern Sociology Association meetings and the Pacific Sociological Association meetings. In 1998 he received the Virginia Social Science Association Distinguished Scholar Award. In 2007 he received his second Fulbright award and served as a lecturer in sociology at Delhi School of Economics and at St. Edmund's College of North East Hill University.