Colleges and Universities Should Rethink MLK Day Celebrations
Many colleges and universities across the United States of America observe Martin Luther King Junior Day of Service (MLK Day) with large-scale philanthropic and humanitarian programs aimed at increasing civic engagement and social responsibility. Days of Service, while impactful in many communities, are often the subject of critique by university students, staff, and faculty, with many arguing that they dilute Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy of direct nonviolent action and are antithetical to his goals of racial justice and civil rights.
Critics of the holiday observances often blame whiteness — the systems and structures that produce and maintain white supremacy — for the slippage of the holiday’s focus. Scholars and activists have proposed alternatives to participating in such watered-down observances of MLK Day in hopes that his radical dream of equality will be revitalized. For example, in an industry Facebook group, J. Spenser Darden, a student affairs practitioner wrote:
I’m sick of the narrative that MLK Day is a day of service. It’s not. Or at least, shouldn’t be… His mission wasn’t to remind people to be nice and participate in a food drive, he challenged American consciousness to examine the rot at our core — the racist…structures in need of dismantling and rebuilding. It’s disingenuous and whitewashed to do these “days of service” on our campuses, particularly at PWIs without fundamentally challenging the charity paradigm of service from which most of the service is developed, and instead engage our students in a discussion of social justice.
The post speaks to the chasm between MLK Day observations that are nothing more than a politically correct ceremony and those that display a commitment to civil rights and social justice. The chasm is widened by modern occurrences of blatant racism on college campuses — it is extremely difficult to believe that celebrations of MLK Day are more than publicity stunts when Black people on campus are still being murdered, assaulted, and brutalized. An MLK Day celebration does not feel as significant when Black students at some of the most elite institutions are still fighting to prove that they belong, and Black people in the neighborhoods surrounding the campus are pushed out of their homes as institutional leaders follow in the footsteps of the colonizers.
Ceremonial events like days of service, renaming buildings, and tearing down statues are necessary, because symbolic events serve as both historical reference points and concrete representations of values. Still, colleges and universities must show their commitment to inclusive campus environments by identifying, problematizing, and uprooting whiteness in practice, programs, and policy.
The Purpose of Education
In a 1947 article that King wrote for the Morehouse College campus newspaper, he expressed his philosophy on the purpose of education. King believed that education should serve a very specific purpose:
“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
Today, higher education institutions are controlled by economic logics such as neoliberalism, marketization, and academic capitalism. Professors and administrators prioritize efficiency and profit over student learning and development, which is antithetical to King’s philosophy of education and directly contributes to much of what he viewed as evil. King would label many higher education institutions today as dangerous and implicate them for producing criminals without morals.
This judgement is not reserved for the current iterations of higher education, but also for their sordid histories of racism, exclusion, colonization, and exploitation. The foundations of higher education institutions are inextricably linked to what Dr. King was fighting for and against in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Higher education was a major beneficiary of slavery as early donors gained wealth in industries related to slavery, many campuses were built by enslaved Africans, and the labor of enslaved Africans was the origin of residence life, dining services, and facilities maintenance. Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era are also part of the sociohistorical context of King’s public activism.
Understanding the historical context of King’s activism and the origins of higher education reveals a deep disconnect and incongruent values. Thus, higher education should not focus on observing MLK Day, but on adopting his philosophy and radically changing the way the institutions function. A paid holiday or large-scale program is but a bandage on the deep, necrotic wound that is racism in the United States.
The Path Forward
Instead of resting on MLK Day programming as the exemplar of campus commitment to social justice, campuses should commit to teaching about the Triple Evils of poverty, militarism, and racism, and their manifestations in the campus environment. Food pantries and resource pantries are providing for student needs, yet there are high-school students in surrounding communities whose low socioeconomic status all but guarantees a future of poverty and debt. Campuses across the country are divesting from military weaponry programs, yet subjective campus event policies force Black and Brown student groups to pay exorbitant amounts of money for unnecessary police presence at their events. Campuses are renaming buildings that were once named for slave-owners, and naming departments after civil rights activists, but the Black population of the surrounding community is rarely reflected in the student demographics.
Instead of day of service programs, campuses can ask how The King Philosophy can build an inclusive campus community and they can commit to using the Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change in the student conduct process. If campus administrators took on King’s belief that no person is their adversary, students might get the developmental and restorative experience that they deserve instead of retribution that mirrors the criminal legal system of the United States.
Lastly, campuses can use the Beloved Community as an aspirational campus climate. King described the Beloved Community as a society where power is balanced amongst all people, and the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism do not exist. King did not believe that the Beloved Community was a utopian society, because he knew that it was attainable. Since higher education’s espoused values of social justice, equity, and inclusion align with the Beloved Community framework, this commitment is a tangible way to honor King’s legacy and effect change on campus.