Martin Luther King Jr. Day
January 11, 2024
To the Campus Community,
This Monday, in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Stony Brook’s academic campus, administrative offices, and Child Care Services will be closed. Stony Brook University Hospital, Long Island State Veterans Home, and Stony Brook Medicine outpatient facilities will maintain normal operations as the country recognizes this important federal holiday.
As a historian I generally eschew counterfactual arguments, yet like most of us, from time to time I have wondered how the present would be altered had critical past events unfolded differently. Lately I’ve been reflecting about what our world would look like had Dr. King been able to continue his work with his moral compass and powerful voice guiding humanity’s advance.
If Dr. King were to visit here, what might he say to us? In a world where hate too often seems to prevail, I believe that Dr. King might challenge us, as he challenged his contemporaries, “to have compassion and understanding for those who hate us.”
At Stony Brook University, I hope that he would recognize the sincere effort that this community makes to learn life’s deep lessons, to debate their meaning, and to persist in healing the wounds of division. Yet, the Dr. King of my imagination would challenge us to work even harder in pursuit of what he called education’s “worthy objectives.” At Stony Brook, those objectives include ensuring that we maintain a community where people from vastly different backgrounds come together to learn and grow, attempting to see one another’s perspective while acknowledging the often-unfamiliar experiences that shaped them. They include moving away from divisive rhetoric and toward mutual understanding and shared purpose.
In the spirit of Dr. King, I challenge all of us to spend time this semester reflecting on those worthy objectives and committing ourselves to the work of discourse and discovery. Let’s begin this spring term with more than a nod to Dr. King’s legacy. Let’s perpetuate it with purpose and actions that advance his cause.
I challenge all of us to risk a conversation with someone we might have “othered” because of how they look, where they’re from or what we assume they believe. I challenge us to acknowledge that there is room to meet one another between the poles of our respective beliefs, that there is opportunity to listen, learn and reflect on the ways in which we are similar rather than focusing on the ways we disagree.
Those conversations won’t soon change the realities on the ground, but they will start a process of evolution within each of us that might heal division and radiate outward one conversation at a time, one classroom at a time, one community at a time. Pursued together, that process could be the “threshold of a new dawn” that Dr. King exhorted us to grasp.
That is most certainly a dream worth honoring and a legacy worth achieving. Let’s go there together.
Sincerely,
Maurie McInnis
President