Dwight Y. King International Student Scholarship Endowment Fund

Dwight Y. King was born in Kansas in 1942. He began his stellar scholarly career at Goshen College, with a degree in sociology. He graduated in 1964 and went on to earn a theology degree (STB) at Harvard, a masters degree in international studies at Johns Hopkins and a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago, completed in 1978. He spent most of his academic career as a professor and as director of the Northern Illinois University (NIU) Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) in Chicago.

A calm person with a low-key demeanor, King was never afraid to take a stand. In the 1960s, he protested America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. As a scholar, he studied the country of Indonesia and gave the world an unflinching view of the government there through his writing and teaching. In doing so, he influenced students who helped lay the foundations for democracy and electoral politics in Indonesia.

King began his life-long relationship with Indonesia in1972, when he went to Jakarta to conduct fieldwork for his dissertation. King and his wife, Kathy, lived for a year and a half in the Tanah Tinggi area in Central Jakarta. “We were thrown right into an Indonesian community,” he told the Jakarta Post in a 2008 interview. “There were no foreigners at all in Tanah Tinggi. My wife had not learned Bahasa before, so she picked up Indonesian just by going to the pasar (market)…we had an interesting year and a half in Tanah Tinggi.” King’s dissertation broke new ground with his assessment of the Indonesian “New Order” government as a “corporatist” structure in which trade unions were allowed to thrive in spite of the militaristic state.

In 1974, a friend from King’s University of Chicago program, who was now head of the Indonesian Central Statistics Bureau, invited King to create socio-economic indicators for a nation-wide census. In 1978, King was offered a teaching position at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. He was named director of the center in 2005. In that position he coordinated programs for more than 1,500 students per year, involving studies in Southeast Asian languages, literature, art, history, religion and government. King retired in 2009.

As a professor, King supervised many young Indonesian scholars who went on to become influential figures in Indonesian politics. Three of King’s former students were appointed by the Indonesian president to a panel that proposed changes in the country’s laws. Their proposals were deliberated in the House of Representatives, and in 1999 the process led to the first free elections in more than 50 years. King later served as an election monitor and senior political advisor for the Carter Center election-monitoring mission, including briefing former U.S. president Jimmy Carter about elections in East Timor in 2001 and Indonesia in 2004.

King was modest about any impact he may have had through the work of his students. In 2008, he told the Jakarta Post, “I am glad that they applied my values in real life experience, and by values I mean the general interests of an expert on comparative politics working on the third world, in how regimes change and become more democratic.”