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Documents raise questions about Obama's father's PhD claims

Print | Comments () Posted by Martin Finucane April 28, 2011 04:36 PM

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Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

In this January 2008 picture, a portrait of Obama's late father hung on the wall at the family house in Kogelo, Kenya.

By Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff

Throughout a tumultuous career as an economist in Nairobi in the 1960s, Barack Hussein Obama, President Obama's father, claimed to have earned a PhD from Harvard University. But according to federal immigration records, Obama was forced to leave the school by school administrators alarmed at the number of women in his life and his financial difficulties before he could complete his doctorate.

In a May 1964 memo contained in Obama's Immigration and Naturalization Service file, an immigration inspector noted that Obama had passed his exams and was entitled to stay and complete the requirements for a PhD in economics. But Harvard administrators, including the chairman of the economics department, "are going to try and cook something up to ease him out. All three (administrators) will have to agree on this, however. They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home."

Less than three weeks later, an immigration inspector recorded in a memo that Harvard had asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to hold up on Obama's request for an extension of his stay. School administrators, the memo continued, "were having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn't seem to figure out how many wives he had."

Although Harvard had earlier informed the agency that Obama would be remaining for the academic year starting the following fall, the school abruptly reversed itself. David D. Henry, then the director of Harvard's International Office, advised Obama in a May letter that he had three weeks to make the necessary preparations to return to Nairobi. Despite his vigorous protest, Obama was compelled to leave the country in July.

For Obama, then 30 and widely expected to be a key player back home in newly independent Kenya, Harvard's decision was disastrous. Lacking the degree for which he so yearned, Obama embarked on an erratic career path that never lived up to his early promise. The INS documents, released to this reporter through a Freedom Of Information Act request in 2009 in the course of research on a biography of the elder Obama, reveal Harvard's crucial role in the tumultuous course of Obama's life. The documents were made public Wednesday by the weekly newspaper The Arizona Independent.