Oprah Winfrey has been chosen as the speaker at this year’s Harvard commencement. This has raised a small ruckus. Here is Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor and former dean of the college, in a bit of a snit:
I am sure she is an inspiration, though I can’t quite get out of my mind the image of her with the wheelbarrow full of fat. The car giveaways and so on. She has given away a ton of money for good causes, to be sure.
And I suppose we will again have some noble, courageous, self-sacrificing folks also receiving honorary degrees as they sit listening in polite silence to the self-promoting, wealthy television celebrity.
Is that what the stage once occupied by Winston Churchill, George Marshall, Ralph Ellison, John F. Kennedy, U Thant, Vaclav Havel, Alan Paton, Benazir Bhutto, Mary Robinson, and David Souter is going to be used for in the future?
But in a later post he makes a more substantive point, noting that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudo-science and quackery:
It seems very odd for Harvard to honor such a high profile popularizer of the irrational. I can’t square this in my mind, at a time when political and religious nonsense so imperil the rule of reason in this allegedly enlightened democracy and around the world.
He also provides a link to a list of past commencement day speakers. Perusing this list, I started wondering why the heck Harvard has a commencement speaker at all. At lesser institutions the speaker probably gives the school a bit of publicity, but Harvard doesn’t need publicity. Sometimes I suppose an institution gives the speaking slot to a top contributor, but Harvard clearly doesn’t do that. So why do they bother? It’s not like anyone cares about what Oprah or Fareed Zakaria (last year’s speaker, also a dubious choice) or Ellen Sirleaf (president of Liberia and the speaker two years ago) has to say. Certainly not when all anyone wants to do is get out of the heat and go party.
And it’s also not like Harvard’s choices have been uniformly good in the past. Lewis admits he cherry-picked that list of his, with Churchill and Marshall and Kennedy on it. The complete list is filled with the names of forgotten politicians and diplomats and industrialists. Harvard seems particularly fond of bringing in presidents and chancellors of Germany. What’s up with that? My year we listened to the immortal Roy Harris Jenkins, who is described as “former deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party.” I’m sure if I hadn’t been hung over I’d have remembered every word he said.
Harvard should just get rid of the commencement speaker altogether. Then it can say that no one meets its high standards. Which would probably be true.
Richard Bowker 
The surest way for Harvard to get a top-notch, well-qualified Commencement speaker would be to offer on-line voting on their website. The American way is always the best way.
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I thin they should have a TV show: “Harvard’s Got Talent”. Or maybe: “Survivor: Harvard Yard”.
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Great idea. I would watch them. Heck, I may enter them.
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Mm, apologies, but the real American way seems to be to convene a committee to discuss things. For example, assuming that Harvard wishes to continue to have commencement speakers, the committee should determine what purpose the speaker’s speech should serve (such as forging links to captains (heck, why not majors? colonels? generals?) of industry, or forging links to potential donors (hmm?), or forging links to European government officials (because Harvard’s Euro students need job leads, too!), or, gee, maybe just providing some interesting/amusing/inspirational comments for the grads and their parents (really, for the parents, I guess, since, as Rich has informed us, the grads are sitting there happily blitzed out of their minds). Once having established the purpose of having a speaker, the committee can seek the participation of Harvard’s alumni/ae, who will be encouraged to form subcommittees for the purposing of putting forth names of those persons — including, naturally, corporate persons — whom they deem capable of fulfilling the challenge of being Harvard University’s Chosen Commencement Speaker (HUCCS). These subcommittees, representing the preferences of Harvard alumni/ae all over the globe, will report their findings to the parent (HUCCS role-defining) committee. (These findings are the only part of the committee process even remotely likely to result in what the intelligence community once referred to as “wet work”, and that’s just because, c’mon! It’s HARVARD! Would YOU turn down the invite? Especially if you or your friend/relative/creditor had a new company or book or government to launch? Talk about getting PODIUM!!) Subsequent to receiving the recommendations of the alumni/ae subcommittees, the governing committee can take a secret vote, and then, acting in solidarity as a committee (no names!) they can reveal the identity of the HUCCS to the President of the University. THAT, my friend, is the true American way. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is exactly how it’s already done at Harvard and at other fine institutions of higher education all over America. And who is to say that a process that produced HUCCS J.K. Rowling has erred in producing Oprah? Both are outstanding women of their time; both are empire builders; and both, if I am correct, have been subjected to the scrutiny of the HUCCS committee/sub-committe process. And frankly, if I were choosing the 2013 HUCCS, I’d prefer that Harvard grads have an “in” at the Oprah Winfrey Network (or at Hogwarts! At HOGWARTS! HOGWARTS!) rather than in some bureaucrat’s office at Somewhere in Europe. But that’s just me.
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