Stanford Launches YouTube Channel; Oprah Gives Graduation Speech

Today, Stan­ford is offi­cial­ly launch­ing its YouTube chan­nel (get it here). Among the videos, you will find Oprah Win­frey’s com­mence­ment speech (giv­en this week­end) and oth­er grad­u­a­tion speech­es from recent years. From there, you can peruse the larg­er video col­lec­tion. Notably, the chan­nel offers access to some com­plete cours­es, includ­ing Clay Car­son­’s African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle and Leonard Susskind’s two cours­es on mod­ern Physics — Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics and Quan­tum Mechan­ics. (Four more Susskind cours­es trac­ing the arc of mod­ern physics will fol­low.)

The Stan­ford Chan­nel also fea­tures many indi­vid­ual speeches/lectures that cur­rent­ly have a strong bent toward sci­ence and busi­ness. (You’ll like­ly find the human­i­ties and social sci­ences get­ting bet­ter rep­re­sent­ed over time.) One par­tic­u­lar video worth watch­ing is a round­table con­ver­sa­tion called “Anx­ious Times.” Host­ed by Ted Kop­pel, the par­tic­i­pants includ­ed Antho­ny Kennedy (US Supreme Court), William Per­ry (for­mer US Sec­re­tary of Defense), George Shultz (for­mer US Sec­re­tary of State), Jer­ry Yang (CEO, Yahoo!), and John Hen­nessy (Pres­i­dent, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty), among oth­ers. And they spent a good two hours think­ing about the many threats now con­fronting the world (glob­al flu pan­demics, North Kore­a’s nuclear ambi­tions, threats to civ­il lib­er­ties, etc.), and how we can get beyond them.

You can explore the com­plete Stan­ford YouTube Chan­nel here and dip into oth­er uni­ver­si­ty chan­nels on YouTube here. Mean­while, here’s Oprah in action below.

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