For the “Everything in America Today is Entertainment” file: Harvard University has announced that its commencement speaker this year will be entrepreneur and talk show host Oprah Winfrey . This is a new thing for Harvard, which sadly ignored Merv Griffin all those years. According to Harvard’s President Drew Faust, “Oprah’s journey from her grandmother’s Mississippi farm to becoming one of the world’s most admired women is one of the great American success stories. She has used her extraordinary influence and reach as a force for good in the world, with a constant focus on the importance of educational opportunity and the virtues of serving others.” She is also a religious leader, as Mark Oppenheimer wrote a couple of years ago, the founder of the Church of Oprah , “at once Christian and pantheistic, African-American in origin but global in reach.” Well, she’ll undoubtedly be more interesting than the speaker my year—Paul Volcker.
