O networks with Harvard and the result is below average rating

Or so I thought.

Oprah Winfrey's commencement speech at Harvard University's convocation for the class of 2013 disappointed me. 

She had a chance to be irreverent and unconventional as is her way to approach authors on her book club show.

Throughout her speech, Oprah displayed an obsequiousness toward Harvard that made me squirm. It seemed like she was gratified at being asked to serve as a commencement speech-maker at Harvard, and described the invitation as a morale booster after a year of being in the rating doldrums with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).

I thought a turning point in her speech was when she said "Why me? Why choose somebody who hadn't succeeded to address those who are guaranteed to succeed (a.k.a. Harvardies)?" I don't see how she could label herself as "unsuccessful" on the basis of just one flop venture, in an otherwise successful career that made her into a media mogul with billions of dollars in net worth. 

Anyhow, so the turning point in her speech turned out to be a damp squib; instead of expressing silly gratitude to President Drew Faust, Oprah could have gone on to re define what "success" is. Success shouldn't mean getting, as Oprah indicated, a Harvard U "calling card" with which you could make infinite calls into the gateways of the biggest and the best in the world.

What Oprah--naively so--assumes, as I gather from her speech, is that once you study at Harvard, you get to know "everything." Thus her humility in saying "What can tell those who already know it all," sounds affected. This attribution of omniscience to the Harvard tribe ran like a refrain in Oprah's speech.

I feel like the opposite is true: Harvardies and other fellow Ivy Leaguers, at least those from the 90s onwards, know as much or as little of the real world. I recall, NYT columnist (himself a Harvard alumni) Frank Bruni writing that those who typically enter the Ivy League consortium are born into privilege and continue to live through the narrow corridors of privilege till they enter their graves. They ought to, Bruni said, yank themselves out of their comfort zones if becoming more "real" was their goal in life. This means that an Ivy Leaguer essentially learns nothing new, but more and more of the same that have been conferred on them since their birth. Their life experiences remain pretty homogenous till they fall into heterogeneity. 

Oprah should've told the class of 2013 at Harvard that they know nothing and their life of learning commences after the commencement. But who am I kidding? Oprah Winfrey is no Socrates.

Harvard's decision to bring in Ms. Winfrey is a good one as far as it gives Harvard a more popular, lightened-up image, and Ms. Winfrey did deliver some motivating (I wouldn't say inspiring) moments. She even modernized the phrase "moral compass" into "internal GPS" in keeping with our technological zeitgeist.

But, if you ask me, they should have asked Oprah to share the podium with Khadijah Williams, the astonishing graduate in Harvard's class of 2013, the black Los Angelina who hopped from shelter to shelter, school to school, public lavatory to public lavatory, trash can to trash can, along with her mother, and by sheer dint of persistence and merit got into Harvard through a Pre-College for gifted but indigent students program.

Now, she would have had a story to tell. Oprah mentioned Williams in passing, but only as an evidence of her own theory of how hard work pays off. Ms. Winfrey's own story was the piece de resistance of her performance at the commencement. Her story, however, is passe and the "the poor girl from rural Mississippi" doesn't quite touch the hearts of millennials, is my belief.

America has changed drastically from its post-segregation days, since the time she "made it" through hard work. In today's America the poor have not only become poorer and the elite ossified in their inability to relate to anything outside of their own sub culture, but institutions like Harvard are becoming the gatekeepers of privilege and prosperity.

I disliked Oprah's statement that whenever, as the CEO of her own network, she sees a resume with the Harvard credential in it, she thinks, "ah, since she is from Harvard, she must be good." It smacked of servility.

Oprah makes for a poor 21st century O (Othello) in this particular case.