Oprah walks the red carpet at the 6th Annual Essence Black Women in Hollywood luncheon, where she was honored. Andreas Branch/Patrick McMullan/Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images)

Oprah Winfrey has been chosen as the commencement speaker for this year’s Harvard graduation, the prestigious university’s 362nd commencement ceremony.

Citing her many business endeavors and philanthropic efforts — her book club, talk show, and push to pass the “Oprah Bill” creating a national database of child abusers — the school’s Harvard Gazette says her work makes her a compelling guest.

“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,” Harvard President Drew Faust said.

Harvard’s graduation ceremony will be held on May 30. On that day, Oprah will also make an appearance at the school’s alumni association annual meeting.

Oprah is just one of the many esteemed guest speakers appearing at graduation ceremonies at colleges and universities around the country. It was announced a couple of weeks ago that President Obama will be making the commencement address at Morehouse in May.

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Although you may not be paying attention to the advertisements that come up during your Google search, one professor over at Harvard University have been studying them. And according to the scholars, when people type in names typically associated with black people during a Google search, the ads that pop up are more likely to be related to criminal activity. All the data has been collected by the Harvard University paper of Professor Latanya Sweeney.

Here is one example: A Google search for a name such as “Tom Smith” may bring up personalized public records, such as “Looking for Tom Smith,” or may be suggestive of an arrest record, such as “Tom Smith, arrested?” reports the UK Telegraph.  But plug in names that are more associated with black people, such as DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine, and ads with links to websites that offer criminal record checks are produced.

Professor Sweeney suggested that the Google results may expose a “racial bias in society.”

“Prof. Sweeney’s investigation suggests that names linked with black people — as defined by a previous study into racial discrimination in the workplace – were 25 percent more likely to have results that prompted the searcher to click on a link to search criminal record history,” writes the newspaper.

Google responded to the Harvard findings: “AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling. We also have an “anti” and violence policy which states that we will not allow ads that advocate against an organization, person or group of people. It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads.”

Have you ever noticed anything strange during a Google search?

Image: (AP Photo/Charles Sykes

Is Jay-Z a successful businessman? Forbes thinks so. He was named in September by the magazine as one of the top hip-hop moneymakers.

But Jay-Z’s successes weren’t enough for Ivy League Harvard University, which initially rejected Jay-Z as a “proper” business model. Could it be because he was once a drug dealer? Well, Harvard isn’t talking. The university did not respond by press time to requests for comments.

Here’s what has been reported: In 2005, a freshman student, Chanequa Campbell, turned in a profile for an on-campus recruiting program in which she listed Jay-Z as her business role model, reports Business Insider. The Office of Career Services told Campbell to find another subject. Campbell, who grew up just blocks away from Jay-Z in Brooklyn, stood her ground and refused to redo her report. Career Services eventually relented and allowed her to submit the profile using Jay-Z’s legal name, Shawn Carter.

Why is this info now just surfacing? Campbell, who was later kicked out of Harvard and who is now teaching in New York City, is thinking of writing a memoir on her times at Harvard.

Still the fact remains that Harvard University got it wrong. Many in business consider Jay-Z a successful entrepreneur. CareerBuilder, in fact, published a “5 Things You Can learn From Jay-Z’s Career.”

Among the points:

·       Find something you’re passionate about and make it part of your life.  Jay-Z is a sports enthusiast. Not content with just being a fan, Jay-Z assembled a team (that included Lebron James) in 2003 to play an Entertainers Basketball Classic (EBC) and then became a partial owner of the Brooklyn Nets.

·       Market yourself.  One of the other reasons Jay-Z decided to assemble was the great marketing opportunity. He branded a bus with the image of a sneaker he designed for Reebok, had the team tour in it, all while his music blared.

·       Know when to move on. In 2003, at the peak of his career (up to that point), Jay-Z retired. Most of us don’t have that luxury right now, but if you’re just going through the motions and the excitement and passion you once had are lacking, don’t be afraid to look around.

CareerBuilder isn’t the only group impressed with Jay-Z business instincts. He rolls with other multi-millionaire businessmen. Business magnate Warren Buffet, considered one of America’s greatest financial minds, even sat down with Jay-Z for a joint interview.

Speaking of Forbes, a staff writer for the magazine, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, even inked a book about Jay-Z’s business prowess, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went From Street Corner to Corner Office.

With investments worth up to half a billion dollars and including the Brooklyn Nets, ad firm Translation, cosmetics company Carol’s Daughter, Rocawear, and the  40/40 Club, we think Jay-Z knows a little somethin’, somethin’ about business.

In the world of celebrity culture, the importance of an education often takes second billing to the bright glares of the spotlight. Many stars have opted to forgo their education in pursuit of their career. However, these 10 stars not only got their degrees first but raised the academic bar by attending Ivy League institutions.

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Sanaa Lathan

Sanaa was born the daughter of famed director Stan Lathan and for some that might’ve been her golden ticket to Hollywood. However, Sanna pursued a degree in drama at Yale University. She graduated with her BA in 1995 and has made a name for herself all on her merit. Her roles in Love & Basketball and Something New are a testament to her talent.

By J. Smith

One of my favorite African-American Studies professors, who held a doctorate in Africana Studies, used to ask the same question: Why do so many of the Ph.D.’s in the field take their degrees and teach at white institutions instead of helping to strengthen the African American studies programs at historically black colleges and universities? For example, The National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College Teachers is currently being held at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute. The aim of the program is to bring two dozen college professors from around the country to Cambridge for intensive three-week training on ways for them to integrate more black history into their classrooms and research projects, The Wall Street Journal reports. That’s lovely, but wouldn’t it be great if the conference were held at Spelman or Tuskegee? Context can be important when examining history.

“The program was founded in the mid-1990s by [Patricia] Sllivan, DuBois institute director Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and University of California-Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin. They wanted a way to introduce college teachers from different disciplines to new scholarship on black civil rights, from Emancipation to the 1960s. Teachers are urged to use the scholarship to develop new curriculum and programs for their classrooms,” the Journal reports.

Surely the initiative and others like it at majority white schools are excellent causes that do exceedingly more good than harm in almost any instance. However, that slight, tiny bit of harm remains. High-brow scholarship and research about Africana is often conducted at white institutions. Black universities and the students there can benefit as well, if not more. We are often just as ignorant about our history as any other group of people would be.

I was often confronted with the same argument against taking classes related to African-American history: “but you already go to an HBCU, why do you need to take classes on it?” But culture and history are not always bedfellows, and making that easy and often false assumption leads to a community of people who have no idea what blacks were up to between Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement, or what Plessy v. Ferguson was about.

There’s nothing wrong with the proliferation of black studies, just as long as it’s spreading evenly to white and black schools.

We all know some smart kids. Maybe even some smart, athletic kids. But it’s safe to assume that not many of us know 15 year olds who’ve not only been accepted to several colleges across the nation, but will be attending Harvard University.

Now you do know of someone with those impressive credentials? This is the story of Saheela Ibraheem, a Piscataway, New Jersey resident and  the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. In an interview with the Star Ledger, the teen noted that she was applied to 14 colleges and was accepted to 13 (including six Ivy League schools). In case you were wondering, Yale was the school that rejected her. Saheela’s parents think it was because of her age.

The soon-to-be 16 year old skipped sixth-grade and 9th grade.  But get this, babygirl is not just some bookworm. She is a three-sport athlete (swimming, softball and soccer).  Saheela’s grades are phenomenal, she scored a perfect score on the math section of the SAT and she’s all types of cute too.

Her parents are doing something right!  We wish Saheela the best. Her story says something about expectations and resources, but also about personality and maturity. Experiencing college at 15/16 years old is very different than being 18 or 19 and something most kids her age probably could not do successfully on a social level regardless of grades. How young is too young to start college?