Thank you so much for posting this!

I add my thanks for posting this. I live near Stanford (and attended Stanford as well many,many years before Rachel!) but was unable to attend the speech due to physical limitations. I will very much enjoy this video. Thank you.

THANK YOU!!!! I will Watch when I can! But--- Cannot wait for Rachel Maddow's appearance at the University of Miami with the President of the University of Miami!!!!--- Rachel--- I Will be There!!!! My Dad said when you Decide to Come Speak at (Florida Gulf Coast University) in Ft Myers---He Would Love to see you there Too!!!!!!!!!!!!! --- OK, being Too Aggressive and Pushy--- I cannot help it!!!!!!!!!!! Thank You--- for coming to Miami on Sunday!!!! :)

Great video. I really related to Rachel's feeling of alienation at Stanford and the fact that she managed to make that work in her favor. Strong message.

I wanted to hear the questions from the audience, though, and they weren't part of the video. Is there more somewhere?

The video is not working for me.

*Eep* Fauxpinky has just fainted...I'll tell her, lol.

Looking forward to watching this. I just finished "Fog of War: 11 Lessons that Robert MacNamara learned". Informative and falls in line with both Hubris and Drift--I suspect the latter is included? I found Hubris on MSNBC lacking in a "definitive fashion". So I hope the discussion that follows Friday's re-airing of Hubris comes to some definite issues that our Congress needs to address. Like lack of oversight and the determination to root out corruption for starts. I was flabergasted to find out they had just recently passed legislation on "inside trading". Just proves that "you leave the fox in charge of the hen house and what do you get"? Also our present form of government is becoming disfunctional. Once considered stable and a country for safe investments from abroad all corporations are doing is stripping the wealth our of a country and moving it overseas. Balance of trade is another.

Thank you Rachel, for the video, for Drift, for holding authority accountable.

Is it only me or is the volume really, really low on this?

Nice vid! Thanks to Stanford for uploading this. I kinda wish their would be another link to a more comprehensive book review on Drift. May have to buy it?!

That was so awesome!

Yes, we need content! We need people to come up with something creative and new.

I never got into the reality show thing, but we need to notice that the people in the shows are what makes the show, most of the stories are just the same ones with different characters. It's the people.

The alienating parts were the most resonating. To me, the whole point is we need to work together more, even if we have differences.

Cultivating more meaningful "content" and actually doing something about the needs that are human. Knowing where to store the files is not going to cut it. As we saw, the files and accumulation is not what is actually the solution.

We need more people looking in the files, determining people deserve to be more that a file in a storage unit. One of the greatest tragedies is the dehumanizing, storing and categorizing as other. The idea people have served their purpose or do not deserve it, while we insist on stockpiling nukes and pouring money into unnecessary military materiel.

That was a very informative "talk" all around. I hope it goes viral, but it is not a short clip. But worth every minute. Much appreciated.

Thank you, Rachel....thank you, Stanford U.... thank you, fauxpinky! What an insightful presentation of communication skills and dialogue. That element of presentation is at the heart of so many issues. Buzz words become the only thing one hears when a thoughtful movement from point a to point b would, perhaps, uncover common ground, points of contention that would be negotiable, and elements that are far apart - but discussion can move from there. Thank you for outlining that with such understanding. Thank you, Rachel, for your courage to be and speak your truth with conviction and care and humor - it is a gift to the universe.

This video is pure gold, IMHO. It not only gives us more insights into Rachel's journey through college and beyond, it makes the best case for a liberal arts education I've ever heard. With great wit and humility, she helps us understand her choices as a student and beyond that were made with a specific goal in mind: to communicate well/persuasively. This, along with the bravery she shows taking on tough issues (AIDS, war), is why we all admire her so very much.

OK, so it took me a while to find the time to sit down for an hour and watch this and think about it. While so many of Maddow's book appearances tend to skim and be a bit "lite" for less intellectual audiences, perhaps, this one, in this context, gave me some good food for thought, stuff to chew on.

I was also interested in the section she chose from the book, for this particular audience, the mossy missile silos bit. Unlike many other more flamboyant (Homeland Security-funded fire truck that won't fit into the old firehouse) or outrageous (Grenada-- really tried to block all that, but the book's treatment was excellent) sections, the missile silo stuff, the nuke questions, rarely get close attention.

Also, a new bit about returning veterans and their alienation, from the three-sided D&D dice to the idea of watching returning soldiers clips without doing more to improve their lot as a kind "porn"-- that idea alone rightfully led to a collective gasp, and then applause, here in my living room too.

That said, I wish I could have a rigorous discussion with Maddow about the pros and cons of disciplinary vs. interdisciplinary study (I have the same opinions about the liberal arts, found the study of ethics to be the most important part of my undergraduate years as well, and I am a "techie" who makes things, because although I am quite confident that I can "write," the price point on that one is trending to $0, one step above poetry, where you have to pay people to publish it).

But the encouragement of disciplinary "discipline" is misguided perhaps (or overly influenced by analytic philosophy?).

"Knowledge-making" is an interesting endeavor in our world, and to my mind the epistemological standpoints available and how they construct their validity (hint, it isn't from statistics) are what I find most interesting. I like how Maddow frames it as digging in for the best tools of persuasion possible (hey, that's my field, my discipline, thankyouverymuchAristotle: Rhetoric!).

In short, quite often the "best" arguments (from an analytic, or truth-seeking perspective) are often NOT the most persuasive. And I'm pretty sure Maddow knows this. She's negotiating a different form of discourse in her television program (enthymeme), dancing nonlinearly around topics with wonderful free-associative wit, while slipping in sideways bits of pure analytic reasoning, as a tangent, oh by the way. Sneaky, in other words.

You're gonna learn something in spite of your television length-of-tune attention span, in other words. For those who have the ears to hear it.

So I gotta call BS here, suggest that perhaps the Maddow doth protest too much. Her arguments are not linear, not purely analytic (of course, not subject to peer review by the Royal Society, heh). That form of discourse is ghettoized in TV-land and in most other parts of popular culture. The only way to get it in is through a Trojan Horse. Pay no attention to what my other hand is doing over there!

Disciplines vs. interdisciplinary. Applied vs. theoretical? Rhetoric is considered applied philosophy, but rhetoric is also widely believed in the (peer reviewed) field to be epistemic! HOW WE PERSUADE IS HOW WE KNOW. Yeee Haaa.

And disciplines have sinned and fallen short of the glory of the Lord. Srsly. They kind of suck.

I should say, for undergraduates, interdisciplinary programs could be a kind of affectation, one of the dilettante. Sort of like what a lot of high school enrichment gifted and talented programs sometimes come off as, as well. Maybe they got too trendy for a while. I'll give you that.

But what has happened in disciplines is far worse. In graduate study, disciplinary boundaries are domains to be mastered and tested on. A way to put a junior scholar through their paces. Wanker stuff, in other words. "Here is how I show you that I read all the stuff that I was supposed to read. Now let me go and do some original research."

Ethics, as applied philosophy, rhetoric, as applied epistemology, would point out that the reality where the rubber meets the road is more important than the theory, the IDEA of a discipline.

And the reality of disciplines are that they reverse ponzi schemes, ever-shrinking pies, infinite regressions of hair -splitting, and THE REASON ACADEMIA IS ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE (after student loans are factored out).

In short, a discipline represents, not the rigorous quest for truths, but turf, often to be defended in the most petty ways possible, by denying the truths and excluding the means and methods of other disciplines and domains.

To put it in the immortal words of Monty Python, in Life of Brian (when confronting the People's Front of Judea),

"SPLITTERS!"

Yeah, I even developed a law about this once, and wanted to name it after my online alter ego, Effluvia, Warrior Sewage. I think it can even be expressed mathematically, as a ratio. It goes a little something like this:

The Effluvia Principle of Inverse Sphincter Flow:

The SMALLER the Turd Mountain that you get to be KING SH*T of, the BIGGER the A##HOLE you are about guarding your territory.

There, in a nutshell, is the Ivory Tower. Not theory untouched by practice, but rather, political gamesmanship.

Now let's take it a step further, and look at the (Western) entrenchment of linear styles of argumentation. They are not the do-all and be-all that one might think (esp. analytic philosophers), and to step back from rigid linearity does not mean stepping back from intellectual rigor, or even to a dumbed down "applied" level.

Disclaimer 1: I sorta wrote my dissertation about this topic, associational linking and thinking as a form of argument and persuasion, looking at these emerging discourse forms in the linking and thinking styles of the World Wide Web.

Disclaimer 2: I also wrote my dissertation on this topic because my own thinking styles are largely dyslexic, nonlinear, and there's a presumption, a judgment, that somehow the way I think is bad, or weak, or pathetic, or what-have-you. My own personal agenda was to explore the rigor of nonlinear forms in an attempt to justify how my own brain works as somehow worthy and not stupid.

So I'm not going to go into all the crap that I found in my research. It's out there, for what it's worth. It's also what you find in Marshal McLuhan, and people pick on him too, so there! :-P

The points I want to make here is this:

1. Disciplines have outlived their usefulness and now narrow thinking so excessively that they prevent understanding of methods and rigor outside their own limited (and increasingly delimiting) constructions, because this will shrink on and on, as each split and sub-domain and sub-field continues splitting hairs into infinity.

2. But this is far more insidious than that. Disciplines, and disciplinary conversations (preaching to the choir, sometimes) have REMOVED from the public square the PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL. Everybody goes off and plays in their own private turf, their playgrounds, their super-colliders, their hermetically-sealed (Bell Labs clean) rooms.

Disciplines, and their practitioners, in other words, are regressing into private alchemies instead of public knowledge-making. Their arcana has gotten so arcane that it can't be described and defended in an average public forum, in the polis, in the square.

In truth, Maddow is one of the few public intellectuals with any kind of a voice in the public square. Some might also cite the indomitable PZ Myers, or the wonderful Juan Cole, or perhaps even danah boyd, but there isn't anyone able to successfully work the public intellectual space the way Maddow does, and that's mainly because she runs a decent Trojan Horse through the cable news filters.

Trust me, I used to work for cable news. The one thing that forum did NOT demand or even strive was good writing. Even the consultant workshops in "How not to write cliche's" were odd exercises in replacing the most overworn TV news cliches with some less overworn cliche's. Because, well, not invoking cliche's means not translating well into a quick sound bite. A cliche apparently is the ultimate shortcut, especially for the conventionally-written before-the-break teasers.

I am convinced that ALL disciplines have to earn their ways of knowing in the public spheres. If their methods and findings are so persuasive, don't condescend to the polis, ENGAGE it. Find the means of persuasion that will both engage and convince an audience of non-specialists, of interdisciplinary types, of Renaissance thinkers.

Yes, intellectual rigor is nice. Knowing a domain and its methods are important, until that territory becomes quark-level small and might as well be the fine cloth of the emperor's new suit, to the lay audience.

A lay audience, btw, that is quickly becoming MORE persuaded by anti-intellectual authoritarians, because postmodernists apparently can only sputter in arguments with religious authoritarians. That's just pathetic. That's an inability to persuade, an inability to use rhetoric. An inability to DEMONSTRATE the superiority of one's argument over another's.

It's just like throwing in the towel. It's not enough for Maddow to sit in the big chair and do it night after night, like some kind of proxy warrior. We all gotta do it.

Well, that surely was a long-winded dump that no one will see! I should also disclaim any typos ahead of time, since there is no way Newsvine will give me enough time to proofread this adequately.

I tried to watch this video but much like others here it seems, I was not able to hear anything. I tried adjusting every sound setting on my computer, watching on Youtube directly, changing browsers, etc. but I was not able to hear anything at all.

Do we know if there is another version of this that we can watch somewhere?

While I am here I should say I am a huge fan and watch the show every day. Rachel adds a perspective to the world that is much needed and I appreciate the fact that I get to enjoy that 5 nights a week. Thanks for the great show. Keep up the good work : )