If you want to know what the world’s lead­ing thinkers are say­ing, you’ll want to check out the Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel. Orga­nized by Prince­ton, but access­ing mate­ri­als from oth­er major aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions across the world, the Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel puts online impor­tant speech­es made by promi­nent fig­ures, often com­ing from the world of pub­lic and inter­na­tion­al affairs. In recent weeks, just to give a few exam­ples, the Chan­nel has fea­tured Noam Chom­sky talk­ing about the cur­rent cri­sis in Mid­dle East, Chris­tine Todd Whit­man offer­ing her views on pol­i­tics and the envi­ron­ment, Peter Singer dis­cussing the ethics of food, and Vaclav Hav­el and Bill Clin­ton talk­ing togeth­er about the chal­lenges fac­ing new democ­ra­cies. Con­ve­nient­ly, all talks are avail­able in audio and video for­mats, both on iTunes (audio — video) and as feeds (audio — video). The Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel offers a great way to pack your iPod with talks that deal with the press­ing issues of our time.

For more uni­ver­si­ty lec­tures and cours­es, see Open Cul­ture’s Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast col­lec­tion.

Also see Open Cul­ture’s oth­er col­lec­tion: Uni­ver­si­ty Online Cours­es & Online Media

As a fol­low-up to the Iraqi Expe­ri­ence in Dig­i­tal, we sim­ply want­ed to put along­side one anoth­er two excel­lent pod­casts that speak direct­ly to the mount­ing Iraqi refugee cri­sis. Tak­en togeth­er they give you an excel­lent view of this prob­lem.

First, a recent pod­cast from Open Source, which fea­tures interivews with Iraqis who have had to make the jour­ney out of Iraq and in to Syr­ia and Jor­dan. (So far, 7% of the Iraqi pop­u­la­tion has fled to these two coun­tries.) Sec­ond, an inter­view with George Pack­er, who writes for The New York­er (you can find many of his arti­cles here) and who sum­ma­rizes extreme­ly well the issues at hand, and par­tic­u­lar­ly rais­es the ques­tion whether the US has a moral oblig­a­tion to take some of these refugees in.