About the Lectures

Founded by Grace and Obert Tanner in the mid-1970s, the Tanner Lectures are dedicated to enriching the intellectual and moral life of humankind. Annual Tanner Lectures are delivered at nine universities: Stanford, Berkeley, Utah, Michigan, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge. The program also sponsors individual Lectures at other centers of learning in the United States and around the world.

The Tanner Lectures Board, which advises the administration of the Lectures, comprises the leaders of the nine Tanner universities and their spouses or partners. The Board meets annually to report on the Lectures delivered at their institutions and to plan for the program's future. The university leaders on the Board also confer annually about the advancement of higher education, a goal of great importance to Obert and Grace. Obert held the belief--imparted to him by his remarkable mother, Annie Clark Tanner--that the university was humanity's greatest institutional achievement. Annual Lecturers are chosen independently by each of the universities in the Tanner group. This autonomy for each institution was established by Obert as a founding principle of the Tanner Lectures. For almost fifty years, the program has sponsored addresses from the world's most eminent scholars, writers, artists, and political leaders.

Obert was a moral philosopher and scholar of the New Testament, and to a considerable extent the roots of the Tanner Lectures can be found in these disciplines. He studied philosophy at Stanford and Harvard, and he taught philosophy at Stanford and Utah for over thirty years. Obert also served as the acting chaplain of Memorial Church on the Stanford campus.

Somehow, concurrently with his academic pursuits, Obert was able to build a manufacturing jewelry business, the O.C. Tanner Company, which he started in the basement of his mother's home in 1927. The steady growth and success of the Company enabled Obert and Grace to endow a very large number of civic and educational projects, and they came to regard the Tanner Lectures as their most significant philanthropic legacy. The entire financial basis for the program is provided by the benefactions of Obert and Grace and the continuing success of the O.C. Tanner Company, whose CEO is a member of the Tanner Lectures Board.

The values of Obert and Grace deeply inform the Tanner program. They believed passionately in building up communities, and each Tanner Lecture event is dedicated to this work and to the development of mutual understanding among the participants.