Salman Amin Khan (Doctor of Humane Letters)

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Salman Amin Khan received an honorary degree from Dartmouth in a virtual ceremony held in May.

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portrait of Salman Khan
Salman Khan (Photo courtesy of Salman Khan)
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SALMAN AMIN KHAN, as an accomplished American educator and successful entrepreneur, you awakened the world to the power of online education.

With three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, it was the simple gesture of tutoring your cousin in mathematics over the internet that sparked an idea that would come to personalize, democratize and revolutionize global learning.

When scores of people found your instructional YouTube videos helpful, you left a successful career in finance for the noble profession of educator. In 2005, you founded Khan Academy. Armed with a mission to “provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere,” you equipped students with online tools to supplement in-person instruction and empowered them to take “agency” over their own learning.

With your accessibility as a person mirrored in the accessibility of your instruction, you affectionately became known as “the world’s teacher.”

Convinced that there are no limits to our learning, you focused on “mastery” and “mindset,” giving students the ability to learn at their own pace, an approach that helped them close knowledge gaps and open doors to success.

As a result of your visionary leadership, more than 100 million users across 200 countries have benefited from the lessons and resources developed by Khan Academy, which – in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic – has served as a critical lifeline to students, parents and teachers at a time when they needed it most.

For your belief in education as a basic human right and your unparalleled commitment to learning equality and the improvement of educational outcomes worldwide, Dartmouth is proud to award you the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

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