Award-winning journalist Judy Woodruff, a senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour who served as the program’s news anchor for more than a decade, will share insights on politics, media and the state of American discourse as part of the Presidential Speaker Series at University of the Pacific.

Woodruff will join Pacific President Christopher Callahan in conversation in Faye Spanos Concert Hall on the Stockton Campus Jan. 30 from 6 to 7 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

Woodruff’s extraordinary career has spanned five decades. She previously served as anchor and managing editor for PBS NewsHour for 11 years and has covered 12 presidential elections at NBC, CNN and PBS.

Woodruff was White House correspondent for NBC News from 1977-82 and served as chief Washington correspondent on the Today Show for a year. She then moved to PBS where she was the chief Washington correspondent for ten years.

In 1993, Woodruff became anchor and senior correspondent at CNN for 12 years. She later returned to PBS in 2007, where she and the late Gwen Ifill were named the first two women to co-anchor a national news broadcast in 2013.

Woodruff has also anchored and reported for numerous documentaries, including the award-winning documentary series, "Frontline with Judy Woodruff,” “Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” and "Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard.”

In 2022, Woodruff was honored with an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement in Television News. She also has received the Radcliffe Medal from Harvard University, the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism and the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. She is the recipient of more than 25 honorary degrees.

In 2017, Pacific’s president bestowed the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism on Woodruff when he was dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Woodruff worked closely with the president during his time as dean of the Cronkite School and CEO of Arizona PBS.

Working together, the PBS NewsHour launched its first West Coast news operation at Arizona PBS in the Cronkite Building in downtown Phoenix in 2019 along with a new West Coast edition of the nightly newscast. Watch an interview with Woodruff and Callahan on the announcement of PBS NewsHour West.

“I counted myself lucky whenever I visited his office because we’d quickly launch into a conversation about the politics of the day, and I’d always come away having learned something and having laughed a lot,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff currently is traveling the country to report for “America at a Crossroads,” a special series focused on the political divide in the United States. Since starting the project in early 2023, Woodruff has traveled to 27 states and the District of Columbia.

“Rather than one principal cause (for the political division), I’ve learned there are many,” Woodruff said, pointing to economics, education and race as a few, as well as “outside influences, like the example set and the language used by political leaders, political systems and upheaval in the business model of news media, plus rapidly changing media technology.”

Though she expressed concern for the state of journalism, she said she sees hope in today’s student journalists.

“It’s a lot cheaper and easier to write an opinion piece or televise a panel of people arguing about politics than it is to explain in detail the country’s housing shortage, the plight of older Americans or the status of the country’s immigration system,” Woodruff said. “On the other hand, I meet many aspiring young journalists who give me hope for the future.”

The Pacific Presidential Speaker Series, which launched this fall, brings national thought leaders to campus to discuss key issues in education and society. Mónica Guzmán, author of the book “I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations,” joined Pacific in October as the inaugural speaker.

The Presidential Speaker Series is open to the community. Those interested in attending the conversation with Judy Woodruff can register online.

Woodruff previously joined Pacific for a virtual conversation as part of a series of political talks in 2020.