Pitt’s Honors College to Present Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour in An American Experience Distinguished Lecture Nov. 15

PITTSBURGH—The University of Pittsburgh Honors College and the American Experience Distinguished Lecture Series of Pitt’s Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law and Public Policy will feature Judy Woodruff, coanchor and senior correspondent of the PBS NewsHour, at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 15 in a lecture titled “After the 2010 Elections: Can They Govern?” 

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, will moderate a question-and-answer session following the lecture, which will take place in The Twentieth Century Club, 4201 Bigelow Blvd., Oakland. 

Woodruff’s lecture is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Anyone interested in attending must RSVP with name, phone number, and name/s of additional attendees to uhcevent@pitt.edu. For more information on the American Experience Lecture Series, visit ae.honorscollege.pitt.edu. 

Woodruff has covered politics and other news for more that three decades at CNN, NBC, and PBS. For 12 years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, anchoring Inside Politics and playing a central role in the network’s coverage of politics and other major news stories. She was NBC News’ White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982, and, for one year after that, she served as NBC’s Today Show chief Washington correspondent. Woodruff is the author of This Is Judy Woodruff at the White House (Addison-Wesley, 1982). 

At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for the NewsHour when it was titled The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. From 1984 to 1990, Woodruff anchored PBS’ award-winning weekly documentary series Frontline With Judy Woodruff. She returned to the NewsHour, then titled The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, in 2007. That same year, Woodruff completed a project on the views of young Americans called “Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard.” Two hour-long documentaries aired on PBS in January and September 2007 along with a series of reports on the NewsHour, NPR, and Yahoo and in USA Today. 

In addition to working for PBS, Woodruff anchors Conservations With Judy Woodruff, a monthly program for Bloomberg Television. 

In the fall of 2005, Woodruff was a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, and, through fall 2006, was a visiting professor at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. 

Woodruff is founding cochair of the International Women’s Media Foundation and serves on the boards of trustees of the Freedom Forum, the Newseum, and the Urban Institute. She also serves as a member of The Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the board of the National Museum of American History. She is a graduate of Duke University, where she is a trustee emerita. 

Woodruff is a recipient of the Cine Lifetime Achievement Award, a Duke Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Broadcast Journalism/Television. 

Late Pitt faculty member Robert G. Hazo created the American Experience program 39 years ago to offer Pittsburgh’s mid-to-high-level managers the opportunity to gain insight into political and economic thought with the intent of enlightening the public’s political discourse. The program’s current director is Edward L. McCord, director of programming and special projects in Pitt’s Honors College and director of the Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law and Public Policy. The series focuses on political and economic issues and has featured addresses by such internationally renowned speakers as Pat Buchanan, Paul R. Ehrlich, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Bruce Babbitt, and the late John Kenneth Galbraith. 

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11/10/10/tmw/lks/jdh