Accomplished leaders in sports, media, ethics and the United States military will engage with students and deliver public remarks next year as featured guests of the 2025-2026 Elon University Speaker Series.
The Elon University Speaker Series returns in 2025-2026 with a lineup of influential voices representing the world’s highest levels of professional sports, military leadership, news media and ethics.
Visiting Elon University in the next academic year:
- Author and first-generation educational advocate Alejandra Campoverdi
- U.S. Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky
- Intelligence officer and leadership consultant Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, Jr.
- Scholar and ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah
- Techno-sociologist and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci
- Author and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni
All programs are free to Elon University students, faculty and staff with ID. Tickets for the public for Fall Convocation go on sale starting in August. Admission: $15 via ElonTickets.com.
Elon University’s Cultural Calendar for fall 2025-2026 will be available later this year with additional speakers and a wide range of musical, theatrical, artistic and other intellectual and creative events.
About the Speakers
Sept. 18, 2025
Alejandra Campoverdi
Alumni Gym, 7 p.m.
2025-2026 Common Reading Lecture
Alejandra Campoverdi is a nationally recognized advocate for educational opportunity and women’s health, a bestselling author, founder, and former White House aide to President Barack Obama.
Campoverdi’s bestselling book, “FIRST GEN,” is Elon University’s 2025-26 Common Reading and the winner of the Dolores Huerta Award by the International Latino Book Awards, which also named Campoverdi its 2024 Rising Star in Nonfiction. “FIRST GEN” is the winner of the Martin Cruz Smith Award and was chosen by the Council for Opportunity in Education as their 2024 Opportunity Matters Book Club selection, a nationwide book club for first-generation and low-income students at colleges and universities across the country.
In 2024, Campoverdi founded the First Gen Fund, a 501(c)(3) that provides hardship grants directly to first-gen students. She produced the groundbreaking PBS health documentary “Inheritance” and founded the LATINOS & BRCA awareness initiative in partnership with Penn Medicine’s Basser Center for BRCA. Previously, Campoverdi served in the Obama White House as deputy director of Hispanic media.
Campoverdi holds a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California. She currently serves on the board of the California Community Foundation and is a Senior Fellow at the USC Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
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Sept. 26, 2025
Katie Ledecky
Schar Center, 3:30 p.m.
Fall Convocation
Katie Ledecky is renowned as one of the greatest athletes of her generation. With 14 Olympic medals and 21 World Championship titles — the most ever by a female Olympian— she has shattered records and set new standards of excellence. Ledecky’s journey began at the 2012 London Olympics, where, at just 15, she became the youngest U.S. Olympian and won her first gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle, signaling the start of a historic career.
Ledecky solidified her legacy in 2016 when she captured four Olympic gold medals and a silver in Rio, making her the most successful U.S. female athlete at a single Games. In Tokyo 2020, she made history again by winning the inaugural women’s 1500-meter freestyle and becoming the first woman to three-peat in the 800-meter freestyle. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Ledecky continued to break records by winning four additional medals.
Off the podium, Ledecky shares her journey and insights through her memoir “Just Add Water,” drawing from her experiences as an iconic swimmer and offering lessons in perseverance and achievement.
Beyond swimming, Ledecky excelled at Stanford University, winning eight NCAA titles and championing STEM education initiatives. Accolades include eight Golden Goggles as Female Swimmer of the Year, two AP Female Athlete of the Year awards and recognition on the Time 100 list.
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Nov. 11, 2025
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, Jr.
McCrary Theatre, Center for the Arts, 11 a.m.
The Carol Ann Walker International Lectureship
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, Jr. is a career Army intelligence officer who has served at the highest level of U.S. national security and intelligence. His final assignment was as the 21st Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency – reporting directly to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and the Secretary of Defense.
Through engaging insider stories and insights from his extensive career at the center of intelligence and security, Ashley examines the current geopolitical landscape, the intelligence community’s role in national policy, and the threats and challenges facing the nation. He combines study, personal experience and observation to share lessons-learned from our most consequential military leaders, present and past, and breaks down how to apply these leadership insights at any organization.
Ashley has commanded at the company, battalion, squadron and brigade levels with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He majored in political science and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Appalachian State University, a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from the National Intelligence University, and a master’s degree in strategic studies from the United States Army War College. His awards and decorations include the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit (1OLC) and the Bronze Star Medal.
Ashley is the CEO of Ashley Global Leadership Security, LLC, and is an Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Center for a New American Security.
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Jan. 8, 2026
Kwame Anthony Appiah
McCrary Theatre, Center for the Arts, 6 p.m.
Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address
Kwame Anthony Appiah challenges audiences to look beyond the boundaries that divide them and to celebrate common humanity. Named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 public intellectuals, one of the Carnegie Corporation’s “Great Immigrants,” and awarded a National Humanities Medal by the White House, Appiah considers readers’ ethical quandaries in a weekly column as “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine.
A recipient of the Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress, Appiah currently teaches at New York University. His book “Cosmopolitanism,” recipient of the Arthur Ross Book Award, is a manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering.
In “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen,” Appiah lays out how honor propelled moral revolutions in the past—and could do so in the future. Among his most recent books are “As If: Idealization and Ideals,” “Mistaken Identities” and “The Lies That Bind.”
From 2009 to 2012, Appiah served as president of the PEN American Center, the world’s oldest human rights organization, and in 2015 he was named to the Top Global Thought Leaders Index.
Appiah was born in London to a Black father and a white mother. Raised in Ghana and educated at Cambridge University where he received a doctorate in philosophy. His book “In My Father’s House” and his collaborations with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. are major works of African struggles for self-determination.
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March 12, 2026
Zeynep Tufekci
Alumni Gym, 7 p.m.
The Baird Lecture
Zeynep Tufekci is an internationally renowned techno-sociologist whose work analyzes the intersections of science, technology, politics and society. She is known for asking hard questions about artificial intelligence, privacy and surveillance, social movements, and public health – and she answers them in ways that defy disciplinary boundaries.
Tufekci is a New York Times opinion columnist and the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Her work on the social and moral implications of machine learning, big data and algorithmic decision-making argues that the true threat of artificial intelligence is rooted in privacy and human rights violations. She links the AI-powered erosion of privacy in processes such as facial recognition to the early stages of authoritarianism.
A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, Tufekci is the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” which examines the power of using social media to mobilize large numbers of people in political protest and why many modern social movements lack the direction to foster real change once the protest is over.
Prior to joining the New York Times, Tufekci spent years as a contributing opinion writer at several of the nation’s most acclaimed news publications. She was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a fellow at the Princeton University Center for Information Technology, and the inaugural director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University.
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April 9, 2026
Frank Bruni
Whitley Auditorium, 6:30 p.m.
The James P. Elder Lecture
Frank Bruni is a journalist and bestselling author who served at the New York Times for more than 25 years as a White House correspondent, the Rome bureau chief, the paper’s chief restaurant critic and op-ed columnist. He is now a contributing opinion writer and maintains a weekly newsletter reflecting on politics and life.
Bruni is the author of five New York Times bestsellers including “The Age of Grievance,” a dive into why Americans are so angry. He makes the case that Americans conflate legitimate causes and petty complaints, creating a condition of constant self-victimization. People obsess over how they’ve been wronged and who to blame, which poses a threat to American democracy, rather than choosing to focus on civil, productive dialogue and constructive action.
“The Beauty of Dusk” is a memoir detailing Bruni’s adjustment to the sudden loss of vision in one eye and the acceptance of the reality that the same fate could befall the other at any moment. It earned rave reviews from people and publications including Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, People magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
The first openly gay op-ed columnist at the Times, Bruni is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Randy Shilts Award for his career-long contributions to the LGBTQ community and the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Newspaper Columnist. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing, he is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.