David Brooks will speak during Old Gold weekend as part of the Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture Series.
Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. He has also worked at The Weekly Standard, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly and The Wall Street Journal.
The speech will be on October 4, at 7 p.m. in the Green Center for the Performing Arts’ Kresge Auditorium.
Ken Owen, executive director of media relations, said that he has been working to get Brooks to speak at DePauw for about four years after first speaking to the Annapolis Group, which is a group that represents over 130 liberal arts colleges across the nation, including Denison University, Kenyon College and Oberlin College.
“He’s at one of the most important places in America,” Owen said of Brooks in a phone interview earlier this afternoon. “It makes him an important voice.”
Owen said that the Ubben Lecture occurring during Old Gold weekend is an “added incentive to get alumni back to campus.”
This will be the second year that an Ubben Lecture will occur during Old Gold weekend. Last year, Bret Baier, ’92, spoke.
While there is no guarantee that an Ubben Lecture will be a new Old Gold tradition, Owen said that so far it has been successful in the university’s goal to get more alumni to return for the weekend.
“I think the Bret Baier thing proved it’s a good concept,” Owen said.
Baier’s speech, however, was in the morning. Owen said that the change of time for the speech was a result of other events in the morning that would otherwise interfere.
“We want this to be the capstone,” Owen said. “We want to end it with a bang.”