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By Stevie Keck ’26
Nick Schifrin, PBS NewsHour’s foreign affairs and defense correspondent, will give Mercersburg Academy’s Schaff Lecture on Ethics and Morals on Monday, January 13, 2025, in the Burgin Center for the Arts’ Simon Theater. This lecture will continue Mercersburg’s Monday evening lecture tradition through the 2024-2025 school year.
Schifrin obtained a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree in international public policy from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is currently on the Council of Foreign Relations and has a chair on the board of the Overseas Press Club Foundation. In his current work as a PBS NewsHour foreign affairs and defense correspondent, Schifrin leads the coverage on daily foreign policies and has created weeklong series for NewsHour from many different countries.
Prior to this position, he was an Al Jazeera America’s Middle East correspondent where he led the channel’s coverage of the 2014 war in Gaza; reported on the Syrian war from Syria’s borders, including Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan; and covered the annexation of Crimea. Schifrin was an ABC News correspondent from 2008-2012, where he was one of the first journalists to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan, following Osama bin Laden’s death. At that time, Schifrin shared one of the biggest inside stories of the year from inside Osama bin Laden’s compound.
Rev. Dr. Will Whitmore, the school minister, said this of Schifrin: “His work is not only potentially dangerous, it requires a level of emotional and situational awareness that most of us do not think of. We believe this would add to our series on listening, understanding, and empowering.”
In 2020 Schifrin won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Media Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. The PBS NewsHour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2017 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. Schifrin was also a member of the NewsHour team awarded a 2020 Peabody award for coverage of COVID-19.
The Schaff Family Endowment, which supports the lecture, was funded by and is in honor of Schaff brothers Phillip ’38, Charles ’41, and David ’42. The endowment supports annual speakers “on topics related to fundamental human values—those principles which direct a person’s decisions and actions because they clarify what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong.’”