Nicholas Kristof always has one foot on the family farm in Yamhill, Oregon — even while reporting across the world as a columnist for the New York Times.

This June, Kristof will have both feet planted in Reser Stadium as the 2025 Commencement Speaker to give Oregon State University students a proper sendoff for their new chapters into the world outside OSU’s Corvallis campus. 

Kristof’s story begins before he was even born. His father was a World War II refugee sponsored by an Oregon family. His father arrived in Oregon in 1952 and immediately loved the state.

Afterward, he went to the University of Chicago and met Kristof’s mother. Kristof was born in Chicago in 1971 and they moved to a farm in Yamhill, Oregon when Kristof was just five months old. 

He still considers this family farm his home today. 

At Yamhill Carlton High School, Kristof fell in love with journalism. He wrote for the local newspaper in McMinnville, Oregon, then moved to The Oregonian and the Statesman Journal in Salem. During his time in school, he was very active in Future Farmers of America, later becoming a state officer in FFA between high school and college. 

After high school, Kristof received the Rhodes Scholarship to attend Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. He moved across the country to study law and Arabic.

Upon graduating, Kristof received yet another scholarship — the Freud scholarship — to study law at Oxford University.

“After that, I kind of had to choose between these two career paths: law and journalism,” Kristof said in an interview with The Barometer. “For journalism, I thought that it would help to have a foreign language like Arabic, and so I turned my back on the law and went to Egypt to study Arabic for a year.”

With Arabic under his belt, The New York Times hired Kristof in 1984, and he began reporting around the world. 

The New York Times

Initially, Kristof covered global economics for the New York Times, working from New York and Los Angeles. He was Hong Kong Bureau Chief, then Beijing Bureau Chief.

While working in Los Angeles, Kristof met his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, when she was covering business for The Wall Street Journal. Naturally, they were competitors. 

“You know, it was a little like a KGB-CIA romance, let’s not talk about anything we were working on, right?” Kristof said. “That was where we met, and began going out in Los Angeles, and then we got married.”

After getting married, they moved to Beijing to begin their life together. They began covering the democracy movement in China in 1989. 

That’s when they witnessed an event they’d never forget.

Kristof was at home writing an article when he received a call — the Chinese Army was sending troops to the capital in Tiananmen Square. He arrived just as the troops began opening fire on pro-democracy university students. 

“The basic rule for a journalist is you never miss a deadline,” Kristof said. “In the course of being, you know, shot at and seeing this massacre, I completely forgot that it was a Saturday and so I hadn’t allowed for the early deadlines and then the editors and, and poor Cheryl were terribly concerned when I didn’t show up in time to write the piece, and were afraid that, you know, that I’d been shot.”

He arrived at home just in time to beg the editors to hold the front page. And they did. 

“I wrote an article that I wish I never had to write about the massacre,” Kristof said. “You never forget seeing a modern army use weapons of war against protesting, pro-democracy students. It’s this unforgettable scene.”

After the coverage of the massacre, Kristof and WuDunn became the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

“Reporting on that massacre and having friends who were imprisoned and tortured pushed me more into human rights and social justice issues,” Kristof said. 

Finding Optimism

Though he enjoyed editing, Kristof always wanted to be a columnist. When the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, there was a shift in appetite for global opinion coverage. He was hired as a columnist at the end of 2011 and has been writing columns ever since. 

Now, he’s spent most of his time covering genocide and poverty in his travels for the Times. 

“People always think that, you know, as a journalist with a career covering war and genocide and poverty, that I may be incredibly depressed and gloomy, and the truth is that I’m kind of guardedly optimistic,” Kristof said. “That’s partly because I’ve seen that when people are tested, they’re just capable of incredible things.”

For example, Kristof wrote about a woman he met in Pakistan, Muhktar Mai, who was sentenced by a village council to be sexually assaulted for an action her brother had done. The council then carried out the sentence.

Instead of killing herself out of shame, as the council thought, she reported the crime, prosecuted her attackers, and used the compensation to build a school in her village. 

“She thought that education was the best way to chip away at the kind of misogyny and cruelty that had led to the attack,” Kristof said. “She enrolled the children of her attackers in that school. I visited that school many times, and you can’t see this little school in a remote village and the children of her attackers there in their little school uniforms and just not feel awed by the human capacity for goodness and decency and resilience and strength,” Kristoff said.

Returning Home

Though Kristof’s farm has changed over the years — from sheep and cattle to grapes and cider apples — his ties to Oregon remain strong. 

He noticed even more changes, such as the humanitarian crises unfolding within rural Oregon.

“Good jobs went away, meth arrived and the lives of a lot of my old friends unraveled,” Kristof said. “I found it very frustrating, I thought that the United States had not adequately supported those in need. We lost a million people to overdoses since the year 2000, and I don’t think that we as a country have done nearly enough to address that crisis.”

Education, Kristof argues, is the best predictor of where a state will land in 30 years. In Oregon, education has constantly fallen short. 

“I think that OSU has a particularly important role because it is something of a bridge between the Willamette Valley and the rest of the state,” Kristof said. “We desperately need bridges across that urban-rural divide. We need healing. We need mutual understanding. And the OSU campus is one place where you actually get kids from Portland interacting with kids from Harney County.”

There’s a tendency among well-educated Americans, Kristof says, to look down upon and limit their interactions with those less educated. 

“I think we should simultaneously see commencement as a reason for pride at one’s achievements, but also for a certain humility about our collective luck in enjoying a privilege that a lot of people never get the chance to enjoy,” Kristof said.

As a columnist, Kristof shares his opinions. However, he also stresses the importance of listening to others’ opinions — even when you disagree with them. 

“At a time where there is so much mutual distrust and suspicion and resentment, the things that bring us together and have us actually listen are really useful,” Kristof said. “Because the issues are so acute and lives are at stake, we tend to wag our fingers and shout down other people. You can never get other people to listen to you unless you also listen to them.”