Upcoming Events
September 23 | Admiral Stuart Munsch
"Leading When It Counts: Lessons from a Life of Naval Command"
Event Location: Advanced Technology Center 109, Bismarck State College, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Admiral Stuart Munsch is a retired United States Navy admiral who last served as the commander of United States Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples.
He is a native of North Dakota and a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, Maryland, with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. While at the U.S. Naval Academy, he was brigade commander of his class and an All-American and national champion pistol shooter. He was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Oxford University and earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Munsch is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. Supreme Court Statecraft Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar XXI Fellow and recipient of the U.S. Navy League's Decatur Award for operational excellence.
His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit (five awards) and several unit awards shared with shipmates.
This event is co-sponsored by the Challey Institute and Bismarck State College.
October 7 | Yeonmi Park & Daniel DiMartino
"The Price of Freedom: Firsthand Stories from North Korea and Venezuela"
Event Location: Oceti Sakowin Ballroom, NDSU Memorial Union, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Born in North Korea, human rights activist and YAF Speaker Yeonmi Park grew up in a punishing society devoted to the worship of Kim Jong-Il. But at the age of 13, she and her family made a daring escape to China. In her viral talks, viewed online nearly 350 million times, Park urges audiences to recognize—and resist—the oppression that exists in North Korea, and around the world.
At the Oslo Freedom Forum and the One Young World Summit in Dublin, she became an international phenomenon, delivering passionate and deeply personal speeches about the brutality of the North Korean regime. Her address to One Young World on the horrors of detention camps, political executions, and sex trafficking has been viewed over 320 million times. The BBC named Park one of their “Top 100 Global Women."
Park is the author of In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom and While Time Remains: A North Korean Defectors’ Search for Freedom in America, published on February 14, 2023.
Daniel Di Martino holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. He is a Graduate Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and serves on the Center for Entrepreneurship & Free Enterprise Board of Advisors at Young America’s Foundation.
Born and raised in Venezuela, Di Martino experienced first-hand the devastating consequences of socialism. After leaving Venezuela for the United States in 2016, he dedicated himself to explaining how socialism destroyed his homeland, advocating for Venezuela’s freedom, and working to prevent this ideology from being implemented in the United States and elsewhere.
Di Martino appears frequently on national television networks such as Fox News and CNN; writes for USA Today, National Review, and other major outlets; and speaks regularly at college campuses and events across the country. He is also the founder of the Dissident Project, which provides students with access to informed, thoughtful perspectives on how authoritarianism takes hold, what happens when it does, and what America can learn from the failures and human costs of current and former socialist states around the world.
This event is co-sponsored by the Challey Institute and Young America's Foundation.
Register for the event - use code "PRICEOFFREEDOM"
November 4 | Seth Dillon
"No Joke: Free Speech, Censorship, and Building the Babylon Bee"
Event Location: Oceti Sakowin Ballroom, NDSU Memorial Union, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Seth Dillon is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, a fast-growing news satire site that has overtaken The Onion in traffic and engagement. Taking on the tone of a traditional news media publication, the Bee satirizes real-world events and public figures.
Dillon's experience with censorship and deplatforming has placed him on the front lines of the battle for free speech in the public square. He now speaks on college campuses and at conferences across the country about the effectiveness of humor, the moral imperative of mockery, and the dangers of censorship.
This event is co-sponsored by the Challey Institute and Young America's Foundation.
Register for the event - use code "NOJOKE"
Fridays from 10-11 a.m. in Beckwith Recital Hall
September 4 | Ahmad Al Asady
“Entrepreneurship During Conflict and Crisis”
Ahmad Al Asady is a scholar at the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth and an assistant professor of management in the Department of Management and Marketing at North Dakota State University. He researches how institutional elements in foreign environments influence the economic decisions of international entrepreneurs. His current research interests include international entrepreneurship, institutions, corruption, and the Middle East and North Africa region. In 2022, Dr. Al Asady's paper with Dr. Christopher Groenig, titled "The Contingent Effects of Firm Response Tactics on Firm Legitimacy During a Secondary Boycott," was selected for Social Issues in Management Division Best Paper by the Academy of Management.
September 18 | Wade Myers
“Impact Investing: Funding Entrepreneurial Efforts At Addressing Big Problems”
Wade Myers is a serial entrepreneur, investor, author, and speaker that has founded, invested in, and been a director of 100+ startups and has completed scores of financing and M&A transactions. He is a general partner of the Eagle Venture Fund and multiple public equities and real estate funds. Wade’s entrepreneurial ventures include a tech-enabled investment bank, a SaaS-based big data company, a tech-enabled government services firm, and an Inc. 5000 SaaS-based property management firm. He also worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Mobil Corporation, and served as an Airborne Ranger in the US Army where he was a decorated veteran of the Gulf War. Wade is a Baker Scholar graduate of Harvard’s MBA program.
October 16 | Erec Smith
“Civil Discourse and Living in a Pluralistic Society”
Erec Smith is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Although he has eclectic scholarly interests, his primary work focuses on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy as well as the role of rhetoric in a free, pluralistic, and civil society.
October 23 | Tessa Conroy
“The Rural Economy and Livability”
Tessa Conroy studies regional economic development with a commitment to developing practical and actionable knowledge for communities in Wisconsin and the rest of the U.S. Her research focuses on small business dynamics as a key component of local economic growth, including the factors that drive entrepreneurship and business survival. As she has studied entrepreneurship and business outcomes, she's become more and more interested understanding the gaps in business development and performance.
October 30 | Abigail Wozniak
“How Recovery From the Pandemic Shaped the Earnings Distribution in the U.S. and the Upper Midwest”
Abigail (Abbie) Wozniak is a labor economist and vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, where she serves as director of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. Her research has examined migration between states and cities, employer compensation and screening policies, and sources of inequality in the labor market. Abbie has served in advisory and affiliate roles for numerous institutions, including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute of Labor Economics at LISER (IZA@LISER), the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), the W.E. Upjohn Institute, McKinsey & Company, and the EconJobMarket website. Her work has been featured regularly in the media, and she has been interviewed on Marketplace, National Public Radio, Bloomberg TV, and other outlets.
From 2014 to 2015, Abbie served as senior economist to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, working on labor economics issues. She was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2008–09 and the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute in 2017. She previously served on the faculty in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned tenure in 2013 and was named the Dannelly Distinguished Lecturer in 2025. She is a graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D.) and the University of Chicago (A.B.). She is a former associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She is also active on several board and volunteer efforts in the Twin Cities.
November 20 | Admiral Stuart Munsch
“Leadership and Flourishing”
Admiral Stuart Munsch is a retired United States Navy admiral who last served as the commander of United States Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples.
He is a native of North Dakota and a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, Maryland, with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. While at the U.S. Naval Academy, he was brigade commander of his class and an All-American and national champion pistol shooter. He was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Oxford University and earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Munsch is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. Supreme Court Statecraft Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar XXI Fellow and recipient of the U.S. Navy League's Decatur Award for operational excellence.
His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit (five awards) and several unit awards shared with shipmates.