The President's Lecture Series serves as a marketplace for ideas, featuring renowned speakers who share their knowledge, experience, opinions and accomplishments. Discussing timely topics, the series puts diversity first, offering an international lineup of authors and educators, business innovators and political figures.

The Series presents to the region a platform for equal exchange of dialogue and ideas. It began in 1991 with its first lecturer, James J. Kilpatrick, a controversial journalist in the 1950s against desegregation in Virginia's public schools. Kilpatrick spoke on campus in a traditional lecture format, including a question and answer session, which allowed for a source of lively dialogue and free speech, trademarks of the series. Today, the President's Lecture Series maintains this format and is free and open to the public.

This collection contains information about all of the lectures in the series. Some actual video of the PLS speakers who were taped with a digital video camera (2016-present) and those whose presentations were converted from raw video tape is available, and indicated with a "play" icon. The majority of pre-2016 PLS videos are available on DVD or VHS in the Special Collections & University Archives Department in Perry Library and will be digitally available in the future. Other lectures were not recorded.