There are a myriad of ways someone may have brained your email address. Odds are the actual spammers bought your email address from someone on the Internet and may be several times removed from the person that originally obtained and subsequently sold the mail lists. The original list could have originated from a disgruntled EKU employee, or student struggling to pay off eduction loans. It could have been leaked by someone in an alumnae association. EKU may have legally sold the mailing list to some organization and it leaked out from there. It could have been captured by a bot on an unsuspecting innocent's computer. (Campus PCs are notorious for the number of viruses they have.)
There are ways of stopping that kind of junk from getting to you but too often the cure is worse than the problem and clever spammers are really good at finding ways around even such draconian measures as white lists and/or black lists.
