Hayward Named the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Fellow

Steven F. Hayward has been named the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. Hayward directs the Ashbrook Center’s new program in political economy and currently teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses. Hayward is also the Thomas and Mabel Guy Professor of American History and Government at Ashland University.

Hayward holds a Ph.D in American Studies and an M.A. in Government from Claremont Graduate School. For the last decade he was the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco.   He writes daily on the popular PowerLineBlog.com website, and frequently serves as a guest host for Bill Bennett’s national radio show “Morning in America” on the Salem Broadcasting Network. He writes frequently on a wide range of current topics, including environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy for publications including National Review, Reason, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The Public Interest, the Claremont Review of Books, and Policy Review.  His newspaper articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other daily newspapers.   He is the author of Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, published in 14 editions from 1994 – 2009, and its successor, the Almanac of Environmental Trends.

He is the author of a two-volume narrative history of Ronald Reagan and his effect on American political life, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989 (CrownForum books).  National Review has called the first volume “grand and fascinating history,” comparing it favorably to Macaulay’s History of England. The Times Literary Supplement said that “the book reads at times like a grand historical drama, a kind of War and Peace of the American century, complete with romance and adventure and tragic characters, a thrilling survey of what we might have thought to be familiar history but which appears here quite transformed.”  William Niskanen, chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, called volume 2 “simply the best history of the Reagan presidency,” while former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said “this is the book we have been waiting for.”  His other books include Churchill on Leadership, The Real Jimmy Carter, Greatness: Reagan Churchill, and the Making of Modern Statesmen, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama.