Grove City profs collaborate on book

Staff report

GROVE CITY, PA.

A new book about the global legacy of Ronald Reagan’s presidency features the work of three scholars with Grove City College ties.

“Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed,” a collection of essays about the 40th president’s impact on world events during and after his presidency, is co-edited by Jeffrey L. Chidester (’02) and Paul Kengor, professor of political science – who both contributed chapters – and features the work of Kiron Skinner, a well-known scholar, writer and policy-maker who serves on Grove City College’s Board of Trustees. The book is published by Harvard University Press.

The collection brings together diverse scholars – liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, policy insiders and academics – to explore and assess Reagan’s role as a world leader and how his policies continue to influence events on the global stage.

“This is not so much a remembrance of Reagan as it is a clinical look at the long tail of his presidency. We thought if we want to do this right, you have to look through a variety of lenses,” said Chidester, policy director of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

Contributors consider the influence of Reagan’s free-market ideas on economic globalization, the impact of his support for increased defense spending and an assertive foreign policy coupled with a push for nuclear disarmament, and international pragmatism and the ways in which his policies altered America’s response to global terrorism.

Chidester was the driving force behind the book, said Kengor, the author of several Reagan books and executive director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.

After graduating in 2002 with a political science degree from Grove City, Chidester earned masters’ degrees in international history and politics from the London School of Economics and University of Virginia, respectively, and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

The book is an outgrowth of a series of conferences the Miller Center, which focuses on presidential scholarship, public policy and political history, had in 2011 to mark the Reagan Centennial – one of only four Reagan centenary events officially authorized by the Reagan Library and Presidential Foundation.

“We wanted to look at the Reagan legacy a generation later, with the historical space to give proper perspective,” Chidester said.

Chidester contacted some of the conference participants to contribute essays and found others “to fill in the holes.” He enlisted Kengor, his mentor at GCC and a “source of real encouragement and support” in his postgraduate career, to co-edit.

Among the contributors is Skinner, an associate professor of international relations at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the university’s Center for International Relations and Politics who joined GCC’s trustee board in 2014.

She served in a number of advisory roles during President George W. Bush’s administration. Her literary output includes “Turning Points in Ending the Cold War” and co-authoring “The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin” and two best-selling collections “Reagan, In His Own Hand” and “Reagan, A Life In Letters.”

In her chapter, Skinner “delivers a long-overdue look at Reagan’s policies on Middle East terrorism and the notable relevancy of those policies in the modern era,” Chidester and Kengor write in their introduction. She details terror threats of the Reagan era and concludes that the administration’s policy on terrorism in the 1980s marked the beginning of a new U.S. approach that’s evident today.

Chidester wrote an essay on the U.S. policy shift on Eastern Europe under Reagan from containment of the Soviet sphere of influence to liberation of the countries in thrall to Moscow. Kengor contributed a piece on Reagan’s willingness to negotiate with the Soviets to reduce each nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Among other notable contributors is Brian Mulroney, former Canadian prime minister, who contributed a foreword about his observations of Reagan as a leader and player on the international stage.

The book was years in the making, in part because of its publisher. Earning the imprint of Harvard University Press requires a thorough academic review to insure objectivity and scholarly value. Both Kengor and Chidester described the process as exhaustive.