Craig R. Smith, professor of communication studies at California State University-Long Beach, serves as the director of the Center for First Amendment Studies. [E-mail: crsmith@csulb.edu] He has also served as chair of the Journalism Department, the Department of Comparative Literature and Classics, and the Communication Studies Department. In 2000, he was named the outstanding professor on the campus to going along with his Distinguished Teaching (1997) and Distinguished Scholar (1994) awards. In 1997, the National Speakers Association named him the outstanding professor in the nation.

Smith is the author of more than a dozen books and more than 50 scholarly articles and book chapters. His most recent studies on the First Amendment include Freedom of Expression and Partisan Politics (University of South Carolina Press) and Silencing the Opposition: Government Strategies of Suppression (State University of New York Press). His textbook on the First Amendment will be published by Waveland Press in 2003. His scholarly study of commercial speech was selected as the lead article in the prestigious Free Speech Yearbook. He regularly publishes editorials on the subject of freedom of expression in such prestigious newspapers as The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Smith has served as a consultant to CBS News for convention, election night and inaugural coverage. He served as a full-time speechwriter for President Gerald Ford and Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca; he has served as a consultant to President George H.W. Bush and former California Gov. Pete Wilson, among others. Smith served as director of Senate Services for the Republican Conference of the U.S. Senate in 1979-80, and as deputy director of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee in 1981-82.

In 1983 he founded the Freedom of Expression Foundation and remains its president. Smith taught at San Diego State University, the University of Virginia and the University of Alabama at Birmingham before coming to Long Beach State.