Troy University‘s Hall School of Journalism and Communication and the Sorrell College of Business hosted the annual M. Stanton Evans Journalism Symposium on Thursday.

The symposium is named after the visiting professor M. Stanton Evans who began coming to Troy in 1980 and this year’s keynote speaker was the author of Evans’ biography.

The author, Stephen Hayward, met Evans while working as an intern early in his career and said that writing about someone’s life is not an easy task.

“Difficult,” says Hayward. “First of all biography is a pretty exacting literary form which I’ve never done before. I’ve never wrote written a formal biography so it’s a challenge because you have to fill in all the gaps and try and get the whole story.”

Hayward believes Evans’ work influenced TROY’s journalism program and that TROY has one of the best programs in the country.

“From what I can tell this is one of the better undergraduate journalism programs anywhere in the country,” says Hayward. “And a lot of universities pride themselves in their programs but I think they’re not as good as the one here. I’d go further and say you probably get a better education in journalism here at TROY than you would get at some of the supposedly fancy graduate schools like Columbia or Northwestern and so it’s a very robust program and I think he gets a lot of credit for inspiring with his example and his own teaching here.”

For the full story watch Georgia’s report.