NewsBriefs
Diana Garland honored by U.S. Congressman
U.S. Rep. Bill Flores honored the founding dean and namesake of Baylor University’s Diana R. Garland School of Social Work from the floor of the United States House on Dec. 3, 2015, following Dr. Garland’s death last year. Watch the tribute here.
Voices & Vinyl: Baylor University Libraries Celebrate Collection of Black Gospel Music with Concert
Baylor University's Electronic Library partnered with Baylor's Heavenly Voices Gospel Choir to present Voices & Vinyl: Selections from the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project Dec. 3 in the Moody Memorial Library Albritton Foyer.
"Voices & Vinyl is a concert performed by the Heavenly Voices Gospel Choir in support of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project," said Eric Ames, curator of digital collections in Baylor Libraries and lecturer in the Department of Museum Studies in Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences. "Heavenly Voices sang songs inspired by the project, remixed for modern times by their own members."
The concert promoted the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project to Baylor's student body and showcased the impact of traditional black gospel music on modern performers.
Members of the Heavenly Voices Gospel Choir, established in 1988, travel around Texas singing, doing community service and ministering through music.
The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project is an effort by Baylor's Electronic Library that aims to identify, acquire, preserve, record and catalog the most at-risk music from the black gospel music tradition. The collection primarily contains 78s, 45s, LPs and the various tape formats issued in the United States and abroad between the 1940s and 1980s.
The project, now in its 10th year, is nationally known as a unique collection of materials related to gospel music and will be included in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in 2016. The project is spearheaded by Robert Darden, a professor in the Department of Journalism, Public Relations and New Media in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Baylor Student Publications Receive Top National Honors
Baylor Student Publications received 18 national awards in November, including five best-in-the-nation awards for individual Baylor journalists. The Baylor Lariat, Focus Magazine, baylorlariat.com and Roundup Yearbook were recognized as top news outlets in their fields for the 2014-2015 school year.
The Lariat was named one of the Top 10 collegiate newspapers by the Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Association, and the Roundup was selected as a top five yearbook for 2015 and No. 2 yearbook for 2014. baylorlariat.com received a top-10 and a top-five national ranking.
As a whole, Baylor Student Publications received awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the Editor & Publisher EPPY Awards, the College Media Association Pinnacle Awards, the Associated Collegiate Press Awards and the ACP/CMA Best of Show Awards.
"As a team, we are elated and honored to have been commended by these prestigious organizations," said Taylor Griffin, editor-in-chief of the Baylor Lariat. "The pieces recognized by these awards reflect the work of last year's staff, and we hope to continue this same excellence now and into the coming semester."
A partial list of the College Media Association Pinnacle Awards includes
- First, Best Newspaper/Opinion Page Spread (Linda Wilkins, Baylor Lariat)
- First, Best Yearbook Feature Page/Spread (Emily Robertson, Round Up)
- First, Best Comic Strip
(Asher Freeman Murphy, Baylor Lariat) - First, Best General News Photo
(Kevin Freeman, Baylor Lariat) - First, Best Sports Feature Photo
(Kevin Freeman, Baylor Lariat)
"We are grateful to be recognized for the work we produce and to compete with our small 20-plus member staff against other universities with much larger staffs," Griffin said.
Who produces the most "Super Lawyers?" Yale, Harvard--and Baylor
Traditional law school evaluations focus on criteria such as acceptance rates, student-professor ratios, and ba passage rates, but often fail to measure the quality of lawyers a school produces. A new ranking, however, has attempted to take the latter approach, judging lawyers based on peer review, awards received and community service undertaken; the best of this group are dubbed "Super Lawyers."
National Jurist magazine then took things a step further, calculating which law schools have the highest percentage of Super Lawyers among their alumni. The top three on their list are: No. 3 Harvard, No. 2 Yale and No. 1 Baylor.
The research found that 23 percent of Baylor Law alumni (or 1,023 of them) have been named Super Lawyers; Baylor was the only school to join Ivy League peers Harvard and Yale above the 20 percent line.
Baylor Law School Dean Brad Toben, JD '77, says such success comes from preparing graduates who leave with "a commitment to public service and leadership within one's community and profession." He also noted that the Princeton Review has called Baylor Law "the Marine Corps of law school" for its focus on discipline and workload demands.
The long list of Baylor Law alumni includes Texas governors, U.S. Congressmen, federal judges, Texas Supreme Court justices, ambassadors, Texas legislators and two former FBI directors.