Interim provost selection and selection process praised by faculty
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics
Acting President Harold Cunningham wasted no time in getting to work last week, announcing Thursday afternoon the appointment of Dr. Elizabeth Davis as interim provost.
Davis replaces outgoing provost Randall O’Brien, whose last day at Baylor was August 1; O’Brien will soon begin transitioning into his new role as president at Carson-Newman College, a small Baptist school in Tennessee. The popular O’Brien spent 17 years at Baylor as a professor and administrator before accepting the job at Carson-Newman in early July.
Early returns indicate Davis, Baylor’s vice provost for financial and academic administration since 2004 and a faculty member since 1992, is a popular choice to follow O’Brien as interim provost. Friday’s Waco Tribune-Herald included comments from Baylor Faculty Senate chairwoman Georgia Green and senior lecturer Lynn Tatum, immediate past president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, praising both Davis’ selection and the process by which she was selected.
Tatum and Cunningham each noted the president’s seeking out of opinions from faculty and other university groups, with Cunningham calling Davis — a Baylor alum — “the consensus favorite everywhere.” As provost, Davis will essentially oversee the academic side of the University, including 11 schools and colleges and more than two dozen centers and institutes, while the administration begins the search for a permanent provost.
Sic ’em, Dr. Davis!
Happy Birthday, Baylor AFROTC!
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Student life, Honors
Baylor’s branch of the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) celebrates its 60th birthday today as one of the oldest and best programs in the nation.
Detachment 810 was formed at Baylor in 1948, just 10 months after the creation of the Air Force as a separate military branch. And it’s only gotten better with age; Baylor’s bunch was recently named the No. 1 large detachment in the Southwest Region for the second time in five years, beating out 34 other detachments. Baylor will now compete against the top detachments from the nation’s other three regions for the right to be called the top large AFROTC detachment in the country.
Sic ’em, BU AFROTC!
Truett Seminary, School of Social Work share a family bond
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics
A growing number of Baylor graduate students are pursuing a pair of master’s degrees that work uncommonly well together. In addition to earning their master of divinity degree from Truett Seminary, they also are earning a master’s degree from the School of Social Work, combining both the theoretical and the practical sides of ministry.
“What does the Gospel look like?” recent graduate Tihara Vargas asked rhetorically in a Baylor Magazine article last year. ” That’s where social work comes in. Truett is one of the only (seminaries) I’m aware of that integrates the two.”
After seeing how well the two programs work together, it probably wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that the deans of Truett and the School of Social Work are a husband-wife team. Drs. David and Diana Garland, respectively, head up those two schools. Their teamwork paid off in a different way recently when the pair jointly received a $300,000 grant to equip local church leaders across the world for effective ministry in their home cultures. International students will enter the new program and come away with the joint M.Div/M.S.W. degrees that they can then use to build the church in their homeland.
Sic ’em, Garland family, Truett Seminary, and the School of Social Work!
Baylor Lariat named best student paper in Texas
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Student life, Honors
As a student, I spent one semester writing for The Baylor Lariat. I certainly didn’t write anything worthy of an award — but this year’s Lariat students did, and they’ve been rewarded for it.
The Lariat was named the best student newspaper in Texas by the Houston Press Club and was ranked second in the state by the Associated Press Managing Editors Association of Texas. Lariat writers Claire St. Amant and Melissa Limmer were also national finalists in the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2007 Mark of Excellence Awards, placing in the top three in the country for “Breaking News Reporting.”
Sic ’em, Lariat staffers!
Top high school students get to sample college life and research at Baylor
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Student life, Research
It’s unusual enough at most schools for undergraduate students to get the opportunity to be involved in university-level research (though not so unusual for Baylor undergrads). But high school students? Forget about it. That is, unless you’re a part of one of Baylor’s summer programs.
Students entering their senior year of high school are eligible for Baylor’s High School Summer Science Research Program. Participants work with Baylor professors, analyzing research groups, data, techniques, instruments and interpretations. Tuition, a technology fee and on-campus housing are covered by scholarships, and the students earn one semester hour of college credit for their month of work.
The Renaissance Scholar Program, meanwhile, covers everything from engineering and technology to history, art, literature, philosophy and theology. In effect, it’s a one-week sampling of a college liberal-arts experience, as high school students study and then get hands-on project experience while at the same time enjoying University social activities like bowling, working out at the SLC and movie nights. Students in the program also earn one college credit hour while working on projects like the miniature trebuchets (catapults) pictured here.
Both programs are highly competitive, drawing some of the top students from across the nation to Baylor at the same time as they are making their college decisions. I certainly look forward to seeing some of these same students returning to campus in the near future as Baylor Bears!
Sic ’em, high school scholar programs!
Baylor professor among nation’s leaders on faith-based initiatives
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Research
Dr. Byron Johnson, co-director of Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR), helped President George W. Bush with the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001, and since then Johnson has been among the leaders in studying whether faith-based initiatives really work.
Shortly after returning from speaking at a White House-hosted national conference on the subject last month, Johnson sat down for a Q&A with the Waco Tribune-Herald about how exactly such projects work, and it really cleared up a lot of things for me on the issue. It’s good to see Baylor professors putting their faith into action in such a practical and unique way.
Sic ’em, Dr. Johnson and ISR!
Young alum honored for research in chemistry
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Alumni, Research
If I asked you to picture a scientist, chances are good that you’d picture a man. In the past, that might have been fair; even in the early 1970s, women made up less than 10% of the science and engineering workforce. In just one generation, however, that number has jumped past 25% — and Baylor graduates are among the leaders in that trend.
Dr. Julia Chan, a 1993 Baylor grad, recently received the Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award, given by Iota Sigma Pi, an honorary society for women in chemistry, for research achievement in chemistry or biochemistry to a woman under the age of 40.
Chan, now a chemistry professor at LSU, serves as chair of the Division of Solid State Chemistry for the Inorganic Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. She was honored as an Outstanding Young Alum in 2006 by the Baylor Alumni Association and speaks highly of her time at Baylor. An active researcher who has published more than 65 papers and given 75+ invited talks, Chan spent this past spring as a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Solid State Physics at University of Tokyo.
Sic ’em, Dr. Chan!
Nursing students prove ‘Sic ‘em, Bears’ sign works on any continent
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Student life
Future nurses from Baylor’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing delivered much-needed health care to hundreds of children in Ethiopia and Uganda this spring on the school’s annual mission trip. (Read a nice wrap-up here, and even more here.) But after long days at the clinic, the students and their patients found time for fun, too, often beading necklaces or playing soccer together. This picture in particular made me smile — the nurses taught a group of children to “Sic ’em, Bears!”
Sic ’em, nursing school students!
Baylor, BGCT launch program for Texas Baptist Scholars
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics
Baylor and the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) are launching a new program that will financially support graduate education at Baylor for outstanding students who have earned degrees at Texas Baptist universities. The goal, according to BGCT-related university presidents, is that the program will help keep their alumni in Texas for graduate work at Baylor, thus increasing the chances that they will return as professors to their alma maters.
The Texas Baptist University Scholar program will reward promising undergraduate or master’s-level scholars from BGCT-partner schools who are interested in pursuing a doctoral degree at Baylor in an area of study not offered by other BGCT-partner universities—areas such as biology, church-state studies, English, religion, and others. Selected Scholars will then receive full tuition and a stipend, as well as opportunities to work with administrators at Baylor and other BGCT-partner universities.
In addition to helping cement ties between BGCT schools and their alumni who head into higher education, the program also will further strengthen ties between Baylor and other Texas Baptist universities. As President Lilley said, it’s “a special way to be of service to Texas Baptists.”
Sic ’em, Texas Baptist University Scholar Program!
Truett professor among speakers at national preaching conference
Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in : Academics, Honors
In 1914, a group of 40 ministers got together in Virginia to address the growing concerns of the African-American church and its relationship to the community. The gathering became an annual conference, and the 94th annual Hampton Institute at Hampton University convened earlier this month.
About 8,000 people attended the inter-denominational conference, which is widely considered to be the largest gathering of African-American preachers and laity in the country for the purpose of hearing preaching. Among the speakers at this year’s conference was Dr. Joel Gregory, a 1970 Baylor graduate and professor of preaching at Truett Seminary. Gregory was the Noon Day Preacher on Days 2, 3 and 4 of the event, and is among a very few — perhaps the only — non-African-American(s) to speak at the conference in modern history.
Sic ’em, Dr. Gregory!
