Students in Dr. Nathan Webb’s Teamwork in Organizations class recently collected over 4,000 books for the Nashville nonprofit, Book’em. Students engaged in service learning by working on and reflecting on various aspects of teamwork through the class project. In addition to obtaining books for Book’em in innovative ways, the class also raised awareness about the organization. According to their website, Book’em seeks to help “Nashville’s economically disadvantaged children discover the joy of reading.”
Communication Students Collect Over 4,000 Books
MBA Alumnus Featured in Tennessean, USA Today
Recent MBA alumnus Judson Aikens was featured in both The Tennessean and USA Today this week for developing a new mobile app called RendezWoof that helps dog lovers find dates. Click here to read the story.
Belmont Named Among Most Beautiful Christian Campuses
ChristianUniversitiesOnline.org has named Belmont University as among the 50 Most Beautiful Christian Colleges in the World. The ranking features schools in the United States, Japan, Uganda, Canada and the Philippines considered broadly evangelical in their theological outlook and chosen by the website’s editors. Belmont made the list at No. 48.
“Beyond both academic and religious teaching, certain Christian universities and colleges around the world stand out for the special beauty of their campuses,” said lead editor J. Shane in a press release. “We created this list to shine a spotlight on those schools for people who see entering higher education as a chance to nurture their knowledge and spirituality but perhaps didn’t realize they could do so with such stunning surroundings.”
The article mentions the University’s Belmont Mansion, a museum on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the 160-year-old Bell Tower and its carillon and describes the 75-acre campus as “host to various grand, elegant and strikingly beautiful buildings.”
Law Class of 2015 Achieves Perfect Exam Pass Rate
Members of the Belmont College of Law Class of 2015 achieved a 100 percent pass rate for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE), which tests on the ethical obligations and professional conduct of lawyers and judges. The national average trends in the 80 to 85 percent range. The 81 Belmont students took the exam on March 29.
“I believe this is a testament to the quality of students attending Belmont Law as well as the quality of instruction they receive, particularly from Professor (Lynn) Zehrt who teaches the Professional Responsibility course.,” said Associate Dean for Student Services Andy Matthews.
To become a licensed attorney, candidates must pass the MPRE as well as the bar exam in the state in which they intend to practice.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Speaks at College of Law Inaugural Commencement
College celebrates graduation of 120 students from charter class
Belmont University’s College of Law celebrated the graduation of its charter class today as 120 students received their Juris Doctor degrees along with timely inspiration from commencement speaker and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Belmont announced the opening of the College of Law on Oct. 7, 2009, one year after hosting the 2008 Town Hall Presidential Debate, and the charter cohort began classes in fall 2011. From enrolling with a median class LSAT of 154, the 2014 graduating Law class set the standard for Belmont lawyers to follow through classroom performance, co-curricular involvement and community service.
Belmont President Bob Fisher said, “We opened a College of Law because we believe it fits perfectly within Belmont’s mission to provide a transformative education that empowers civic engagement and creates change agents in our community and the broader world. This first class has undoubtedly exceeded expectations, and I’m both proud and honored to welcome Justice Alito to campus to give them a final charge into service.”
Encouraging his fellow graduates to “build a legacy of greatness,” Alexander H. Mills provided the valedictorian address for the College of Law Class of 2014, quoting from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Justice Alito used his commencement address to declare that the foundational backbone of this country could provide an appropriate source for the graduates’ future guiding principles. “The essential features of the Constitution and the legal system can lead us to ideals that are applicable to life… it separates matters that are essential from matters that are simply important. The same strategy is a good one to implement in our personal lives. It’s good to go through the mental process to identify what is essential and permanent in our lives, those things that matter most.”
Justice Alito also noted the brevity and accessibility of the Constitution, as well as the way it reflects the American culture of optimism. “The Constitution entrusts the future to the good sense and decency of the American people.”
Though Supreme Court Justices rarely offer commencement addresses, Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr. agreed last summer to speak at Belmont Law’s inaugural graduation. Educated at Princeton University and Yale Law School, Alito served as a law clerk for Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1976–1977. He was assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1977–81, assistant to the solicitor general for the U.S. Department of Justice from 1981–85, deputy assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice from 1985–87, and U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1987–90. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1990. President George W. Bush nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat January 31, 2006.
Founding College of Law Dean Dr. Jeff Kinsler, who is stepping down June 1 to return to a full-time faculty role, said, “We have pushed these students to be the best attorneys possible, presenting them with challenging academics while also helping them garner as much first-hand, practical experience as possible. I couldn’t be more proud of how they’ve responded, and I’m confident they will become exceptional lawyers and community leaders.”
Having a Supreme Court Justice speak at the first graduation represents a perfect culmination to the legal education for Belmont Law’s charter class, but it’s certainly not the only highlight of the College’s first few years. Accomplishments and moments of pride to date include:
Academics
- Guest speakers for Belmont Law have included noted Civil Rights attorney Fred Gray, International Justice Mission founder Gary Haugen, Restore International/author Bob Goff, journalist and First Amendment advocate John Seigenthaler, former U.S. Congressman Mike Espy and U.S. Congressman Lamar Smith.
- Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was recently named the next dean for the College of Law, effective June 1.
- The College of Law hosted the Tennessee Supreme Court’s review of three appeals cases in February, allowing students first-hand perspective of how the state’s highest court functions.
- Belmont Law’s 2013 entering class has a median LSAT of 155 and median 3.42 GPA, placing it in the top 100 of American law schools.
Honors and Awards
- The American Bar Association (ABA) granted provisional accreditation to Belmont Law last summer—the milestone was achieved in the earliest possible timeline allowed by accreditation guidelines and marked the first time in nearly 50 years a Tennessee law program has received accreditation.
- The Baskin Center, a new building that opened in 2012 to house the College of Law, was awarded Gold-Level LEED certification, the first LEED-certified law school building in the state.
- In its overall ranking of the 202 ABA-accredited law schools by student selectivity weighted by LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs using the U.S. News methodology, Belmont placed in the top half of the list at No. 95. At that level, Belmont is ranked higher than every new private law school to open in the country in the past 35 years.
- Two trial advocacy teams from Belmont University College of Law competed in the Louisville, Kent., regional of the 2014 American Association for Justice (AAJ) Student Trial Advocacy Competition. Both teams went undefeated until they met each other in the championship round.
- Belmont Law student Candace Meagan Carter was one of only two students in the state awarded the inaugural Birch Memorial Scholarship.
- The Tennessee Bar Association named Belmont Law student and soon-to-be 2014 graduate Katie Blankenship its 2014 Law Student Volunteer of the Year.
Community Service
- College sponsored Nashville’s “Law Day 2010,” a 50-year anniversary event honoring local attorneys who defended the rights of the lunch counter sit-in demonstrators in Nashville courts in 1960.
- The College’s Student Bar Association turned its traditional Barrister’s Ball into a fundraiser for locally-based nonprofits, the Both Hands Foundation in 2013 and the Tennessee Justice Center this year.
- The College of Law’s Baskin Center houses Nashville’s Arts & Business Council, allowing for sustainable partnerships between the Council’s work and Belmont Law students.
About Belmont’s College of Law
Belmont’s College of Law provides a natural extension of the university’s mission and vision, which emphasize challenging academics, a service-minded approach, real-world experience and community leadership. Belmont law graduates are practice-ready attorneys, empowered by their education and co-curricular experiences to provide legal counsel in a variety of settings, with commitment to high standards of expertise and ethics. The College of Law is housed on campus in the Randall and Sadie Baskin Center, which includes a state-of-the-art law library.
Click here for additional photos from the charter College of Law commencement.
Occupational, Physical Therapy Help Make Disabled Children Mobile
The Inman Health Sciences Building became a workshop and playground on Thursday as part of an international project to promote pediatric mobility. University of Delaware physical therapy professor Cole Galloway and his Pediatric Mobility Lab and Design Studio bought to Belmont Go Baby Go, a program that teaches adults how to modify existing toy cars in a few hours to make them functional for children with disabilities.
Eight families and their therapists from Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia worked alongside Belmont occupational therapy and physical therapy students and alumni to learn how to modify toys and the logistics of the Go Baby Go program. Together, they altered Fisher Price Lightning McQueen red cars with Velcro, PVC pipes, pool noodles and kickboards to create wheelchair-like toys. The cars also function as physical therapy devices to teach strength and balance while allowing the disabled children to socialize with other children their age. Through constraint-induced therapy, the children are motivated to use their weaker muscles to gain independence and operate the toys, which by nature are fun. Buttons were moved so that the toy car moves only when a girl with cerebral palsy holds her head up or a boy with a spinal cord injury stands.
For 1-year-old Paisley Queen, she must engage her weak right hand to move her toy car. She suffered an intrauterine stroke and does not use the right side of her body.
“Hopefully, the car will make her more mobile and force her to use her right arm and eventually her right leg and catch her up with her peers who are crawling and starting to walk. That will be a benefit to us,” said her mom Laura Queen, of Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
Occupational Therapy Assistant Professor Teresa Plummer and Galloway sit on a panel of North American academics writing a position paper on early pediatric mobility to change policy among insurance companies and manufacturers.
“There aren’t wheelchairs this small, and insurance companies won’t pay for it because they don’t think these young children should be mobile. But these cars meet the needs of kids who don’t have access to independent mobility. Socially, they are not with other kids, so cognitively, they don’t develop, and they can’t keep up with their peers,” Plummer said, but she hopes their position paper will transform the industry.
“Go Baby Go is the candy coating to the science behind it, an advocacy program that gets the word out, bringing the latest research into condensed version so that policy makers can get a picture of how much support there is behind pediatric mobility,” said Galloway, who added that in five years, he hopes the industry will fill the gap. Go Baby Go toy cars cost only about $200, and because infants and young children weigh little, they can use devices made of plastic parts and small batteries.
“There is nothing magical about what we did today. You can’t judge a kid by her head control. With a little PVC and engineering, she can activate her whole body,” Galloway said. “What’s magical is all of you working together in this room. What we have here is easy to copy and paste anywhere,” Galloway said, as he encouraged parents and therapists to share their knowledge and pictures with other special needs families.
“Our ultimate goal is that in communities, people will hook up with others and pass down the devices. That when a child outgrows her car, it goes back to a clinic to be modified and passed to another child,” Plummer said. Belmont students plan to take what they learned to Mexico and Peru and build more Go Baby Go cars while doing summer medical mission work.
“We’ve learned more about pediatric mobility and possibilities for children zero to 3 years old. I’ve learned to engineer things you would not think are modifiable into functional devices for children that need help,” said third-year occupational therapy student Sara Harper.
Middle Tennessee-based Permobil, the leading provider of power wheelchairs with mobility products, funded the two-day workshop and sent engineers to observe the process for research and development. The company also unveiled its prototypes to parents and solicited their feedback on cost, functionality, safety features and aesthetics. Pixar also filmed the workshop on campus for a documentary on pediatric mobility and the Go Baby Go program.
Historic Columbia Studio A Reopens as Educational Space for Belmont Students
Mike Curb, Curb Family Foundation in kind gift equivalent of $10 million
Preserving Music City history while shaping the music of the future, Belmont University and the Curb Family Foundation announced today the completed renovation of Columbia Studio A at 34 Music Square East as a classroom and hands-on learning lab for students in Belmont’s Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. Through his Curb Family Foundation, Curb Records’ founder and CEO Mike Curb is giving the University a 40-year lease on the 34 Music Square East property (including office spaces, Columbia Studio A and the Quonset Hut) as an in kind contribution, an estimated donation value topping $10 million.
From its opening in the mid-1950s as part of Bradley Studios to the building’s purchase by Columbia Records in 1962 to its transition to office space in 1982, Columbia Studio A and the Quonset Hut provided the sonic landscape for many of that generation’s biggest hits and greatest artists, including Bob Dylan, who recorded his legendary 1969 Nashville Skyline album in the most recently renovated space. “A-Team” session musician Charlie McCoy, who played on Nashville Skyline, noted that thanks to Dylan recording in town at Columbia Studio A, “Nashville was certified as a recording center in music to artists who might never have come here otherwise.”
Other artists who’ve graced the building include Dusty Springfield, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Buddy Holly, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Charlie Rich, The Byrds, Patti Page, Elvis Costello, Simon & Garfunkel, and many more. Today’s event was opened by rising I.R.S. Nashville band Striking Matches, a duo who first met when paired together in a Belmont guitar class.
“If these walls could talk,” said Brenda Lee, who spoke at today’s announcement, “they could recount a virtual ‘who’s who’ of great artists and hit songs that first found life here… Thanks to the vision of today’s industry leadership—to men such as Dr. Bob Fisher, president of Belmont University, and Mike Curb, whose namesake Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business is unparalleled as a music industry learning resource—thanks to them, these walls can and will ‘talk’ to a new generation of young creativity that will come here to experience and learn where it all began. And for that, we can all be grateful.”
Dr. Fisher added, “When it comes to honoring Nashville’s music roots, we all need to thank Mike Curb for both his generous contributions and visionary commitment to keep that history alive in this town for future generations to recognize and enjoy. But Mike’s vision extends beyond our history to our future, as he has and continues to be a tremendous resource for tomorrow’s legendary artists through his support of Belmont’s Curb College. We’re truly grateful for his contributions to all of our programs.”
Boyle Presents at Science of Consciousness Conference
Dr. Noel Boyle, associate professor of philosophy, gave a presentation titled “A Friendly Critique of Subjective Physicalism” at the 20th Anniversary Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference on April 23 in Tucson, Arizona. The conference is the world’s premier international conference on the topic of consciousness, drawing a wide range of scholars including philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, physicists, computer scientists, artists and Eastern meditation experts. The keynote speech was given by esteemed theoretical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose. Other pre-eminent speakers included some philosophers (including David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, John Searle and Ned Block), some neuroscientists (including Christof Koch, Bernard Baars and Michael Graziano) and novelist Rebecca Goldstein. Boyle’s presentation offered a defense and expansion of Robert Howell’s attempts to reconcile robust phenomenal realism with supervenience based accounts of physicalism.
Belmont Hosts Tennessee Academy of Science Middle Division Collegiate Meeting
Belmont University’s School of Sciences hosted this year’s Tennessee Academy of Science (TAS) Middle Division Collegiate Annual Meeting, on April 12. Dr. Duane Hatch, of the Chemistry Department, coordinated this event. There were 30 undergraduate students that presented their research. They were from Belmont, Tennessee State University, University of the South (Sewanee), Rhodes College, Volunteer State Community College and Austin Peay State University. There were five different sessions: chemistry, zoology, cell biology, math and computer science and environmental science. The following Belmont students won awards:
- Lee McGill, chemistry, second place
- Emily Mason, zoology, first place
- Valini Ramcharan, zoology, second place
- Morgan Arrants, cell biology, second place
Several Belmont School of Science faculty serve as judges and moderators, including Darlene Panvini, John Niedzwiecki, Robert Grammer, Lori McGrew, Rachel Rigsby, Justin Stace and Danny Biles.
The Tennessee Academy of Science seeks to promote scientific research and the diffusion of knowledge concerning science; to secure communication between persons engaged in scientific work, especially in Tennessee; to assist by investigation and discussion in developing and making known the material, educationaland other resource and riches of the state; to arrange and prepare for publication such reports of investigations and discussions as they further the aims and objectives of the academy.
Occupational Therapy Program Provides Ergonomic Consultation
Occupational therapy doctoral students Evan Pendygraft and Jevorius Price began work this semester to provide ergonomic consultation to Spring Back Mattress Recycling in Nashville. The local nonprofit was started in 2010 as a project by Belmont Enactus (then Students in Free Enterprise) who explored mattress recycling as a means of achieving a triple bottom line, serving people, planet and profit. Pendygraft and Price are working under the guidance of Dr. Teresa Plummer and Dr. Debra Gibbs, faculty members in the School of Occupational Therapy, and with Dr. John Gonas from the College of Business Administration, to assist workers at Spring Back to lessen the physical strain in their work activities and avoid potential injury. The consultation will continue during the next year.
