Cherry Award Banquet to Honor Visiting Professors Sept. 21

Baylor University will honor Dr. Robert H. Bell and Dr. Paul G. Ashdown, the recipients of the 1998 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers, at the eighth annual Robert Foster Cherry Awards Banquet at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21, in the Barfield Drawing Room. Tickets for the banquet are $15.
During the awards banquet, Baylor President Robert B. Sloan Jr. will present medallions and citations to Dr. Bell, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Williams College in Massachusetts, and Dr. Ashdown, professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The men also will receive an award of $12,500 each and will teach a week-long series of lectures at the university.
Dr. Bell will deliver his lecture series during the week of Sept. 21. Dr. Ashdown will return to campus in the spring to deliver his lecture series.
Ashdown received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Florida and his doctorate from Bowling Green State University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 1977, he taught journalism at the University of Southern Colorado, the University of Toledo and Western Kentucky University. Ashdown also worked as a reporter for the Gainesville Sun and United Press International.
While at the University of Tennessee, Ashdown has served as assistant and acting associate dean for undergraduate studies in the College of Communications and as acting director of the school of journalism.
The winner of numerous awards and honors, Ashdown was selected in 1997 for Who's Who in the Media and Communications and Who's Who in the South and Southwest. Additionally, he was named the Chancellor's Teacher-Scholar from 1995-1997 and was awarded the UT National Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award in 1991.
Bell graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and received his master's degree and doctorate from Harvard University. He has been a member of the faculty at Williams College in Massachusetts since 1972.
With expertise ranging from the works of Shakespeare and John Milton to those of James Joyce, Bell is a frequent presenter at academic conferences and has served as editor-in-chief of the Berkshire Review and as a reader for Cornell University Press, Columbia University Press and the University of Florida Press.
In 1989, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers, and in 1994 he was named Exemplary Teacher by the American Association of Higher Education.
Robert Foster Cherry graduated from Baylor in 1929 and entered the Baylor Law School in 1932, passing the state bar exam the following year. Before his death, he established the awards to honor great teachers and to expose Baylor students to the world's greatest teachers.