Morris had met the kids a week earlier when he was giving a talk on the music business. They instantly recognize him when he walks in, and their excitement is palpable. After the show he tells them, "Stay out of trouble and one day I'll give you a job."

In a sense, this is what the Academy does. As a trade association aimed at "improving the cultural condition of music," the organization is particularly active at the grassroots level, providing music education programming, advocacy to keep arts funding in place, and charity initiatives that provide for local awards and grants. At the professional level they offer training-seminars, workshops, informational publications-and networking opportunities to all types of music professionals, from songwriters to recording engineers. Then on top of it all they dangle a goldtone gramophone statue and say, "If you get good enough, we'll give you a Grammy one day."

"The Academy is the coolest company in the world," Morris says. "It's fun to work at a place where the goal is to make an industry better, not make money." He discovered his affinity for this type of work early on. After completing the joint JD-MBA at Emory University, he moved to San Francisco to work for California Lawyers for the Arts, a group that provides free legal information to artists. "I had always been a huge music fan," Griff says, "but the connection wasn't visceral." Being a lawyer for the arts changed all that. "I worked with musicians who had real problems-taxes, copyright issues, disputes in the group. My job was to get the legal stuff off their plate so they could go about the business of being artists, and it was rewarding to know you helped them make a sustainable career out of it. When they would nod at you backstage and say thanks, that's when I knew what I wanted to do."

So he dove in, moving back to Georgia to start Atlanta Lawyers for the Arts and then to Illinois to be Associate Director of Chicago Lawyers for the Arts. While in Chicago he started teaching classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, and Roosevelt University, covering legal issues in the music business. He was also doing a number of lectures across the country and served on various boards for arts organizations, his favorite being the magazine New Arts Examiner, for which he also wrote legal columns.

After having crossed paths with the Grammy organization, he took the position of executive director for the Chicago chapter of the Academy. The Chicago chapter is also a regional office, and Morris soon became regional director and then vice president for the central region. Despite a demanding schedule, he still teaches a class a semester and manages the Entertainment Law Initiative, an annual legal writing contest for law students.

Griff Morris '87 in his office at the National Association of Recording Arts & Sciences in Chicago.

From law students to heavy metal musicians, Morris's job puts him in close proximity to a diverse array of people, just as it requires him to stay at the forefront of an equally diverse array of issues facing the industry. And he credits Hampden-Sydney for his ability to manage multifaceted challenges. "What I learned at Hampden-Sydney was how things were interconnected," he says, citing specifically Ken Townsend's environmental economics class. "I learned from Dr. Townsend that the most challenging problems and scenarios can be brought down to a science and analyzed, and that's taught me to understand new situations and not to panic. That's what a liberal arts education does-it increases your comfort level with new situations and new information." And from handling the press on Grammy night to adapting to the technology-driven evolution in intellectual property law, new situations and new information are what Morris' job is all about.