Berkeleyan

Clover, Kay honored with 2007 Faculty Service Awards

25 April 2007

Two Berkeley faculty members - Professors Carol Clover and Herma Hill Kay - have been selected as winners of the 2007 Berkeley Faculty Service Award (BFSA). The recipients were announced by the Academic Senate's Faculty Awards Committee at the Berkeley Division spring meeting April 19.

A relatively new campus honor, the BFSA was established in 2004 to recognize faculty with an outstanding record of service to the Berkeley campus. The awards committee, chaired by Professor Bob Buchanan, said in its citation that Clover and Kay exemplify the ideal of shared governance and the award recognizes their long-standing commitment to the interests and well-being of the faculty, staff, and students at Berkeley.

Carol Clover

Carol Clover

Beginning with her appointment in 1984 to the Admissions, Enrollment, and Preparatory Education Committee, Professor Emerita Clover has served on key Senate committees - including Budget and Interdepartmental Relations (which she chaired in 1993-94), the Committee on Academic Planning and Resource Allocation, and the Committee on Committees - and represented the Senate on the Systemwide University Committee on Academic Personnel. Clover also has performed many special assignments for the campus, including membership on the 1996-97 Chancellor's Search Committee. "Not only did she serve her fellow Senate members tirelessly and with great distinction," the committee writes, "but she demonstrated a capacity for leadership and ability to effect change. She took advantage of these talents in administrative positions" - including service as two-time chair of the Department of Scandinavian and assistant dean in the College of Letters and Science. Additionally, she was founding director of the campus's Beatrice M. Bain Research Group and a founding member of Women's Studies.

Since 1985, Clover has also been an editorial-board member (and for four years editor) of the Berkeley journal Representations. "She performed these duties," the committee writes, "while becoming one of the world's leading scholars in the culture of early Northern Europe as well as in the history of American cinema; her standing in these fields was recognized in her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996."

Herma Hill Kay

Herma Hill Kay (Bonnie Azab Powell photo)

Professor Kay's lengthy list of service contributions at both the campus and on systemwide committees "reflects a level of commitment to the ideal of shared governance that the Faculty Awards Committee takes pride in recognizing this year," it writes. A recipient of the campus Distinguished Teaching Award, Kay chaired the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate from January 1973 to September 1974. She served on numerous committees and chaired four different Berkeley Division senate committees, as well as, recently, the UC Systemwide Committee on Academic Freedom.

Kay was involved in the past three Berkeley chancellor searches - as a member of the search committees that chose former Chancellors Chang-Lin Tien and Robert Berdahl and as chair of the faculty screening subcommittee that participated in the recruitment of current Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. She also served as dean of the law school (1992-2000), the first woman to serve in that capacity. Kay is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her contributions to the legal field and for her commitment to improving the status of women and minorities in the field of law.