2017 Berkeley Faculty Service Award

The Berkeley Faculty Service Award (BFSA) honors a member of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate for their outstanding and dedicated service to the campus, and whose activities as a faculty member have significantly enhanced the quality of the campus as an educational institution and community of scholars. This award recognizes Senate service, which is essential to the ideal of shared governance, and contributions that have had a lasting and significant impact on the excellence of the Berkeley campus.

2017 BFSA Awardees are David Lieberman and Trond Petersen

David Lieberman

 David Lieberman
 James W. and Isabel Coffroth Professor of Jurisprudence

David Lieberman has served Berkeley tirelessly and effectively. He served as member and chair of the Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations and as member and co-chair of the Committee on Research. He has served as associate dean of the Law School and head of the Legal Studies undergraduate program. Most notably, Professor Lieberman very successfully headed the Task Force on Jewish Studies. By 2012, when Professor Lieberman chaired the task force, Jewish Studies had hit bottom. It no longer had staff or office, was reduced to four faculty, and was about to close, orphaning twelve graduate students.

Professor Kenneth Bamberger (former co-chair of the reorganized Jewish Studies) explains what Professor Lieberman accomplished:  

"His tenure was characterized by a lot of hard work, as well as by full use of his abundant interpersonal skills. In this post, David "did the impossible," turning around a program that few could see being revived, at an unheard-of speed on a campus not known for institutional agility. He developed an extensive vision for a new institutionalization of Jewish Studies at Berkeley; proposed the creation of a campus Center for Jewish Studies and a new graduate Designated Emphasis (DE); proposed new faculty appointments; and envisioned a revitalization of the undergraduate program. He expended significant personal capital in building a new, expanded, Jewish Studies community and constituency, enlisting faculty from all parts of the Berkeley campus who may hitherto have been uninvolved with the program (but who might have substantive overlap or interest), as well as folks from across the administration. And he kept a focus on the "orphaned" students from the former Joint PhD program."

 Trond Petersen
Professor of Sociology

Professor Trond Petersen was chair of the Department of Sociology, associate dean for Social Sciences, served on several Senate committees — Courses of Instruction, Faculty Awards, International Education, Rules & Elections, and served on and chaired Status of Women and Ethnic Minorities. However Professor Peterson’s major contribution to the campus is in the area of international education.  He built the Berkeley International Study Program and founded the Peder Sather Center. Both of these endeavors benefitted his department, as well as the campus, more generally.

Carla Hesse, professor and dean of social sciences, describes these two accomplishments:

"Along with this service—indeed parallel to it—Professor Petersen singlehandedly devised a very creative means to generate revenue for his department by using the UNEX Concurrent Enrollment Program to bring foreign students (initially from his native country of Norway) to study at Berkeley. This Program, now expanded from Europe to Asia, generates more that $2.5M annually in revenue. The Berkeley International Study Program which brings nearly 250 foreign students from Norway, Taiwan, Korea, and China to campus each semester has been critical in sustaining the academic excellence of his department, the division of social sciences, and other departments and programs in the College of Letters and Sciences."

Quite apart from the support this generates for our programs, the Berkeley experience is often transformative for our visitors and sometimes transformative for ourselves.

Dean Hesse also describes the success of the Sather Center: 

"Professor Petersen was also the founder of the campus level Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study in 2013. This campus level collaboration with nine Norwegian Universities has resulted, to date, in an infusion of somewhere on the order of $9M in research funds for faculty collaborations with Norwegian scholars across all fields—from Biology, Business and Engineering to Political Science, History, Literature and the Arts. He was recently awarded a knighthood by the Norwegian government for all of his good works."