Prestigious Clark Kerr Award Given to University Innovation Alliance Leader for Over a Decade of Improving Student Success

UIA CEO Dr. Bridget Burns receives award recognizing cross-institutional innovation and student success impact

TEMPE, Ariz., Dec. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The University Innovation Alliance (UIA), a multi-university laboratory working to improve student success, announced today that its Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Bridget Burns, has been selected to receive the 2025 Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education--one of the field's most prestigious honors--by the Academic Senate of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Burns joins past recipients including former Supreme Court justice and California governor Earl Warren, Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian, former Harvard president Derek Bok, free speech champion and former college president Lee Bollinger, UC Berkeley chancellor Carol Christ, and former Gates Foundation CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann.

The UC Berkeley Academic Senate describes the Clark Kerr Award as recognizing "remarkable accomplishments that place recipients in the rare category of exceptional individuals who have made an extraordinary contribution to the advancement of higher education." Established in 1968, the award carries forward the legacy of Clark Kerr, the visionary architect of the modern research university. This year's recognition marks the first time the award has elevated work rooted in cross-institutional improvement and student success innovation.

"Clark Kerr has long been a personal hero of mine because he understood how to build educational enterprises that could meet the needs of a changing nation," said Michael M. Crow, President of Arizona State University and founding member of the UIA. "The UIA embodies that same spirit by bringing institutions together around a shared urgency to innovate, to take collective responsibility for student success, and to model what universities can accomplish for the future competitiveness of the country. Bridget has been the critical driving force behind this work, continually pushing us to align, to stay focused, and to act together at the scale the nation requires."

For more than a decade, UIA member universities have piloted and scaled interventions years ahead of the sector, from forgiving small student debts that block re-enrollment or graduation, to redesigning advising systems to be proactive, to using predictive analytics to identify and support students at risk, to redesigning high-DFW courses to prevent students from dropping, failing, or withdrawing. By sharing data openly and learning collectively, UIA campuses have accelerated improvement, demonstrated which practices are effective and scalable, and helped set the national agenda for student success innovation.

"Bridget Burns exemplifies the spirit of the Clark Kerr Award through her visionary leadership and dedication to expanding educational opportunity," said Michigan State University President Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Ph.D. "I've long admired Clark Kerr for his firm belief in the importance of higher education to our society and his keen insights into the tensions inherent within it. This honor very fittingly recognizes Bridget's work with the UIA to amplify student success through measurable coalition-based innovation that achieves lasting impact."

The UIA's eleven founding institutions exceeded their stretch goals by producing more than 160,000 additional graduates by 2025, including a 43 percent increase in annual graduates from low-income backgrounds and a 100 percent increase in annual graduates from underrepresented backgrounds. As a collective, the UIA's nineteen institutions now award approximately 127,000 degrees each year.

"This award affirms what the University Innovation Alliance has demonstrated for more than a decade: when public universities collaborate and innovate together, students succeed and our nation benefits. Iowa State University is proud to be a founding member of the UIA," said Wendy Wintersteen, Iowa State University President. "Bridget Burns' leadership has been instrumental in bringing our institutions together to advance our shared vision of increasing the number of college graduates to strengthen America's economic competitive edge."

"I am deeply honored because when launching the Alliance, I used to ask what might be possible if the Clark Kerr of this generation was not one person at all, but a group of university presidents choosing to work together to transform the future of higher education," said Bridget Burns. "To prove that universities can be both big and good. That we can innovate faster by working together. That we can transform ourselves in ways no one could fathom by keeping students at the center and holding one another accountable. And that we can lead radically by caring as much about each other's students as our own. To receive an award in Clark Kerr's name is profoundly humbling because it affirms that this kind of collaborative leadership is not only possible but necessary for the future of our sector."

About the University Innovation Alliance:
The UIA is an award winning national consortium of large public research universities committed to improving student outcomes through collaborative innovation. For more than a decade, the Alliance has served as a multi-university laboratory where member institutions test, refine, and scale approaches to increase the number of graduates and expand opportunity for students from all backgrounds. Today, the Alliance continues this work with renewed focus on improving student mobility and ensuring that institutional success leads to long term economic opportunity for graduates. The UIA's nineteen members include Arizona State University, Georgia State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, North Carolina A&T State University, Oregon State University, Purdue University, Temple University, University at Buffalo, University of California Riverside, University of Central Florida, University of Colorado Denver, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of New Mexico, University of South Carolina, University of Utah, and Virginia Commonwealth University. For more information, visit www.theUIA.org.

SOURCE University Innovation Alliance