NACUA's First Decade Award

Jack Bernard - 2009

Jack Bernard is an attorney with the University of Michigan’s Office of the Vice President and General Counsel, where he has worked for over a decade. During the eleven years prior to this work, he had been an academic administrator and/or instructor at Macalester College, Saga Daigaku, and the University of Michigan.

He currently serves as Chair of the University of Michigan’s Council for Disability Concerns and as President of the Board of Trustees of the Rudolph Steiner School of Ann Arbor. He has been a Spencer Fellow and a researcher at the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement. This year, he was named the L. Ray Patterson Award recipient by the American Library Association. He has been a recipient of the University of Michigan's Neubacher Award, a Roy Johnson Trust Award, and a Saturn Award for Leadership. He received his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and a Master's Degree in Higher Education from the University's School of Education. As an undergraduate, he studied neuroscience at Macalester College.

Since joining NACUA in 2001, Jack has quickly become active as a new member and has been a frequent speaker and moderator (12 times in the past 6 years since he was first a speaker in 2003). He also has served as a member of the Committee on Legal Resources. He was one of the lead attorneys in the Google Library Project. He also conceived the University of Michigan's BAYU System, an innovative approach to dealing with the issue of file sharing on university campuses that has been made available to other institutions as open source software.

NACUA is pleased to recognize Jack Bernard as a recipient of the First Decade Award for his outstanding service to the Association and to the practice of higher education law in his first eight years of membership.