The Distinguished Service Award: Bruce K. Berger and the Plank Center

Page presents the Distinguished Service Award to those whose service has strengthened the profession and built lasting capability within it. Bruce Berger is a fitting recipient. He founded and led the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations at the University of Alabama, which has spent two decades on a question the profession often takes for granted: what actually makes a good communications leader.

He came to that work with twenty years in practice behind him. At the Upjohn Company he managed public affairs from European headquarters in Brussels and later ran worldwide human health public relations, working on programs in more than thirty countries. At Whirlpool Corporation he served as vice president of corporate affairs and president of the Whirlpool Foundation, leading ninety professionals across media relations, employee communications, government affairs, financial communications and community relations. He earned his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Kentucky in 1999 and joined the University of Alabama, where he is Reese Phifer Professor Emeritus of Advertising and Public Relations and previously served as department chair and director of the MA program.

The programs he developed at the Plank Center have become familiar landmarks in how the field thinks about leadership. The Milestones in Mentoring gala recognizes senior leaders — agency heads, corporate and nonprofit CCOs — for the talent they have helped develop. The biennial Leadership Report Card surveyed hundreds of practitioners on where communications leaders succeeded at engaging their organizations and where work remained, gradually building a longitudinal picture of how leadership in the field changes over time. The Challenge for Emerging Leaders, established in 2017, brought students from a range of programs together for an intensive two-day workshop on real communications problems.

His own research runs alongside it. Berger studies leadership, power and influence in practice, including a study of communication management across eighteen countries, and has published more than fifty academic and professional articles, co-authored one book and edited two others. He co-chaired PRSA's national research committee and served on the editorial boards of journals including Management Communication Quarterly and the Journal of Public Relations Research. He was also a trustee of the Institute for Public Relations.

The teaching has been recognized along the way. PRSA named him national Educator of the Year in 2006. The University of Alabama's National Alumni Association gave him its Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award in 2010, the same year he was named Outstanding Student Advisor for his work with Literacy is the Edge, a student advocacy group. Perhaps the more telling record is where the people he taught and managed have ended up—several of them now in senior communications roles at global companies.

"The depth and breadth of the Plank Center's programs and accomplishments is truly extraordinary, and none of that would have been possible without the vision and efforts of Bruce Berger," wrote Bill Heyman, founder of Heyman Associates, in his nomination — describing someone who drew on his experience as both a practitioner and a scholar to build something the profession could use.

It is work that reflects two Page Principles in particular: manage for tomorrow, and realize that an enterprise's true character is expressed by its people.

With this honor, Berger joins a distinguished list of Distinguished Service Award recipients including Ken Makovsky, Don W. Stacks, Shelley Spector, Sandra MacLeod and Jim O'Rourke.

Dr. Bruce K. Berger will receive the Page Distinguished Service Award at the 2026 Page Annual Conference, September 27–29 in Atlanta.