Gift from Kitty Hoffman creates lectureship in environmental chemistry

Kitty Hoffman, a former FSU faculty member and dean—not to mention a standout student leader back when the university was named the Florida State College for Women (FSCW)—is still making good things happen at the university she has long loved.

Professor Emerita Kitty Hoffman

Thanks to a gift to the department where she taught for decades, the university will be able to bring an internationally renowned scientist to campus every spring, beginning in 2012, for a colloquium to coincide with Earth Day. The $50,000 gift establishes the Katherine B. Hoffman Endowed Lecture in Environmental Chemistry, with a focus on environmental, sustainable, or “green” chemistry.

“We are very grateful for Professor Hoffman’s gift and think it will be an excellent opportunity for our students to rub elbows with someone in such a vital area of chemistry,” says Timothy Logan, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “The department has not yet set a date for the inaugural seminar, although a committee of faculty and students will determine who will be our first colloquium speaker.”

Joe Schlenoff, former chair of the department and FSU’s Mandelkern Professor of Polymer Science, worked with Hoffman several months ago to determine the focus of the colloquium.

“Chemistry now plays a critical role in planning for a sustainable environmental future through activities such as the development of ‘green’ manufacturing processes and is the central science responsible for monitoring our water, air, and soil,” Schlenoff says.

This is not Hoffman’s first financial gift to the department. She and her late husband, Harold, created the Katherine Blood Hoffman Endowed Fund in Chemistry in 1994 with a gift of more than $115,000 for student support. At that time, Hoffman said, “FSU has been the foundation on which my life is built. How could I not [give] when I had received so much? I had received assistance, and I wanted to help today’s undergraduates in return.”

In addition, Hoffman has made dozens of other gifts to Arts and Sciences, including a $50,000 gift in 1998 for symposia for the liberal arts and a $32,000 gift in 1987 to establish an endowed chair in psychology.

Hoffman graduated from the Florida State College for Women in 1936—the height of the Depression—after famously bartering three truckloads of oranges from her father’s grove for a year’s worth of room and board, which cost $200. At FSCW, Hoffman was a straight-A student, president of student government, and captain of at least two sports teams. In addition, she wrote for the campus newspaper, worked in the dining hall, and was one of the earliest members of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society in Florida.

After graduating from FSCW, Hoffman earned her master’s degree in chemistry in 1938 from Columbia University and was accepted into medical school at Duke University. Unfortunately, Duke required its female med students to stay single, so Hoffman decided Duke was not for her. Instead, she married her high school sweetheart and fellow chemist, Harold Hoffman, and in 1940 joined the chemistry faculty at FSCW.

With energy and drive like that of a marathon runner, Hoffman served on the faculty throughout the World War II era; through FSCW’s transition to a co-ed university; through the years when male recipients of the GI Bill flooded the university’s science classes; through the tumultuous years of the 1960s and ’70s, during which she also served as the university’s last dean of women from 1967 to 1970; and into the early 1980s, when she served as president of the Faculty Senate from 1980 to 1982.

Over the course of her career, Hoffman authored many publications, including a book called Chemistry of Life, which received a favorable review from The New York Times in 1964. And in what is perhaps her most enduring legacy, she taught thousands of students and received multiple teaching awards. To mark that legacy, in 1984, the year she retired, the chemistry department dedicated the Katherine B. Hoffman Teaching Laboratory in her honor. And in 2007, the university awarded her an honorary doctorate.

“Hoffman was a great role model and mentor for women joining the faculty and for her chemistry students,” says chemistry Professor Emerita Penny J. Gilmer, who joined the FSU faculty in 1979. “She inspired faculty and students alike with her love of chemistry and her ways of working with others.”