UC President : Gardner: A Study in Elusiveness

As president of the most prestigious public university in the United States as well as one of the largest, David Pierpont Gardner is among a handful of the country’s most closely watched educators. And, as California’s highest-paid public official at $178,200 a year, he should be one of the state’s most visible employees.

Yet the 15th president of the University of California is also one of the least understood--so much so that some of the staff in UC’s central administration have dubbed him the “invisible president” and one state legislator described him recently as “the most infuriatingly inscrutable public official” he had ever encountered.

At least part of this public impression pleases the soft-spoken 52-year-old chief administrator of the nine-campus UC system.

It is no accident that, even while embroiled in such highly publicized issues as South African divestiture and the resignation under fire of one of his chancellors, Gardner has remained as mild-mannered as Clark Kent and just about as elusive in revealing himself and his views of the world to the public.

Budget Increases

It also is no accident that in just three years, Gardner has built a remarkable record of winning from Sacramento the budget increases he regards as essential for keeping UC in the front rank of the nation’s universities and that he has attained a degree of control over the university and its Board of Regents that no other UC president has had in decades.

Gardner grew up in Berkeley, went to public schools here and for a while worked in the UC system’s central administration, so becoming president of the University of California in 1983 was something of a homecoming for him. But in many ways he remains an outsider.

A devout Mormon who is devoted to his wife and four daughters, Gardner is almost invariably pleasant, but he also is so intensely private that most people in the university don’t even know where his house is.

By his own account, Gardner’s approach to running California’s premier university system has not been simply a matter of whim. His managerial style is a carefully calculated one, based on firm conviction and backed by such meticulous logic as to confound even lawyers, let alone lawmakers.

Painstaking Comments

Even in casual conversation, Gardner talks as if he had composed a speech and painstakingly rehearsed it.

“My job,” Gardner said in a recent interview, “is not to use my office merely to give vent to my personal view of the world or my personal opinion of people and things.”

Instead, he explained, his role is to find consensus among the many groups that are constantly pushing him to take up their worthy causes, to be responsible to the Board of Regents, which hired him, and to serve the university community he oversees.

Perhaps most important, Gardner said, his responsibility is to preserve the university for what he calls its “essential purposes”--that is, as a place where ideas are “welcomed, critically examined, freely debated and respected.”

“People who don’t have those responsibilities are freer than I to express themselves when they wish, how they wish and for whatever reason they wish. I am not able to do that.

“Now, I think it’s also true that I have a keener sense of this responsibility and burden than most people. . . . I also think it’s true that I’m more self-disciplined with respect to these matters than most people. . . .

“But that’s the way I am.”

It is a style that sets Gardner apart from many university educators who not only have been willing to proclaim their personal values but also see doing so as their obligation.

Notre Dame University President Theodore M. Hesburgh, for example, has been active and outspoken on issues of poverty and nuclear arms. A. Bartlett Giamatti, who recently stepped down as president of Yale University, has sharply denounced the New Right and the “self-proclaimed Moral Majority” as “peddlers of coercion.”

Predecessor Fired

One of Gardner’s most famous predecessors, Clark Kerr, UC president from 1958 to 1967, was fired from his post when his liberal views became a target for then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

And more recently, at least three UC chancellors have spoken out on hot political issues. UC Santa Cruz’s Robert L. Sinsheimer has opposed UC’s operation of government-financed weapons research laboratories. Sinsheimer, UCLA’s Charles E. Young and Berkeley’s Ira Michael Heyman were among a group of about 85 university presidents who recently signed an open letter to Congress calling for legislative sanctions against the government of South Africa.

Gardner has been categorically unwilling to follow suit on any of these issues. He admits that his friendly but distant manner and his calculated neutrality on most issues may baffle--and infuriate--those who work with him. But it is an approach that Gardner firmly believes not only serves him well but will prove to be a key to UC’s survival as a great academic institution.

Nowhere has this aloofness and cool-headed logic been more evident than in his dealings with Sacramento.

Quest for Funding

One of Gardner’s first tasks when he was hired by regents in the summer of 1983 was to get more state money for the university.

Under the austere state budgets that began under Reagan and continued in the Administration of Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., UC had suffered serious setbacks. Campus buildings were deteriorating, student fees were being pushed higher and faculty and staff salary raises were being neglected.

Gardner began his job, he said, by reading “every public statement related to education” by George Deukmejian, who early that year succeeded Brown as governor. Deukmejian had promised more money for education, and Gardner intended to help the new governor keep his promise.

Gardner sat down with the governor and worked out the details. What emerged was a jump in the state’s appropriation for UC of more than half a billion dollars over three years, from $1.1 billion to nearly $1.8 billion. Gardner later said, repeatedly and proudly, “The governor has been a man of his word.”

“It was not, on this issue or any other, what I wanted for the university that was important,” Gardner said. “It was the charge given to me by the regents who hired me (and) it was what the governor himself said he wanted. . . . I was simply desirous of helping him frame an agenda for accomplishing his expressed intentions.”

Utah Reputation

In fact, many regents openly said that one reason for hiring Gardner was his awesome reputation for raising money at the University of Utah, where he had been president for nearly a decade before taking over the UC presidency.

A story that followed him from Utah was that Gardner had visited, in person, every member of the Utah Legislature in the course of about a year. Asked to confirm it, Gardner said with obvious satisfaction, “That is quite true.”

It is also true, by all accounts, that Gardner has been as painstakingly organized and calculating as any lobbyist who ever paid a visit to a state capitol. Intimately acquainted with minute details of every budget the university has presented, he is able to translate those details into straightforward arguments that are, in the words of one legislative aide, “very persuasive.”

Gardner has an “absolute genius” for removing his ego from situations and figuring out who his audience is and what it wants to hear, said William B. Baker, UC’s vice president for budget and university relations.

Baker grew up with Gardner in Berkeley and is the man thought to be closest to the president outside his own family.

“It is a myth that we were boyhood friends,” Baker said recently. “We grew up together. . . . But I can’t say we are close personal friends. . . . I can’t say that anyone knows him very well. But I probably know him as well as anybody. I’ve been with him a lot. I’ve seen him in a lot of different situations. . . . And what I do know about him is that he is able to project a personality that makes people feel comfortable . . . that makes them understand what it is the university needs.”

Struggle Over Salaries

Perhaps the best illustration of this ability involved UC’s long struggle in Sacramento over faculty salaries. For several years before Gardner came to UC, his immediate predecessor, David S. Saxon, now chairman of the corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been warning that faculty salaries at UC were falling 7%, 10%, eventually 16% behind those of competing universities around the country.

Shortly after arriving at UC, Gardner was asked by Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy what effect UC’s salary lag was having. Instead of giving a predictable answer about the importance of being competitive and the high cost of living in California, Gardner set his staff to work.

“I wanted to know how many of the university’s first-choice faculty recruits . . . were actually accepting UC’s offers of employment. I wanted to know what the statistic was before the salaries had begun to fall behind and what it was at the time. I told them (the staff) I wanted that information and I wanted it in time for the Legislature.”

The staff went to work and found that in 1972-73, UC’s first offers were accepted 90% of the time. A decade later, the figure had dropped to 72%.

“The difference between 90% and 72%,” Gardner said, “is the difference between the University of California and an average American university. That’s all I have to say.”

Today, UC faculty salaries, which range from an average of about $33,500 for an assistant professor to $90,000 and $100,000 for top-ranked scholars in such fields as law, medicine and dentistry, are once again on a par with salaries at Harvard, Yale and the University of Michigan. And the university is now getting 89% of its first-choice recruits.

Salaries have always been something of an issue for Gardner.

‘Outrageous’ Salary

Before he agreed to take the UC post, he persuaded the Board of Regents that, if he and family were to maintain in Berkeley the standard of living they had in Salt Lake City, he would have to make at least $150,000, 60% more than Saxon was making. The decision, as some regents feared, drew the ire of many state legislators. State Assembly Ways and Means Chairman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) called Gardner’s salary “outrageous.”

(In addition to the salary, which today has risen to $178,200, Gardner receives other benefits and draws a monthly housing allowance of $2,085 so that he and his family can live in a private home instead of in UC’s official presidential residence. He also received a temporary interest-free loan of $150,000, a 25-year 6.11% mortgage of about $295,000 and an outright grant of $65,000 for additions and improvements to the house, which is outside Berkeley.)

Although his compensation remains a sticking point with some legislators, it had until recently faded as an issue. Once again, the subject of salaries of UC’s highest-paid employees is of serious concern to the president.

Proposition 61 on the November ballot, an initiative sponsored by tax-fighter Paul Gann, would limit the total compensation of top state and local employees to 80% of the governor’s proposed $80,000 salary, or $64,000.

According to UC’s analysis, the initiative would have a “devastating” effect on the university’s ability to attract and retain the country’s top teachers, researchers and administrators. If the pay limit passes, UC budget officials say, 7,400 employees, including 5,350 teaching faculty, would be subject to compensation cuts or freezes.

Intends to Fight

Gardner has made it clear that he intends to fight pay limits as hard as he fought for salary increases--and that, in any case, he has no intention of living on $64,000 a year if the initiative passes.

“It’ll affect the salary of my successor, but it won’t affect my salary,” he says.

He smiles when he says it, but, eager to resume his serious view of his position at the university, he is quick to add: “I don’t want to personalize this, however. It’s not me at all. It’s the University of California. To impose these constraints on UC’s ability to compete for talent with the nation’s leading universities would be so devastating as to alter fundamentally the quality, capability and character of the University of California.”

Whatever else can be said about the university, it is as huge and complex a system as any educator has ever had to oversee. With nine campuses, five medical centers and three Department of Energy research laboratories, the university enrolls 148,000 students and has 125,000 employees. Its total budget, from federal, state and private sources, is approaching $6.4 billion annually, more than all but about a dozen states.

At University Hall near the Berkeley campus, where Gardner’s offices are, many central administration staff members complain that they rarely see the president. It is a change from UC’s past several presidents, who could be seen occasionally wandering the halls or having coffee in the cafeteria, or whose presence was felt in memos sent to the staff.

Gardner admits this is true. He is on the road 40% to 50% of the time and spends few of the remaining hours of the week socializing. By his own account, he rarely sends memos to the staff.

‘I Delegate Authority’

“The fact is,” Gardner continued, “I delegate authority very substantially. I try to appoint the best people I can, respect the authority they therefore possess and back them up in their decisions, as against trying to second-guess them. . . .

“But,” he added, “I’m not blindly supportive. . . . I am a very trusting person--until I have reason not to trust.” Then he can become quite visible--as he has done at least twice during his UC presidency.

During his time in office, Gardner has had to face two public personnel problems, both involving chancellors. One, Robert A. Huttenback of UC Santa Barbara, was found to have improperly spent university money to renovate his home, and the other, Richard C. Atkinson of UC San Diego, was embroiled in an embarrassing lawsuit with a woman who claimed to be his former lover.

Although both situations were thought by many to be distasteful to Gardner personally, even his critics concede that he handled them with equilibrium and dispassion.

In the more recent case, which occurred this summer, a university audit found that Huttenback had misspent $175,000 of university money on his private residence. (Like Gardner, campus chancellors are given allowances for private housing if the regents find that university residences are unsuitable for their family situations.)

Although there were immediate calls for Huttenback’s resignation, Gardner refused to consider dismissing the Santa Barbara chancellor until a full investigation could be made of the chancellor’s performance over his nine years in office. The investigation was conducted by three of Gardner’s five vice presidents.

‘Listen to All Sides’

“You should see the letters I got,” Gardner said. “ ‘What do you mean (one writer asked) conducting a performance review of a man . . . that any reasonable group of people would conclude is patently immoral?’ But there were also opinions on the other side of the spectrum. And it’s my job to listen to all sides,” Gardner said. “Once I have the information, I move very quickly, but I will not be stampeded into making a decision.”

As the performance review was nearing its end, Gardner held a private meeting with Huttenback. Nine days later, the Santa Barbara chancellor offered his resignation.

“Once all the facts were on the table, a reasoned decision could be made. Until that time, such a decision could not be reached by me or anyone else. . . . Had I moved any more quickly, the decision itself would have been the object of contention. Now, having been handled as it was, we can move forward. That’s my job: to make sure the university can always move forward.”

Two years earlier, Atkinson had been sued for $2 million for allegedly forcing a former lover, who was then a professor at Harvard, to have an abortion on what she said was the false promise that he would later impregnate her. (The suit was settled out of court this year.)

That review Gardner conducted himself. But it was not, Gardner contended, to determine whether Atkinson was right or wrong. “That was a legal matter for the courts to decide. . . . Barring any evidence that this matter was continuing into his present situation . . . I was bound simply to see whether his performance was in any way being affected adversely.”

‘Support and Encouragement’

Having determined that Atkinson’s administration had not suffered--and that he got ringing endorsements from virtually everyone on campus and within the community--Gardner concluded that it was his “responsibility not to make a moral judgment about what had occurred in the late ‘70s but to offer support and encouragement in what was a very embarrassing and awkward situation for the chancellor and his wife. . . .

“Some people said: ‘If it even occurred, how can you allow him to serve?’ I got a letter from a person quoting the Bible to me. I wrote back and quoted that part of the Bible where Christ confronted the adulteress and the crowd surrounding her and suggested that those without sin be the first to cast the stone. And the crowd melted away.

“That was the answer I gave that person.

“Put it this way: I regard myself as a Christian. I do not regard myself as a moralist.” Gardner paused, as if listening to his own words, then, apparently convinced of their own validity, repeated them. “I regard myself as a Christian. I do not regard myself as a moralist. I believe in the tolerance that is an intrinsic part of Christianity--or at least should be.

“I hope that’s useful. I think it may explain a lot about why people wonder what I’m like.”

Regarded as Conciliator

When Gardner was hired, the UC Board of Regents knew he was a skilled conciliator, a man who could forge consensus where it seemed unlikely. Before going to Utah, he had held several administrative posts at UC, one of which involved getting radical students and entrenched administrators to talk face-to-face during periods of the worst student unrest in the 1960s. In the early 1980s, as head of a national commission on education formed by the Reagan Administration, he had persuaded 18 prominent educators to agree, in writing, on what was wrong with American education--which nearly everyone who was involved agreed was no mean task.

Despite these strengths, there were serious reservations on the UC board about Gardner’s intellectual credentials.

Academic Field

Unlike most presidents of top research universities, Gardner does not hold an advanced degree in a highly prestigious academic field. His doctorate is from Berkeley, but it is in education. His undergraduate degree is from Brigham Young University.

“He knew a lot about education, but he was not viewed as an intellectual leader. He was viewed as a manager--a manager’s manager,” said Patrick M. Callan, former director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission and now head of the Education Commission of the States.

“There was some disdain at first,” added Neil J. Smelser, a Berkeley sociology professor who is a faculty representative on the Board of Regents. “The faculty can be a pretty arrogant lot. Since that time, the faculty has come to change its mind. . . . Salaries are, of course, one reason, but people have come to appreciate enormously his intellectual abilities. . . . Why, he even gets applause at meetings of the Academic Council (the statewide faculty governing board).”

Gardner’s diplomatic skills have also been studiously applied to the Board of Regents, whose 30 members span the spectrum from archconservative to ultra-liberal. Although the potential for divisiveness is enormous, Gardner has managed to win support for almost all of his initiatives, including a controversial reduction in the number of the board’s business meetings beginning in the fall. The board’s 13-9 vote last month to sell UC’s holdings in companies doing business in South Africa stands out as its only significant break with Gardner.

During Gardner’s tenure, many observers agree, the board has become almost docile and has left most of the important work of the university directly in the hands of the president.

Yet, for all of his political and managerial skill, Gardner has been privately criticized by some educational leaders in the state for not pushing hard enough to resolve the next set of problems facing the university.

“To do something about the quality of undergraduate teaching, which has been woefully neglected; to cope with the enrollment crisis, which has already begun to hit some of the campuses . . . to provide real opportunities for women and minorities, who have largely been overlooked by UC--all of those are highly charged issues that cannot be dealt with in a totally dispassionate, totally compromising way,” said one high education official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

Neutrality Questioned

“They cannot be dealt with by someone who insists on always being neutral, always playing the role of . . . the outsider,” the official added.

The quality of undergraduate education is as tough a problem as UC faces. Initiated by Gardner, a report from the faculty on that subject is due out in the fall. It is to address many of the age-old problems of public universities: classes that are large, research-oriented professors who are indifferent to undergraduates and counseling programs that are inadequate. Whatever the solutions, many within the state contend they are long overdue.

Although he has been quick to realize that the university is likely to experience an enrollment explosion over the next decade because of the rising population in California, Gardner has yet to offer concrete proposals for coping with it.

Nor has he yet offered new solutions to UC’s longstanding problem of under-representation of minorities and women throughout the system. Although UC has strained in recent years to accept more blacks and Latinos, their representation on the UC campuses is still far below the level that some believe it should be. According to recent figures from California Postsecondary Education Commission, Latinos made up more than 18% of California’s high school graduating classes but only about 9% of UC’s freshman class in 1984. Blacks made up 8.7% of their high school graduating classes but only 5.6% of UC freshmen classes.

At the undergraduate level and even in graduate and professional schools, women have done far better but, as many of Gardner’s critics are quick to point out, in the upper reaches of UC’s management hierarchy, women remain almost nonexistent.

Top Positions Open

Gardner may now have a chance to address that problem at the most senior levels. A search will begin shortly for Huttenback’s replacement at UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz’s Sinsheimer recently announced that he will retire next year. But many within the UC system remain openly skeptical that any real change will come about.

It is when the discussion focuses on the role of women and minorities in the university that the subject of Gardner’s Mormon faith is most often raised by his critics. A strict, theocratic church that opposed the equal rights amendment and, until 1978, barred blacks from the priesthood is a natural target of suspicion in the free-thinking atmosphere of a large university.

There has also been much speculation within the state that Gardner’s religious convictions played a role in his decision last month to oppose Deukmejian’s proposal for UC to divest South Africa-related holdings.

Why else, his critics wonder, would Gardner not only go against the wishes of many outspoken students and faculty members but also oppose both a governor who has been very supportive of the university and his regents, the majority of whom voted to adopt the governor’s plan?

Although Gardner has commented only briefly on South Africa since the board voted to divest, he has made clear time and again that his “personal views” would not enter into to this decision or any other issue facing the university.

‘Public Trust’

Gardner freely recognizes that such questions come up “because I am a Mormon,” but he insists that he is committed to executing his “public trust.”

“I have never allowed my personal value system or my religion to influence my professional responsibility,” he said in an interview several years ago, adding that if his professional obligations should ever put him in a position to “do some things that I found to be unconscionable, I would quit.”

At a Ways and Means subcommittee hearing last year, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) pressed Gardner on the issue of race and discrimination.

As one observer remembered it, the “oral artistry” between the two men was reminiscent of “a sweltering Tennessee courtroom . . . long ago as Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan clashed over evolution.” The observer, one of the state’s most prominent education leaders, gave this account:

“Dr. Gardner,” Brown began slowly, his voice gradually rising to a crescendo, “we are very concerned by the university’s attitude. Specifically, I want one scintilla of evidence that the atrocities of the South Africa regime present a problem to you personally, not as president of the university, but as a human being.”

Gardner then tersely explained his view of the importance of the neutrality of a university president on political matters and then went on to say that he, too, knows something of social injustice and persecution.

“Mr. Speaker,” Gardner continued, according to the observer, “my great-grandfather was driven from Canada because of his religion; he settled in Nauvoo (Ill.). Then a mob burned his house and drove him to the West. After several years and more bloodshed, he came to Utah, but this was no sanctuary. In fact, the bones of my ancestors are strewn throughout the western United States.

“And I have personally known discrimination because I am a Mormon. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I abhor oppression, whether it occurs in South Africa or in Iran or in Russia. But I do not choose to advertise it.”

Months later, in an interview, Gardner expounded on his view of the role of a university in society. By its very nature, it must not take political positions or it risks losing sight of its basic mission--to be the one place in society where people can freely express their views without being persecuted simply for holding those views.

‘An Affront’

When he arrived the University of California as its president, he said, he was deeply troubled that Jeanne Kirkpatrick, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was prevented from speaking on the Berkeley campus because of outbursts from protesters. Such actions, he said, are “an affront to one of the most fundamental purposes of the university.”

Today he is just as troubled by attempts by some right-wing groups to silence professors as he is by demands from some faculty to call a halt to all Strategic Defense Initiative research at the university.

“There has been,” Gardner said, “an erosion in the degree of freedom people possess . . . to express their ideas and be heard on American college and university campuses. The diminishing of this freedom has occurred principally from forces within the university rather than forces without.

“One evidence of that degree of intolerance is the divestment issue,” Gardner said. “For the people who are convinced that they are right, they regard themselves as the possessors of all truth and virtue. Anyone who is in disagreement is somehow immoral.”

So obsessed is Gardner with academic freedom that he is writing a book on it--his second on the subject.

The first, published in 1967, was “The California Oath Controversy,” an account of the board of regents’ effort in the late 1940s and ‘50s to rid UC of Communist influences by forcing faculty members to sign an oath of loyalty. Gardner described in his book how 36 faculty members who refused to sign came to be fired although not one was charged with “professional unfitness or personal disloyalty.”

‘Futile’ and ‘Misguided’

Despite such “futile” and “misguided” efforts, Gardner contends, there have been at least some hopeful moments in American education.

“During World War I, for example, there was a professor at Harvard who was pro-German. He was protected by the university in his post. His ideas were freely published and openly debated on the campuses. Donors withdrew their commitments. Others refused to give. The university paid a price for it. (So much so that one Harvard alumnus threatened to annul a bequest of $10 million if Prof. Hugo Munsterberg was not deprived of his chair.)

“Yet the alternative,” Gardner said, “is to forfeit the institution to the prevailing political winds and thus give up its special claim to independence and the freedom it enjoys within our society.”

Does Gardner imagine he will offend people with his book?

“Very likely. Very likely,” he replied.

As things stand now, his critics would probably like to see him run off campus. But, he concluded with a laugh, in a truly free university they would simply--and respectfully--”point out where I am in error.”