| Photo by Jane Scherr |
David Gardner Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 1 of 7
Dr. Gardner, welcome back to Berkeley.
Harry, thank you. I'm very happy to be with you this morning.
Were you raised in Berkeley?
I was raised just up the street, and I was born down the street -- Alta Bates hospital. I attended the Berkeley public schools and grew up here.
Did you ever imagine that you would come back as president of the University of California?
Actually I was amazed when I was admitted as a freshman student at the Berkeley campus in 1951.
What did your parents do?
My father was a civil servant with the Farm Credit Administration and the Federal Land Banks, programs of the New Deal in the 1930s, and was resident here in Berkeley for all of his professional life.
And growing up near the campus, was it a real presence in your life even as a young person?
It was a tangible presence, really a daily presence, because most of my father's or mother's friends were professors or administrators at the university. We would come on campus and play our football games on the fields here, find unauthorized ways of gaining admission to Memorial Stadium, and other events on campus. Yes, it was a daily part of life.
Looking back, in the years before you went to college, do any mentors stand out? Somebody who had a formative influence on you?
Interestingly enough, Robert Gordon Sproul, who was president here for twenty-eight years from the early 1930s to the late 1950s and a great figure in the history of the University of California, was a person I greatly admired and had occasion from time to time to come to meet and to know, especially during my years with the Alumni Association. I always admired him, his style, his verve, his respect for the institution, his standards, his way of doing things.
In looking back at your youth, what stands out as formative experiences, formative factors in shaping your character?
There are many. Of course the family would be primary. My mother passed away when I was six. My father remarried. Nevertheless, I had a very stable home life, a very loving home life that developed in me a sense of security and confidence. That was the primary thing. My father and mother were both from Utah, and I had occasion therefore to work on my uncles' farms during the summer, and on their cattle ranches, and I learned how to work. Get up at 5:00 in the morning and stop working at 9:00 p. m. I learned what work was and I learned how to earn a dollar and to respect what it meant. When I turned thirteen my father said, "Here's twenty-five cents a week. We will provide you your home and your food, twenty-five cents a week, and the rest of it is your responsibility." So I learned how to be an entrepreneur early on, manage a budget. The only money I had was what I had. That was very important.
I played the piano for five to six years, from age six on, and got up every morning and practiced. That gave me a sense of discipline and obligation which I discharged, most of the time. When I was twelve I really tired of the piano and went to the pipe organ, loved the instrument. As you know, the pipe organ has more than one keyboard, anywhere from two to five manuals, over a hundred stops which give you different musical sounds. You also have a keyboard which commands the use of your feet in the course of playing it. There are three staffs on the musical score, and so forth. So one cannot play the pipe organ without concentrating on it. So I did learn how to concentrate. I'd get up in the mornings to practice and every Saturday I'd take a two-hour bus ride to my teacher in Alameda, California. Was there for an hour. Back home by bus for two hours every Saturday. Every morning I would get up, hitchhike to the church in the morning, practice for an hour in a dark church, and then walk to school.
Those experiences, working on my uncle's farms and ranches, my music, my work at home, buttressed by the love and security of my family, gave me a leg up, as it were,
with respect to many of those same traits later on that helped me with my professional as well as my personal life.
It sounds like playing the organ involved the management of a complex system at a very early age.
I hadn't fully realized it, but it was.
Was your Mormon religion important in forging your character? In what ways?
I was born into the Mormon Church. My great grandfathers and their families came across the plains with Brigham Young in 1847; so it's been a part of my life and part of my family's life for as long as I can remember. The values that are reflected in the Mormon religion are in many respects contemporary, but at the root are 20th-century rural values in American life. Values in respect for hard work, for meeting one's obligations, for being responsible for one's own behavior, for valuing education, for valuing the family, for a sense of responsibility to the larger community, and so forth. And these are traits, qualities, and values that were imbued in me from my first recollections and have carried through in terms of all of my work and all of my professional activities, as well as my personal life.
Was it hard being a Mormon growing up in Berkeley?
It was only hard if you were not confident about your beliefs. Then it would be extremely difficult. For example, we don't drink liqueur or wine or alcoholic beverages. Most my friends did. And I was pressured to do so. We don't smoke, and most my friends did and I was pressured to do so. And I didn't. And I had to decide early on, therefore, Harry, whether I was going to live by my principles or adjust them when it was convenient to do so. And I decided: I can't live two ways. I've got to be one way or the other. And I decided, well, those are my beliefs and other people are going to have to either respect them or choose not to. That was their decision, not mine. And so that's how I was and was reinforced in that actually by my friends, who would have been greatly disappointed if I'd been breaching my own beliefs, even though they made a surface effort to persuade me to do so.
Your leadership started to be manifested early. You were a class president?
Well, it started earlier than I have any reason to suppose that it should have. I was president of my junior high school here, at Berkeley High School president of my junior class, and then president of the student body. So I did not find that living by my beliefs, even though they were contrary to the behavior of most of my friends (whose own behavior had nothing to do with my love and respect for them), certainly didn't harm me in terms of my opportunities. And that was an early lesson that I took to heart.
Next page: Research
© Copyright 1998, Regents of the University of California