David Gardner Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Research

You went on to get your B.A. at Brigham Young University and then your doctorate at Berkeley.

My Masters and Ph.D. here at Berkeley, yes.

Tell us a little about your dissertation research. You did a dissertation on The California Oath Controversy, which was published by the University of California Press.

Between the years 1949 and 1952 the University of California was torn apart by a controversy over a loyalty oath that was required to be signed by every member of the staff and faculty as a condition of employment or continuing employment. And this was a wrenching experience for the University of California. And the feelings that it engendered, and the issues that gave it life, and the sense of divisiveness that it created within the University of California during those years persisted for many years thereafter. And there are direct links, which we don't have time to discuss, between the loyalty oath in the early 1950s and the free speech movement ten to fifteen years later. So this was a seminal event in the University of California in many ways.

I chose to write about it because, in reading about it, I was convinced that the story couldn't possibly have been fully told. Because in the published sources, everybody was saying the same thing, and I thought, there couldn't be only one side to this issue. So I was determined to pursue the matter for my doctoral dissertation. The three members of my committee, all senior professors at Berkeley, all respected members of the faculty here, each one in his own way discouraged me from doing so, believing that I could not gain access to the primary sources, that I had to have the primary sources to do a credible job (which was correct), and that I would find failure in this initiative. They knew a lot more about it than I did and if I knew as much as they did I probably would not have started the research. So there's something to be said for ignorance.

I brushed aside their concerns, confident that I would be able to do it. And, through a series of determined efforts on my part and some luck, and certainly the help of key players who couldn't have been counted on ahead of time, I managed to get the materials that I required, and the University of California Press liked the results and published the book.

If I could summarize your conclusions and bounce them off of you to see if I am correct, you seem to be saying, after looking in a very comprehensive way at this case study, that all the actors, the faculty, the administration, at a certain point lost sight of the common good, that there was a breakdown of consensus about the issues and that in a way the dialog within the university ground to a halt. Is that a fair assessment?

It is in one sense, but I would like to qualify it in another. I think the principal parties to this debate all thought they were doing the right thing. That is, they were persuaded that their view was correct. They also would have argued that their position served the most fundamental interests of the University of California. They obviously both couldn't have been right, and their inability to find some kind of common ground here is what injured the institution and in many respects cost both sides their principles in a very real way.

So this story is a wonderful accounting of how controversy can arise, how misjudgments can aggravate it, how egos and untrammeled ideology can perpetuate it, and how strong-minded people who are unwilling to take account of the other person's views can badly damage an institution whose interest all interested parties sought to serve. So it's a very interesting case study.

I also discovered how power moved through the institution, where the levers were, how the various constituencies within the university interacted. Certain administrative decisions that were made I learned not to make, and so forth. So it was a very instructive research for me personally, and I hope that it was an addition to the literature on higher education.

I have a quote from an article that you wrote on "Leadership for Excellence" about leading a university. I'd like to quote: "Most academic communities cannot and will not be lead by directives or slogans or the force of a single personality. They require consensus more than charisma. Building consensus requires, in turn, a leader who exercises persuasion, reason, civility, patience, high tolerance for ambiguity, a respect for competing views, and the flexibility to change his or her mind if that is where the evidence points." So the case you studied as a researcher was, in some ways, a negative with regard to that need.

It was an example of how the absence of some of those principles precluded an accommodation of differing views and ways that would have permitted the institution to move forward without it being terribly divided and damaged in the process. And I think the statement you've read, at least as far as I'm concerned, remains as true today as when I wrote it.

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