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

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Leadership

You wrote an essay on leadership in which you commented on the extraordinary qualities of the founding fathers of the country. You wrote, "They had a disciplined, informed, and sophisticated appreciation of their culture and civilization and the forces shaping it." Building on that definition, that seems to be what you're saying is required of someone who seeks to lead the University of California.

I believe that's necessary, especially in this university, which is multi-campus, spread all across the state, over 160,000 students, 155,000 employees, major medical centers and clinics throughout the state. We are the land grant institution for the state, so we have the cooperative extension programs, the agricultural field stations, agricultural experiment stations. We have nine campuses with research and public service and teaching obligations. We operate in over eighty countries worldwide. We have nearly as many ships out of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at work as most countries have in their navies. It's a huge enterprise. And therefore, it's extremely difficult to get one's arms around it.

We're in a state with 34 million people, a highly mobile state. Mobility and rootlessness is a way of life, so how do you get stability of support out of that? Divided on ethnic grounds, divided on socioeconomic grounds, divided on racial grounds, divided on geographic grounds. And the legislature reflects these divisions. It is an extremely difficult state.

Therefore, in order to have one's bearings one has to know where one has been. Knowing about the oath, knowing about the free speech movement, knowing about the faculty revolt in 1919 that gave rise to the Academic Senate, knowing how this university was founded and the expectations that were created in the mid-nineteenth century that gave life to the culture of this place are really essential. And people who come in here without an acquaintance of that history and those values and that culture will have a harder time.

It sounds to me that you're saying that you have to be a historian to do this job, to know the past. You have to have your ear to the ground, know what's happening right now, and have some intuition, putting all these things together, about the future and how you want to shape that future.

Well, if you don't possess this knowledge yourself, then you'd better have people around you who do, and you need to consult with them. I've been fortunate because I grew up in Berkeley and I know the university and I've worked in it for many years before being asked to serve as its president. Others haven't, although generally the University of California does draw from within, partly, I think, for these reasons.

The other point I wanted to make is that in the University of California, the Academic Senate has authority delegated to it directly by the Board of Regents, not through the administration. So they have authority that they should have, which is authority over the basic educational policy decisions of this institution. And therefore the president or the chancellors not only are obliged to work with them, but are fortunate to be able to do so because the balance that is created there, over time, irrespective of the irritations and awkwardness that sometimes arise, is very good for this university. And it's a source of stability for this university. Therefore the president has to allow for the fact that he or she does not possess all of the executive authority in this institution.

It sounds as though you're in the hot spot, you being the president, in trying the mediate the integrity of the university with the environment in which it's embedded. So it's managing the outside pressures and the inside pressures for the benefit of both the state and the university.

That puts it very well. The question of course is how does one go about doing that? But that is the job. I think it's important to keep in mind that the president of the university is the only executive officer who has responsibility for the entire institution. No one else does. When I say executive officer I mean the authority to act. The vice presidents are really staff to the president. Their authority derives from the president's authority, in an organizational sense of the term. The chancellors, of course, are the chief operating or chief administrative officers for their respective campuses. They possess authority delegated to them. But they're interested in their campus. They obviously have to be interested in the university as a whole, but their primary focus is the campus, as it should be. But the president has responsibility for all of it.

The Regents, which have the constitutional authority to govern this institution and possess ultimately all the authority, even though they give most of it away to the president and the chancellors and the Academic Senate, rely on the president to do the job. So at Regents' meetings we have maybe 125 items that go to the board; every one carries a recommendation from the president. There's not a recommendation from the chancellor or a dean or a vice president. It's from the president. So the president has that central responsibility.

Now, the president is just not a passive party, receiving all these demands and requests and expectations from his or her colleagues. The president has to make things happen that, in the end, he or she thinks are best for the university. I'll give you an example. When I came in 1983, we had suffered through sixteen years of very difficult budgets under Governor Reagan and Governor Brown.

And some of that was a result of the university's relation to the environment and the politics of the sixties.

That's right, at least during the Reagan term. And some residue of it, but for different reasons, under Governor Brown's administration, which would require another interview. Anyway, that's where we were. So when I came in there was a sense of how do we survive the next fiscal year? Well, I took a tremendous risk because I [sought] in one year, the 1984 - 1985 budget, to recover everything we lost in the previous sixteen years. I asked for a 32 percent increase in our operating budget. That was unheard of. There wasn't a single chancellor or vice president or regent who wanted me to do that. No one wanted me to do that. I was actively discouraged from doing it, because we'd been getting 1, 2, 3 percent budgets and the feeling was that if I asked for 32 percent and got 3 percent, this was not going to look so good. And my view was that this was my job. The only way I knew how to turn the university around was to turn it around, and we desperately needed to do that. Faculty salaries were off ... So, I thought the worst that could happen would be I'd only serve one year. But there are other things I can do, that's not a problem.

But you would have been sticking by your principles.

I would have done what I thought was right even though I couldn't bring people along [at that point]. This is an example of what I mean by leadership.

On your staff?

Right. I couldn't bring them along, and they were concerned for me. They didn't think I was wrong in terms of my assessment, they just thought I was politically unwise with respect to the course I was taking. Well, I'd already had conversations with the governor, about which no one knew and which were encouraging to me, although I hadn't thought they were [necessarily] all that encouraging. In the end we got everything we asked for. So in one year we recovered everything we'd lost in the previous sixteen years.

Once that had happened, all the wheels were greased in the university. Money greases the wheels. And it made it much easier for me then to be a more proactive leader than just a mediator, although you do a lot of that too. It gave me the kind of credibility and currency in the bank, as it were, that I needed for people to come around and be supportive. That was important. Big risk.

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