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

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 6 of 7

Issues

Let's talk about two issues that reflect the changing environment of the university, where this kind of leadership is required. One is the changing source of funding for the university, the decline in state funding and federal funding, the end of the Cold War, the availability of private money to conduct its own research, to support research in the university. What are the issues there for a president of a university as he or she tries to protect the integrity of the university, but also respond to the changing environment?

My experience in Sacramento was that there were two overriding considerations on the part of legislators. And this states it a bit baldly and boldly, but that's really what it was with some notable exceptions: they wanted to keep student fees low and they wanted all eligible students admitted. Now what happened to [students] after they were admitted was of less consequence to them. They wanted to be able to go home to their districts -- I can understand this -- tell their constituencies that they had kept the fees down and that every eligible student from their district was enrolled who wanted to be. So it's the university that has to keep the standards up. Others aren't going to do that. We have to keep them up. That's the first point. There's an inherent conflict, in some respects, between the university's sense of its own responsibility and the sense of responsibility that legislators have. That's the first point we have to keep in mind.

The president and those who work with the president have the obligation to try and bridge that natural difference, in terms of their respective sense of obligation. That's important. How do you give them the opportunity to help you without appearing to be [unresponsive to] those issues that they think are important to their constituents? Not to confront. How do you make it easy for them to help you? That's the important thing. So you work together, not at odds with them.

Secondly, universities frankly have been losing ground in the last several years to other social priorities. The construction and administration of prisons, the percentage of the population on welfare, the cost of providing health care to indigents and others who need it and can't afford it. And the schools, especially because of the protection that K-12 and the community colleges have in the state constitution through a proposition enacted several years ago by the people. So our share of the state budget has been in decline for years.

People will say that that's a new phenomenon. That is not a new phenomenon. In the 1970s, when Governor Brown was governor, the state had a surplus of funds, billions of dollars in surplus, but they were not spending it on the University of California. So it's not just a question of not having enough money. There's some other force at work here and the fact is that we've been losing ground in terms of the elected public officials' sense of their responsibility to us and the importunings of other parts of our society for public money. And the desire of people not to pay any more taxes. So here we are.

Now the tendency in dealing with inadqueate budgets is to make administrative decisions that are expected to be short term but tend to become long term. The tendency is to allow the student - faculty ratio to slip a little, to defer maintenance on buildings, to leave some faculty positions vacant, to reduce the cost of the administration of the university, to try and increase private support.

I've raised a lot of money in my life and I can tell you that the people who give money to the University of California, or any other university, give it for reasons unrelated to what the state will pay for. And if you ask them to pay for what the state has paid for but won't now, they won't do it. They'll say, "I already paid my taxes. This is to help improve the place, not to supply additional funds to the state indirectly." So that's not an answer.

So, unless you allow the quality of the place to kind of go down, or you're not able to persuade the legislature, then you're left with increasing fees and tuition. Or curtailing enrollment. And my own view is that the state is about there and they're going to have to deal with the fundamental issue as we move into the next century.

And that, as you just said, is a real problem for the legislators.

A tremendous problem. They won't want to admit they've done it.

What about the other issue that arose during your tenure and is still of great concern, the whole question of dealing with the diversity of the population in California, preserving the quality of the institution but also responding to where the students will be coming from?

I'm very proud of the progress we made while I was president, even though we followed policies that some people now prefer to fault. I'd hate to think where we'd be if we hadn't followed those policies, and I refer to affirmative action policies. And by affirmative action policies I don't mean what some other people [mean by it]. What I mean is that we make a determined effort to increase the pool of historically underrepresented minorities who are eligible [to be admitted] out of high school. We work with the high schools, we work with the middle schools of the state trying to identify promising young people, making sure they take the courses they need, and not, by inadvertence, fail to do so. That they attain at levels that permit them to become eligible for the university. Give them a sense that there's a future for them. Work with them as best we can. That [in the admission process] we take account of any number of issues other than merely grade point average, courses in high school, and test scores. No university in the United States admits only on the basis of those academically objective criteria. No one does.

We also take account of the fact that people live in a very large state. We want them from every county in the state. We want them from the suburbs, from the inner cities, from the metropolitan areas. We want them from every socioeconomic group. We want all races and ethnic groups represented here. Not in any quotas and not by making exceptions to our admissions standards. And we want them coming here from a variety of experiences they've had, [backgrounds], and so forth. Because I've always believed we don't just admit individual students to the university; we are admitting a class to the university [as well]. And we want these young people to interact with one another, learn how to live with one another, how to get along. If they don't get along, then how to figure it out. And that's an important part of their education. So I regard that as a very important part of our educational mission.

Those who suggest that somehow we have been subverting the university's standards either are ignorant about the realities or prefer not to know, because the average grade point of the undergraduate student body has never been higher, even with our affirmative action policies. Now, is the affirmative action policy a perfect policy? No. Is it perfectly administered? No. Do we make mistakes? Yes. Do we learn from the mistakes? Most of the time.

I discussed this with Regents at length in 1990 in a special meeting, and we discussed our affirmative action policies in contracting and purchasing and personnel and admissions.

And at the end of the day one of the Regents, extremely frustrated because he thought [the policies and practices were] full of ambiguities, which [they were], said there ought to be a solution to this problem. And directed that to me. It was a statement, not a question. I said, "Regent so-and-so, for those of you who believe that there's a solution to this problem, you do not comprehend the problem. And for those of us who comprehend the problem, there is no solution. If our policies appear to be somewhat ambiguous [and in evolution], they are. It's necessary. We're in part muddling through an extremely complex and difficult social problem. And we'd better get it right. Now if you want to clarify this rather than live with the ambiguity, we'll have divisiveness within this university and the state of the kind that you will not welcome and in the end you cannot sustain. So there's something to be said for muddling through on issues of this kind."

Well in 1990 they agreed to it, in 1995 they weren't willing to muddle through. But we haven't seen the end of that either. Now, do I believe in absolute preferences? I do not. And where I noticed in the University of California that a person, because of reasons of their race or color was being admitted automatically for that reason alone, we stopped it. Race was only part of a mosaic. But at least we had a more diverse student body than, I think, generally speaking, we're likely to get today under the present policies.

As I listen to you describe the complexity of public education, winning over the various constituencies, certainly in managing your own staff, I certainly am glad that you played that pipe organ back in Berkeley. I want to draw on the fact that though you're now out of the university, while you were in the university you helped forge this report on the quality of the K-12, and to ask you about this dilemma. There has been improvement. Do you think there has been enough improvement? What is our society to do about the fact that if enough resources and talent don't go into that area, that the university won't have the pool to draw on?

I was in a meeting with President Bush before the Governors' Conference on Education in the late 1980s. He was getting briefed on this; I was one of several who were asked to meet with him. A person who was there said, "What's needed, Mr. President, is more money." He almost went through the ceiling. He said, "I don't want to hear about more money. I don't want to hear about it." He said, "Appropriations per student, adjusted for inflation, since the early 1970s to the mid-1980s have gone up (I think it was 65%, I forgot the exact figure); that cannot possibly be the problem," he said.

Now in the report A Nation at Risk, we didn't call that out as the main problem either. We addressed the curriculum that is mostly a curricular cafeteria now where the desserts and the entrées are not clearly distinguishable, where a course in bachelor living carries as much weight as a course in English composition. So there are problems here. We talked about the expectations that we have of our young people. What message are we giving to them, as their performance declines and their grades go up?

Next, we talked about the need for better ways and means of compensating teachers. In higher education, you know, we have a salary scale for those teaching in the business school, a different one for those in the medical school, a different one for those in veterinary medicine, than we do for most of the rest of the university. And if we didn't we wouldn't have a medical school, we wouldn't have a business school. That's the real world. And the schools don't do that. Moreover, in the universities, tenure really has to be earned, whereas in the schools by and large it tends to be a function of years of service. So there are things there that we proposed, many of which were not welcomed by the teachers unions; so it was awkward. Then we laid out what we thought the government ought to be doing.

The reason I mention this is that most of the conversation about school reform gets down to money; whereas I think there are a lot of issues besides money that also need to be addressed. We've made quite a bit of progress in terms of what students are now studying in high school compared with what they were studying in the early 1980s. There have been dramatic increases in the number of students that are now taking the core courses, as we refer to them in A Nation at Risk. There's a richer flow of students from the universities into teaching than there was before. There's more teacher development. Teacher salaries are up, as they need to be. But we were years going down and we're going to be years going back up. We just have to be patient, to keep at it.

Next page: Lessons Learned

© Copyright 1998, Regents of the University of California