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

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Lessons Learned

Looking back at your life, Dr. Gardner, what lessons might students draw from your career about leadership in the university or elsewhere, and about preparing to assume those kind of roles?

Well, I think one really must learn how to work. I don't mean casually or erratically or sporadically, but what concentrated, hard, intellectual work requires. And you tend to get that when you're young, not older. You build that step by step, whether it's working thinning sugar beets in the western Utah desert, as I did, with a short hoe. Or cleaning the weeds out of the irrigation ditch. Or running the cattle for days on end. You stick with it when there's a job you have to do. So you learn how to work.

You have to learn how to concentrate. I learned how to concentrate when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. We had two young children at home and I was working full time and in graduate school. And I'd come home and I'd have to study, whatever the noise level. So the roof can fall in and I'll hardly notice it if I'm concentrating. So those are experiences you tend to get when you're young and you simply build on them as you get older.

Secondly, you have to have sufficient confidence in yourself that you're willing to act on your own judgment. But you shouldn't be so arrogant as to suppose that you can somehow instinctually [and invariably] know what the right answer is. You have to consult with people who know more about it than you do, preferably people who are smarter than you or who have had more experience than you. And you weave that together.

Then you decide what's possible. I decided it was possible to get that early budget, I did not think it was impossible. Everybody else thought it was impossible, I thought it was possible. If I had thought it was impossible, I would not have tried because I don't believe in going to the barricades and dying there. If I know how to go around or through the barricades, I'm willing to try it. But I'm not willing to die on the barricades, because when you're dead, you're dead. You're not there to live another day to try. But you need to be willing to take some risks with leadership or you won't be exercising it.

Third, you shouldn't be concerned with who gets the credit. For example, the first new professional school in the University of California in over twenty years was created at UC San Diego when I was president. It was the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. Well that was an idea that I planted with Dick Atkinson, who's now president of the university but who was then chancellor of San Diego. And I said, "It can't really be known that I suggested it as that's the surest way to kill it."

Right, "Why not at Berkeley?"

So I said, "You come to me with the proposal and I'll consider it sympathetically, but that's the way it has to go." So I also exerted leadership, at least as I understood it, by planting ideas but taking no credit for them, by giving credit to other people, which has never been a problem for me. As a matter of fact they deserved it because they made it happen, even if it wasn't their initial idea. They made it happen. That's a process in itself that warrants that kind of acknowledgment and recognition. So that's another form of leadership -- out of sight, private.

There are other times, on the other hand, where the president needs to be out front, even if it's a very unpopular position. For example, I opposed divestment for reasons that I thought were sufficient. I also understood that people who had different views on this issue were people I could respect. Honest people could and did have different views on that issue. Well I had one view of it. After having studied the issue very carefully I concluded that the university, I'm not talking about individuals, the university acting collectively as a corporate entity ought not to divest. We didn't invest in South Africa because of apartheid; I thought we shouldn't divest because of it. And there were a lot of other arguments for remaining as against leaving.

Putting that aside, I was vilified, really vilified during that controversy. I never lost a night's sleep over it, however, because I thought I was right on that issue. Now in the end, a majority of the Regents thought I was not right. But I didn't resign or go pout or something. That's their responsibility to make the final decision; it's not mine. It was my responsibility to help lay out the issue and to share with them my thoughts and my recommendations; and I did. They didn't want to follow it. Fine. But that's leadership too.

One doesn't always have to win to continue to be a leader. That's another thing I think that's very important. Also I think one has to be quite prepared to walk away from his position any time, without a sense of either having been pushed out or having failed. But if you want this position more than anything else, you'll make compromises that you really shouldn't. And I've seen that happen many, many times. These are just a few ideas.

Very helpful, I think. One final question then, what do you see as the university's role in giving something to students that further the values by which they might assume leadership in the future? What is the university's role as a moral educator?

Well, I think we should oblige them to deal with the issues intelligently. I think we failed in that during the divestment issue, for example. By divestment I mean people asking us to sell university investments in companies doing business in South Africa. We failed the students in that, in my view, because we allowed the political rhetoric to dominate the debate. And the political rhetoric was, in effect, a bumper-sticker approach to the issue. If you were for divestment you must be against apartheid, if you were against divestment you must be for apartheid. A kind of simplistic bumper-sticker approach to issues. It was our obligation -- I think we fell short -- to force the students who thought this is a simple issue to confront its complexity.

Another example. I think in the free speech movement, whatever meritorious outcomes may have arisen from that in terms of political openness and access to political views on campus and so forth, there was a downside too. And we don't hear about that very much. The downside was that there is today in many respects less tolerance rather than more tolerance for contrary opinions, at least openly expressed. And it gave rise to what's popularly called "political correctness," which some say has always existed and others think has not. My own view is that we shouldn't allow students to get away with mere sloganeering, even if we're the focus of their animosity. In that sense, the university has an affirmative, moral obligation. If we fail in that, what have we succeeded in? When we have debates and people get shouted down, that bothers me very much. Or when people launch ad hominem attacks simply because they disagree with someone, that's the last resort of a demagogue. I think that ought to be pointed out. And I think the university has an affirmative, not a passive, obligation to instill the students with those values that carry respect for evidence, including negative evidence, analysis, reason, and respect for others. On any issue those values ought to be brought to bear, and I think American universities do less well in that arena than they did several decades ago. I hope we recapture that.

Dr. Gardner, thank you very much for taking time to walk us through this extraordinary career from kid in Berkeley to president of the University of California.

Thank you. I've enjoyed our visit very much Harry. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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