Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President (review)

In keeping with contemporary interest in autobiography, if not with postmodern assertions of the instability of the human "subject," many American scholars have published memoirs in the past two decades. They typically focus on the nature of the disciplines and the inner life of science or scholarship. A complementary, if not as extensive, group of academic autobiographies reflects the experience of college and university presidents. David Gardner led the University of Utah for 10 years (1973–1983) and then the University of California for nine before resigning in an atmosphere of some personal controversy.

Unlike autobiographies by scholars, Gardner's memoir stays close to the surface of his academic experience, describing, in the stance of an observer as much as a participant, the activities of leadership at public institutions during a volatile and demanding period in the history of research universities. Gardner favors institutional over intellectual and scientific matters and it is hard to tell from his book that, during his time in higher education, except for his years as an "apprentice" administrator at the University of California at Santa Barbara, academic work was changing. He does not reflect on the growing influence of "theory" and the biological sciences for example, nor on the fact that the culture wars were redefining campus matters as public ones.

Gardner reports briefly on his childhood and youth in the Bay Area (he was born in Berkeley in 1933) and Utah, where he spent summers working on his relatives' ranches. He did the dirty work of agriculture. His memory of it sets the tone for his book, in the early image it offers for Gardner's understanding of what made him a particular kind of institutional leader:

My appreciation for physical labor and a healthy body, early rising, hard work, self-reliance, dependability, and like values and lifestyle preferences grew. None of this was burdensome, nor oppressive, nor exploitative. It was good for me, and I am very grateful to have been nurtured in such a loving but demanding and expectant environment.

Throughout his memoir Gardner celebrates those features of his temperament well fitted to organizational work, in particular his steady-handed approach to problems and determination to see through what he believed to be the proper decision or direction.

Like all long-time administrators, Gardner was adept at forming and maintaining alliances across different institutional interests. He worked well, by his own account, with governors and their staffs, state bureaucracies, and faculty leaders. But when he was at Santa Barbara during the volatile late 1960s, he also learned how "very much alone" any leader is who must steer between intensely held and seemingly irreconcilable positions, and how little students, faculty, the local community, and the media can be relied on to grasp the complex forces at work in any major institutional problem.

It was at Santa Barbara and then in the system office for the nine campuses that Gardner learned the essentials of higher education leadership and management. He had earned a Ph.D. in higher education at Berkeley (in 1966), but inevitably his early experience working at high levels of administration came to shape his attitudes. He admired his colleagues' pragmatism: "There is a difference between finding an answer that satisfied and discovering a solution that worked." And he found the place where problems had to be managed: "I learned. . . that the political center of gravity fits between the opposite ends of the political spectrum and how crucial it was, therefore, that the center hold during times of stress."

Indeed, if is there an organizational, and perhaps even a psychological, theme to Earning My Degree, it is Gardner's preoccupation with the "center." It is the solution to virtually every dilemma. When, as chair of the national commission that produced the famed educational report A Nation at Risk (1983), Gardner was disappointed in its reception by President Ronald Reagan...