Gardner, Elizabeth, 1935-1991

Biographical Information

David Pierpont Gardner was born in 1933 in Berkeley, California to Reed S. and Margaret Pierpont Gardner. In 1958 he married Elizabeth (Libby) Furhiman, and they had four daughters together: Karen, Shari, Lisa, and Marci. Libby died in 1991, and Gardner married Sheila S. Rodgers in 1995. Her son, Matthew, was twelve at the time.

Gardner earned his bachelors degree with majors in political science, history, and geography at Brigham Young University in 1955 and his M.A. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1959. He earned his Ph.D. in higher education at U.C. Berkeley in 1966. Even before completing his Ph.D., he became Assistant to the Chancellor at U.C. Santa Barbara (UCSB) and then in 1967 accepted a joint appointment as Vice Chancellor and Professor of Higher Education at UCSB. In 1971 he moved to the U.C. Office of the President as Vice President for Public Service Programs and University Dean of University Extension.

In 1973 Gardner left the University of California to become the president of the University of Utah, a position he held until 1983 when he became the 15th president of the University of California System. After his wife Libby's death in 1991, Gardner chose not to continue as U.C. president without her and resigned in 1992. He became the president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 1993, leaving in 1999. In 2001 he returned to the University of Utah to become a professor of educational leadership and policy in the Graduate School of Education. Gardner also served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles and as a member of the Governing Council of the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.

During Gardner's career in higher education, he served on several national commissions. He was chairman of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, whose 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, helped spark the national effort to improve and reform schooling in the United States. He also served on the National Commission on Student Financial Aid, and on other such committees and commissions for the major national educational associations in Washington, D.C. He wrote the seminal work on UC's loyalty oath controversy, The California Oath Controversy, as his doctoral thesis, published by the University of California Press in 1967. After he left the UC presidency, he was the subject of an oral history at UC Berkeley, and later wrote his memoirs, Earning My Degree: Memoirs of and American University President, published by UC Press in 2005.

Gardner's honors include election as a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Philosophical Society, as a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration, as a 40th anniversary Fulbright Distinguished Fellow in Japan, an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and as chairman of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. He was Cal's 1988 Alumnus of the Year.

From the guide to the David P. Gardner papers, 1949-2005, bulk 1983-1992, (The Bancroft Library)