Crusading for a University System : UC President Gardner steps down; who will succeed him in this key post?

David Pierpont Gardner, whose wife of 32 years died nine months ago, announced his resignation Thursday as president of the University of California. “My reasons are not largely personal, they are exclusively personal,” he said.

Since 1983 and, since 1987, with Elizabeth Fuhriman Gardner as his formally designated associate, Gardner had presided over the largest university system in the U. S. during a decade of takedowns, takeovers and givebacks.

The chancellors of each of the nine campuses of the university can and do engage in private-sector fund-raising. But the University of California is, in the end, a state university, and it is to the university’s president that its crucial relationship with the state is entrusted.

As we enter the 1990s, the University of California has not been taken down, taken over or given back. It is difficult to overstate how large a victory this has been.

And yet, in the nature of state-sponsored higher education, it is also a victory in a war that must be re-fought every season. Despite their steadily growing private endowments, the nine UC campuses still live on an “endowment” that is no stronger than the Legislature’s commitment to annual appropriations. And how deep is that commitment? In tough times, will the whole enterprise come to seem a “frill”?

French aristocrats wore frills on their shirts. At the founding of this republic, American democrats pointedly did not. And yet Thomas Jefferson, who more than any other founder created our unbuttoned sartorial style, was an unabashed intellectual aristocrat. The country he created is forever in danger of confusing his substance with his style.

“There is no class in America,” Tocqueville wrote, “in which a taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary wealth and leisure and which holds the labors of the mind in esteem. Both the will and the power to engage in such work are lacking. A middling standard has been established in America for all human knowledge. All minds come near to it, some by raising and some by lowering their standard.”

Against this tyranny of intellectual mediocrity, David Pierpont Gardner has defended the University of California well. Gov. Pete Wilson will make no appointment more important than that of Gardner’s successor.