At the End of a Love Story, an Abdication
Standing on the cold and wind-swept rim of the Mauna Kea volcano, University of California President David Gardner was witnessing the dedication of a dream he had helped realize: the Keck Telescope, an astronomical tool so powerful that it may shed light on the origins of the universe.
As mirrors shifted soundlessly inside the immense orb on Nov. 7, Gardner felt alone amid a crowd of dignitaries and their spouses. Nine months before, for reasons even a man of his faith could not explain, his wife and partner, Libby, had been taken from him, the victim at 55 of an obscure bone cancer. Each function like this one seemed not to relieve, but to reinforce, his loss.
Back at the hotel after the ceremonies were over, alone and sick in bed with the flu, he penned his resignation.
“This letter is one not easily written, for it relies on mere words to convey feelings that reach far deeper than words can express, and that arise from principles of life that are more complex than I am able adequately to share or even fully to comprehend,” he wrote.
”. . . It has become clearer with each passing month since Libby’s death that without her I cannot remain as president of the University of California. I intend, therefore, to step down. . . .”
There, on a sheet of hotel stationery, was a modern-day abdication for love of a woman.
In an age when politicians’ careers are truncated by dalliances with mistresses and evangelists’ ministries are ruined by encounters with prostitutes, David Gardner had willingly relinquished one of the nation’s most prestigious academic posts because he could not go on without the woman to whom he had been married for 32 years.
When his resignation becomes effective next October, Gardner will give up leadership of a nine-campus public university system with a $6.4-billion budget, 20 Nobel laureates, and some of the most important research laboratories in the world. His $243,500 salary makes him the most highly paid state employee in California.
A man of immaculate diction, a keen observer of himself and those around him, Gardner is a most private public servant who spurned the UC presidential mansion for a private home that few associates have ever visited. In his first interview since his announcement Friday that he will retire next October, Gardner offered a stirring tribute to his wife.
“Libby was a highly intelligent, very practical, exceedingly well-organized, loving person who chose to devote her life principally to her family and to the two of us working together,” he said. “I am keenly aware there are people who have strong views about feminism, who will not find favor with some of the observations I make about her role. What I wish to emphasize is, that is the role she chose to play.”
Theirs was a quiet love story contained largely within the borders of a traditional marriage. He was the husband and father, the wage-earner and public figure. She was the wife and mother who raised four daughters but always managed to be at his side at the university’s numerous social and academic functions, a quiet and dignified hostess.
Married in 1958, they were strong Mormons whose religion provided a solid foundation in which there were never arguments about values, Gardner said. But religion alone did not make their marriage strong.
“I definitely think there was something extraordinary about their marriage,” said Lisa Gardner, one of four daughters. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any marriage of my friends’ parents that was quite the same.”
A blonde, blue-eyed former dental hygienist who inherited what Gardner described as a “Swiss practicality,” Elizabeth Fuhriman Gardner was the sort of woman who cut maxims out of newspapers and put them on the refrigerator for her family to live by.
During her husband’s 10-year tenure as president of the University of Utah, she quietly disagreed with the Mormon Church’s position opposing the equal rights amendment that would have assured women equality, he said. But, he said, she expressed her views only if asked--even her daughter Lisa said she never knew her mother held that view.
Before coming to California in 1983, Gardner said, they discussed the UC job and decided to take it on “together, as a partnership.” He made clear to the Board of Regents that he would spend Sundays with his wife and four daughters.
At night, as he dried the dishes that his wife washed, David Gardner would talk to her about the issues facing him, and she would offer common-sense advice on everything from expanding the university system to divestiture of financial interests in South Africa.
A modest woman who sometimes impressed strangers as proper to the point of primness, Libby Gardner carried out the duties commonly expected of the wife of a university president--greeting dignitaries, hosting social events, giving tours.
“Her life was rather consistent with the role played by large numbers of women in the American university and college--for which almost no consideration is given, to which very little attention is paid, and for which very little credit is afforded,” Gardner said.
Yet, he stressed, his wife’s rapport with spouses of dignitaries and donors made a concrete difference to the university. When Libby struck up a warm relationship with spouses of key donors to a medical center, he said, contributions increased.
In 1987, when Libby Gardner and the spouses of the chancellors of the nine UC campuses asked for such things as campus library cards, insurance when they traveled with their husbands to required events, and telephone listings in the campus phone book, Gardner encouraged the UC Board of regents to comply and bestow titles as well. Libby Gardner became “associate of the president.”
A year ago this month, his associate was found to have bone cancer. When told she was going to die of complications, she spent her final days counseling her husband and children on how to cope with their loss.
When she died Feb. 5, UC publicists issued an obituary calling Libby his “wife.” Gardner reworded the obituary, referring to himself as “her husband.” “All of our life, I was the one who was out front,” he said. “This time, I wanted to turn it around.”
At her funeral, Gardner had students sing a song written by Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar.
Did you ever know that you’re my hero?
Everything I would like to be.
I could fly higher than an eagle,
But you were the wind beneath my wings.
Fighting an impulse to quit, Gardner returned to work a week after she died. The university was raising fees 40% and facing severe budget problems. When it came to less critical problems, he found himself drifting off, reaching to pick up the telephone to call her.
Her death did not shake his belief in the eternal nature of the soul or his adherence to Mormon belief that they eventually will be reunited. But he couldn’t understand why she had died and others who gave nothing back to society lived on. He lost patience with well-meaning people who said God needed her elsewhere.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, her four daughters could have used her here,’ ” Gardner said.
He felt himself coming alive again on a lengthy trip to Asia--only to be crushed when he returned to an empty home. “I opened up the door to my house and walked into an empty house (and) the reality of it just hit me like a sledgehammer,” he said.
Every ceremony, every football game and campus concert they had enjoyed together became a burden alone. When Gardner waited for the arrival of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in September, he stood alone at the head of the driveway, in a familiar place without his partner at his side.
While he could feel himself slowly healing, every aspect of his job only reminded him of his loss. He didn’t know what he would do next, only that it had to be something new.
“Some of the spark is out of it, you see,” he said, clearing his throat in an office decorated in UC blue. “When you’ve done it as a team, a partnership, and that partnership dissolves, it’s not the same as it was, and never will be.”
