Barbara Gardner; Led USC Urban Program

Barbara Seaver Gardner, retired director of the USC Office of Urban Affairs who put college students to work helping disadvantaged youths, has died of lung cancer. She was 68.

Mrs. Gardner died Friday at her Berkeley home, where she moved after her retirement in 1990, USC announced late Wednesday.

In 1985, she created the Los Angeles Youth Book, which was a guide to help others start, strengthen or expand low-cost and free programs for children.

Printed with USC funds and donations, the book was given free to anybody who could prove he or she had donated at least $10 to a youth charity.

“We did this book because the government is cutting back on money for children and the community has to do more things by itself,” she told The Times when the guide was published. “There’s never been a book like this before.

“This was written not just for youth program directors, but for churches, for givers who want to know where to make cost-effective contributions, for civic and fraternity groups and for religious organizations.”

The project was one of her many innovative efforts to put students into the community to assist youths while earning college credit.

In 1972, she founded USC’s Joint Educational Project, considered the oldest and largest service-learning program in the country. The program has put about 35,000 undergraduates into neighborhood projects since she started it, and continues to place 1,400 students a year in community schools and agencies to teach, tutor, translate and counsel.

Mrs. Gardner left the project in 1980 to become head of Urban Affairs, where she was a driving force behind the development of USC’s civic and community relations movement. She also was a co-founder of USC Women in Management.

At her retirement, Mrs. Gardner was saluted by the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Dean Gerald Segal as “a forceful woman, a dynamic person, a maverick. As a university, we owe her a considerable debt.”

The Pasadena Guidance Clinics gave her its Silver Achievement award in 1985 for her work with community youth.

A Los Angeles native, Mrs. Gardner was the only woman to get a degree in civil engineering from Stanford University in 1946. Denied admission to Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, then for men only, she went to Europe and became an economic adviser to the Marshall Plan.

She later earned a master’s degree and doctorate in economics at UCLA and taught there before moving to USC in 1969.

Mrs. Gardner is survived by four children, Stephen, Jeffrey, Leigh and Florence; two sisters, Johnnie McAlister and Mary Wade; a brother, Richard Seaver, and six grandchildren.

The family asked that any donations be made to the Joint Educational Project, USC, Los Angles, Calif. 90089-0471; to SHARE Foundation, P.O. Box 192825, San Francisco, Calif. 94119, or to the Berkeley Public Education Foundation, 2841 Russell St., Berkeley, Calif.