David Pierpont Gardner photograph collection, 1970-1989

David Pierpont Gardner (b. 1933) was actively involved with President Reagan's Excellence in Education Commission. This commission was created in 1981 to study the decline in American schools and to design a viable alternative to what many felt was a cumbersome and ineffectual system. The prevailing wisdom was that America had lost her edge and much of her inability to compete in the global workforce was due to the lack of competent teaching, bloated budgets, and system-wide apathy. The results of the commission were in the report, A Nation at Risk, with which David Pierpont Gardner was intimately involved. He is the author of The California Oath Controversy (California, 1967) and coeditor of Higher Education and Government (1979). He published, Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President in 2005. David Pierpont Gardner received his B.S. from Brigham Young University in 1955, his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1959, and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1966. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the National Academy of Education, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Following his tenure as President at the University of Utah from 1973-1982, he became President of the University of California from 1983-1992. From 1993 to 1999, he was the president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. More recently, he served as the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust from 2000 to 2004. Now in his retirement, he remains an active supporter of education.