Education Professor K. Patricia Cross has been appointed to the new David Pierpont Gardner Chair in Higher Education. Cross becomes the first professor to hold the position. The Chair was established by The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley to honor David Pierpont Gardner (`66), who retired as President of the University of California in 1992.
Under the terms set forth by the Regents, the Chair will rotate among disciplines and departments at the discretion of the Chancellor.
Cross is an internationally-known scholar of higher education, with an exceptional record of continuing accomplishments in the field. During a distinguished career of 40 years, the Berkeley researcher has broken new ground in many areas, involving research on lifelong learning, non-traditional students, and the open-door community college. Her most recent work on new assessment methods for college classrooms has strengthened the linkages between research and practice.
"I am deeply honored by the appointment to this new endowed chair at Berkeley," Cross said, "and most grateful for the support that it provides for my continuing work on the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education.
"My colleagues and I will be working on a book designed to help discipline-oriented college faculty members use their classrooms as laboratories for the study of learning as it takes place in the context of their own classrooms and disciplines. Our goal is to help teachers assess the impact of their teaching on students' learning."
Dr. Gardner, for whom the chair was named, also was a professor of higher education, and received his Ph.D. from Berkeley's Graduate School of Education in 1966. He served on the faculties at the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses, and at the University of Utah. For most of his distinguished career Gardner was associated with the University of California, holding a number of executive positions. From 1973 to 1983 he served as president of the University of Utah, before becoming the University of California's fifteenth president in 1983. *