Bren Gives UCI $1.5 Million, Invites High Tech

Irvine Co. chairman Donald L. Bren on Tuesday announced his gift of $1.5 million to UC Irvine and the company’s permission to use part of the campus for high-technology businesses and other education-related commercial development.

The unusual arrangement will allow the university to commercially develop 2 million square feet of campus, which could generate millions of dollars each year. The endowment is intended to be used to bring top professors to the 23-year-old university.

“It is my hope that this endowment over time will place UCI in a position of tremendous and virtually unparalleled academic strength,” Bren said at a joint press conference with university officials in Newport Beach.

The key to the endowment is an agreement by the Irvine Co. to change restrictions on 510 acres it sold to UCI in 1964. That purchase agreement stipulated that no money-making enterprises could be located on UCI land. By changing those restrictions, UCI can now develop up to 2 million square feet of its campus “for almost any use except major retail.”

The campus is expected to use the space to bring in high-tech businesses. The commercial buildings can be situated anywhere on the 510 acres at the outer edge of the campus.

The inner part of the campus contains classrooms and dormitories. This part of the campus is on 1,000 acres that the Irvine Co. donated to the UC system in 1959 to entice the building of a UC campus in the county.

Irvine Co. officials said that when the development is completed, UCI will “conservatively get $5 million a year in income.” The money is to go into the new Donald Bren Endowment, which is to be started with Bren’s initial $1.5-million cash donation.

Paul West, a spokesman for the nine-campus UC system, with headquarters in Berkeley, said Tuesday that UCI’s ability to have money-making commercial buildings on its campus “is unique” to the system.

West noted that most of the UC campuses are crowded and have no room for money-making private buildings. He said that UC San Diego is discussing a possible “research park” on campus but has not yet developed it.

While many major public and private universities frequently have for-profit research parks next to their campuses, comparatively few have commercial enterprises on the campus itself.

UCI Chancellor Jack Peltason stressed that the businesses coming to UCI will be geared to academic pursuits.

In a letter thanking Bren, Peltason said: “Today you have given us the opportunity

to continue the momentum toward becoming one of the top research universities in the country by the beginning of the next century. Amending the restrictions on the development of UCI land, combined with your initial grant, will give this campus the competitive edge it needs to move to the front of the pack.”

The Irvine Co., the biggest landowner in the county and one of the biggest landowners in California, gets nothing in return for freeing up the UCI land, Peltason said.

“There is no quid pro quo agreement,” he said.

Ray Watson, vice chairman of the Irvine Co., said at the press conference that the land agreement actually puts UCI in competition with the Irvine Co. UCI may be able to attract some high-tech companies that the Irvine Co. could be seeking for the company’s new Spectrum development center in Irvine.

The newly amended land restrictions will allow UCI to get a share of income generated by any commercial company building on the Irvine campus. The amendments, however, forbid UCI from using the land for shopping centers, major department stores and discount stores. The amendments also forbid commercial structures taller than six stories on the UCI land.

Peltason said the most likely new developers on the UCI land would be high-tech industries seeking to be in a research-intensive area such as a university campus.

The new Bren Endowment Fund will eventually have so many millions from land-use income that several professors can be hired with the money, Peltason said. He said he hopes that UCI can hire its first Bren Fellow in about a year.