CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : THE IRVINE EXPERIMENT : UC IRVINE THE BUZZWORD IS ‘DESTINY’

Twenty-five years and 37,331 degrees since it was founded, the university appears poised for the big leagues. The aim, today as in 1965, is to rival UC Berkeley and Harvard. ‘The question is, will UCI achieve greatness? The opportunity is there.’

In the sunny, book-lined office of UC Irvine Chancellor Jack W. Peltason, a dozen distinguished academics gathered recently to honor one of their own.

It was an important, even a historic moment, but there was nothing stiff about it. Champagne flowed along with effusive toasts, and Peltason beamed like a coach whose underdog team had just run away with the championship.

UCI chemistry professor F. Sherwood (Sherry) Rowland, a founding faculty member, had received the Japan Prize for his research on the destruction of the Earth’s ozone shield. The prize included $400,000 in cash, enough loot to inspire enthusiastic chest-thumping, even if the award were not second in international status only to the Nobel Prize.

“Sherry Rowland’s work is significant to the whole world, and the world has recognized him,” Peltason proclaimed. “And that work took place at our university.”

UCI and UC Santa Cruz, both of which opened in 1965, are the newest universities in the 120-year-old University of California system, but it is UCI that is competing in many disciplines with hallowed Berkeley, UCLA and other top institutions across the country for the most prestigious prizes, elite professors and brightest students.

In recent years, UCI has grown in political muscle and brainpower with the additions of the Beckman Laser Institute, a medical research center, the western headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences and the Humanities Research Institute, a UC think-tank. UCI has also lured world-renowned scholars with above-scale salaries and, increasingly, has had to fend off outside bids for faculty members such as Rowland, who have done pioneering research at Irvine and now are celebrated themselves.

Always land-rich, UCI is beginning to bring in big bucks, too. Private donations reached a record $24 million in 1987-88, and research grants, the fuel that propels scholarly study beyond state-funded basics, totaled $61 million. The university, which employs 10,336 administrators, professors, clerks, groundskeepers and others, also pumped an estimated $544 million in personal income into the economy, with three-quarters of that spent in Orange County.

The momentum shows no signs of slowing. Twenty-five years and 37,331 degrees since UCI was founded, the university appears poised for the big leagues.

“I think UCI is one of the most exciting places in the world of higher education,” Peltason says. “We’re like a kid entering adolescence--we’re maturing. UCI is going to be good, and it is going to be big. The question is, will UCI achieve greatness? The opportunity is there.”

The aim, today as in 1965, is to rival UC Berkeley and Harvard University, and the buzzword is destiny . Some caution that striving to accomplish so much in so short a time may result in shortcuts in quality, but no one disputes the remarkable strides the newcomer already has made.

PLANS FOR A UC campus in East Los Angeles or Orange County began in the 1950s when soaring enrollment projections and a suburban building boom convinced the UC Board of Regents that Disneyland wouldn’t be surrounded by orange groves for long and that UCLA alone would not be able to serve the growing metropolis.

And so the search began. More than 20 sites were considered, then rejected, as communities competed for the university and the development it would bring. In March, 1959, the Regents selected 1,000 acres of gently rolling property on the Irvine Ranch because of its sweeping view of the Santa Ana basin, its location in the center of an urbanizing county and the planned web of freeways that would link it to metropolitan Los Angeles.

UC officials also saw a rare and exciting opportunity to nurture a new community around the campus in cooperation with the Irvine Co., the development firm that owned the more than 100,000 surrounding acres of Irvine Ranch land.

About the same time, a bitter two-year battle within the Irvine Co. was coming to a head. Joan Irvine Smith, then 26 and the only descendant of founder James Irvine II on the company’s board of directors, wanted to make the 1,000-acre tract a gift to UC but faced a wall of opposition from other board members. Exasperated, Smith took her campaign public. She called news conferences, wrote letters and spoke at rallies.

It worked. In December, 1959, the Irvine Co. agreed to donate the 1,000 acres selected by UC. The university’s landholdings were completed three years later when the Regents purchased from the Irvine Co. an additional 510 acres for $3.3 million.

Smith, who declined interviews pending the outcome of a suit she filed against the Irvine Co. after she was bought out in 1983, wrote in a 1977 account of the land fight, “I must admit in all candor my motivations were not entirely philanthropic.

“It took no crystal ball to see what the location of UCLA had done for (the development of) Westwood in Los Angeles. The value of the Irvine Ranch property would be greatly enhanced, and there would be great benefits both financially and intellectually for the entire surrounding community.”

Athalie Clark, Smith’s mother, recalled that “Joan was adamant, and she did a magnificent job. We all thought the university could do so much for the community. It was very much an agrarian community at the time.”

The university “gave an entirely different tone to the county,” says Clark, now in her 80s and active as a philanthropist and a member of the UCI Foundation Board of Overseers. “Twenty-five years ago, the future of UCI was unknown because it was a new campus. I don’t think anyone could have foretold the great impact it has had even outside the county.”

THE EARLY YEARS of the university were exciting and experimental for students, administrators and planners. Daniel G. Aldrich, dean of agriculture for the UC system, who was chosen to be UCI’s first chancellor in 1962, three years before the university opened, assembled the founding faculty and provided a vision that lasted until his retirement in 1984.

One of Aldrich’s first appointments was Peltason, who in 1964 was lured from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana to be vice chancellor of student affairs. Twenty years later, in September, 1984, Peltason succeeded Aldrich to become UCI’s second chancellor.

Now chancellor emeritus, Aldrich, 71, calls himself “the institutional memory.”

Aldrich saw a relationship between campus design and academic goals and, with architect William L. Pereira, set out to create “a sense of destiny, a focal point for the campus and . . . the feeling that (the Irvine campus) was part of a major institution.”

On the dry, sloping ranchland, Pereira, who also was the architect for the first village in what became the city of Irvine, carved concentric circles, with half a dozen boxy, modernistic buildings clustered around the campus ring. At the center, a 35-acre arboretum was planted with trees and shrubs from around the world. Now called Aldrich Park, it is the heart of UCI. The vigorous founding chancellor, who often can be found strolling there, never walks past a scrap of litter without stooping to pick it up.

Looking back to 1962, what did Aldrich expect UCI to become? “Exactly what it is,” he replies. What kinds of advances will occur in the next 25 years? “More of the same,” he says succinctly. “It all goes back to what we who came to Irvine were charged with building. UCI was a research university from the day we opened our doors. We did not begin as a two-year school that would one day become a four-year university. We offered Ph.D. programs on the day we started.”

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, while Berkeley and other campuses were torn by angry, destructive Vietnam War protests, Irvine was distinguished by relative calm. When Gov. Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency at Berkeley in May, 1969, and sent in the California National Guard, UCI students staged a peaceful boycott of classes. And when nine UCI students who traveled to Berkeley to observe and report on the conflict were arrested there, Aldrich used $900 from his own pocket to bail them out.

“We weren’t caught up with a whole mess of regulations, telling students, ‘You can’t do this; you can’t do that.’ There was an atmosphere of responsiveness,” Aldrich says. “And unlike a campus in an urban setting where a rally would move into city streets, and frustrated students would look for things to lash out against, there was nothing surrounding Irvine but fields. After walking a few miles across fields, the enthusiasm flags.”

A potentially serious clash between students and administrators at UCI occurred in February, 1969, when about 40 students staged a five-day sit-in in an English department writing lounge to protest the firing of three popular teachers. The students laid in for a siege with sleeping bags, peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and stacks of stereo records. They were “vexed,” according to a newspaper account of the time, to discover that a professor had taken the stylus out of the stereo in the lounge.

Even though the sit-in was more of a slumber party than a hostile takeover, some campus officials and community residents urged Aldrich to call police.

“These students were very intent on expressing their concerns, and I said, ‘So long as they are not obstructive or destructive, so be it,’ ” Aldrich says. But he told the student leader of the protesters that “‘the moment some faculty member says to me, ‘I’ve got to use the writing center for my class,’ you’ll be obstructing the business of the university. You’ll have to leave or you will be trespassing and you will be arrested.”

The standoff that Aldrich dreaded came four days into the protest, when a professor told the chancellor that his class was scheduled to meet in the lounge. Aldrich called the student leader, Mike Krisman, and told him he had to clear out in time for the Monday class.

“Over the weekend, I did a lot of second-guessing. I thought I had set myself up for a confrontation,” Aldrich recalls. “I thought on Monday I was going to have to go out there and arrest them and the whole thing was going to blow up.”

Then, late Saturday night, Aldrich got a call from Krisman. “He said, ‘Chancellor, we’ll be out.’ And the next day, they were. They cleaned up the place and had it all spic and span.”

Violence did visit UCI during the Vietnam era--when an arson fire gutted a campus Bank of America branch in October, 1970. Revolutionary slogans had been painted on the building, but the arsonist was never caught, so authorities were unable to prove who was responsible.

Characteristically, Aldrich said, UCI students reacted in a positive way. Dozens came to the bank site after the fire to help board up the building and clear away debris.

COMPARED WITH THE political involvement of the Vietnam era, the late 1970s and early ‘80s were marked by a quiet, internal focus. Students at UCI and around the country were interested in career paths, and the university’s energies returned to its academic and research roots. Student activism meant adding a video-game contest to the annual “Nerd Week” festivities in 1980 and celebrating the UCI water polo team’s first National Collegiate Athletic Assn. championship the following year.

Faced in 1978 with allowing the struggling engineering program to languish or making the commitment necessary for it to grow, UCI officials concluded that a great university needs strong professional programs. The result: a commitment of new funds and a 30% increase in the engineering faculty during a single school year, 1978-79.

The university’s efforts to solicit private donations began to pay off when, in 1981, the Marilyn and Richard Hausman Chair of Ophthalmology, UCI’s first endowed chair, was established with a $250,000 gift.

In 1983, Rowland released his findings that showed that chlorofluorocarbons, a substance that causes the breakdown of the ozone, had tripled in the earth’s atmosphere in 10 years.

And UCI’s research partnership with private industry was launched that same year, when the Nelson Research & Development Co. agreed to build offices and laboratories on campus that would be shared with medical school researchers.

Also in 1983, UCI gave up its longstanding plans to build a research hospital on campus. UC Regents killed the plan because of fierce opposition from community leaders who backed the proposed Irvine Medical Center (now under construction). Aldrich bowed to the Regents, but UCI Medical School Dean Stanley van den Noort did not, leading to a split that resulted in Van den Noort’s replacement as dean in 1985.

UCI remained an enclave of liberal thought in Republican-dominated Orange County. It was one of several sites under consideration for Richard M. Nixon’s presidential library until spring, 1983, when the Academic Senate voted to accept the archives only if the former President would relinquish all claims to control of materials displayed there. The Nixon Archives Foundation then scratched UCI off its list and later found a home in Yorba Linda, Nixon’s birthplace.

Such independence continues today, with UCI faculty members among the most vociferous community opponents to the planned San Joaquin Hills toll road, which would stretch between the Costa Mesa Freeway and San Juan Capistrano, running parallel to the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways. UCI administrators, however, strongly favor construction of the county’s first toll road, which would make the university’s undeveloped acreage easily accessible and commercially valuable. At issue is the preservation of the fragile wildlife environment.

RAY WATSON, vice chairman of the Irvine Co., has watched the university, city and company grow together and, on some issues, grow apart since he came to Orange County in 1960. In actions such as the Nixon Library vote and the faculty opposition to the toll road plan, UCI has influenced thought in Irvine and throughout the county, he says.

“The university was at first the stimulus but ultimately the conscience of the community,” Watson says. “Historically, universities have walls around them, figuratively, and professors like to think that it is more important to discuss the problems of the world than to participate in the community. But there has always been an interrelationship with UCI and the community.”

Watson, now 62, accepted a job as the Irvine Co.’s first architectural planner in 1960 because he was intrigued by the chance to design a city in cooperation with a new university. He set up his shop on the first floor of the old Irvine family home, and Aldrich worked upstairs in temporary university offices.

“We worked together, trying to figure out how this great university and this town could reinforce each other,” Watson says. “We had a lot of expectations that the campus would be something special. The university was the glue that held together a very special group of men and women during those early days.”

The relationship among the Irvine Co., the university and the city of Irvine, incorporated in 1971, has shifted with the interests of each partner. Watson likens the relationship to a stool, with all the partners thrown out of kilter if one leg grows longer and stronger than the others.

“For that stool to be stabilized, all the legs have to be the same length,” Watson said.

The stool teetered precariously in the late 1970s when UC Regents considered taking the company to court over a 15-year-old contract that binds the parties together to this day. The Regents challenged a deed restriction prohibiting commercial development on the 510 acres purchased from the Irvine Co. in 1964, arguing that times--and Orange County land values--had dramatically changed. Legal proceedings were never pursued, and when Donald Bren bought the company in 1983, negotiations were renewed.

Bren and Peltason finally reached an agreement last summer: UCI will be permitted to develop 2 million square feet of office space on the property, clearing the way for its long-planned research park, and all lease profits will be used fund a special endowment, the Bren Fellows. Bren, who has contributed millions to UCI for projects including the Bren Events Center, also donated $1 million to begin the endowment.

Peltason has called the agreement “a clarification” of the original deed terms; Watson refers to it as limited permission for the university “to compete with the Irvine Co. in the real estate business.”

The city of Irvine also has battled with the patriarchal company over development proposals, but has maintained a generally friendly relationship with UCI, according to Mayor Larry Agran. Growing pains--usually related to parking shortages and traffic excesses--have caused occasional flare-ups, but the city and university have more often worked in partnership.

The Irvine Theater, a 750-seat showplace now under construction on a 2.3-acre site donated by UCI, is perhaps the best example of this cooperation. Plans for the theater, originally proposed more than 15 years ago, nearly fell through late last year when the low bid came in at $17.6 million, more than $5 million over budget estimates. UCI, one of the three partners in the construction, kicked in an additional $1.8 million and the city and the Irvine Theater Operating Co. raised the remaining $3.6 million.

When the first shovelful of earth for the theater was turned in March, it was a triumph for university and community supporters.

“We have come a long way,” Peltason said at the ground-breaking ceremony. “We have just a little bit more to go. And then it will be opening night.”

Agran, who supported the theater project, says he would like to draw on the energies and intellect of the university in future projects.

“Our relationship has been strengthened because we need each other to accomplish mutual goals,” he says. “Our challenge now is to involve the engineers, the social scientists, those who are knowledgeable about air pollution or toxins in the environment in the urban problems we face. We need to involve that intellect in the day-to-day life of the city.” Irvine residents feel great pride that theirs is a university town, Agran says. “I think without UCI, Irvine would be largely indistinguishable from the other suburban municipalities along the freeways to San Diego.”

DEVELOPING THOSE community ties is part of UCI’s maturation and a priority for the chancellor. Peltason, 65, who spent a decade as chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and started his academic career as a political science instructor at the University of Missouri, uses those communities as models.

“I’d like to see UCI and Irvine become like a Midwestern university town,” he said. “An Ann Arbor, a Champaign-Urbana, a Columbia, Mo. Those were agricultural centers that gave rise to universities, and there is community support and interaction that goes back for years and years. We’re still young, but we’re getting there.”

Peltason’s overtures to the community have taken many forms. He formed the Chancellor’s Club, a circle of wealthy and influential county residents who offer advice and bring other potential donors into the fold, and he has launched community-support groups to strengthen university ties with citizens. The chancellor has also encouraged university officials to participate in Irvine affairs, take appointive posts and run for local office.

The emphasis on private donations has paid off. The university’s fund-raising office, headed by Vice Chancellor John Miltner, brought in a record $24 million last year and has begun an ambitious five-year capital campaign to raise another $195 million.

One prominent professor, who once was skeptical of the power push, is now a believer.

“Jack is doing more on community outreach and touching bases with the ruling elite of Orange County,” says the professor, who has held leadership roles at UCI for more than 20 years. “He is doing very well at that, and some who didn’t see the need, including me, have become convinced that it is very useful for the university. It is bringing in enormous amounts of money.”

Peltason also has presided over UCI’s entrance into the high-stakes competition for star scholars from around the world. In recent years, the university has recruited literary critic J. Hillis Miller from Yale University, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala from UC Davis and French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida, who travels to UCI from Paris to teach one quarter each year.

Next on the chancellor’s recruiting list are top graduate students, the next generation of university professors and undergraduate honors students.

“The real future of the university is in people,” Peltason says. “One of my most important jobs is bringing the best, smartest people to UCI and supporting the ones we’ve already got.”

Peltason, who is expected to retire in 1991, is the bridge to that future. And the next century is almost tangible at UCI, where 30 buildings are under construction and student enrollment is expected to nearly double, from 15,000 to 27,000 by the year 2005. In a few years, the direction for the coming quarter century will be set.

The next boom is inevitable. The challenge for UCI is to rise in quality as it swells in size.