CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : THE IRVINE EXPERIMENT : ORANGE COUNTY AND UCI: A MARRIAGE NOT EXACTLY MADE IN HEAVEN

Shortly after an eminent educator named James March was recruited in 1964 from Carnegie Tech to become UC Irvine’s first dean of social sciences, he celebrated his first Fourth of July in Orange County as was his custom: He flew the American flag in front of his house.

I had dropped by to see him that morning and told him: “If you fly that flag, everybody around here is going to assume you’re against the United Nations, in favor of impeaching Earl Warren and think that the fluoridation of public water supplies is a Commie plot.”

He didn’t believe me and left it flying. The next day, a neighborhood committee of members of the John Birch Society called on him to ask if he wanted to join the local chapter.

This is but one of dozens of similar incidents that greeted the impressive--and startled--corps of educators who were recruited to help launch UCI’s vision of itself as the “Harvard of the West.”

Orange County and UCI weren’t exactly a marriage made in heaven. A lot of unsuspecting educators who were regarded as moderates or even conservatives in their previous lives found when they arrived here that they were instantly suspect as left-wingers.

So were the students. A 1967 resolution of the board of governors of the United Republicans of California asserted that “a deliberate effort is being made to admit only liberally oriented students to Irvine.”

I remember a newly hired English professor, who had left a prestigious job at an Eastern university, coming into my office at UCI waving a copy of The Times. He had just read the account of a speech by Dennis Carpenter, then vice chairman of the Republican State Central Committee (later a state senator from Orange County), who said--among other things--that he would like to see a UCI “program of recruitment that would hire young, shaven, all-American types to teach the kids something instead of trying to influence them politically.”

This new professor was middle-aged, bearded and politically liberal. He was also one of the best in his field. I remember the panic in his eyes that morning as he faced the cold reality that he had sold his home in the East. His name escapes me because he didn’t stay the route, as so many of us did.

I joined UCI in 1966 as a lecturer in the English department and spent 21 years teaching there. From close up, it strikes me that in its brief life, UCI has already gone through five rather distinct stages: euphoria, disillusionment, activism, apathy and technocracy. I have a feeling the latter is going to be around for a long, long time.

The euphoric stage lasted until about a year after UCI accepted its first students. Those were the years when we all went out and watched the campus literally grow out of the brown hills of the Irvine Ranch.

It was an exciting time, a whole new element of great promise introduced into what had been for so many years an agrarian society. And at the same time the buildings were going up, human resources were being recruited to write on a brand-new academic slate--a challenging prospect that seduced some potent academicians into coming to this new and unproved school.

UCI and Orange County were able to cohabit briefly in a superficial sort of harmony. The good citizens were mildly upset over the irreverent selection of an anteater as a mascot, but things were relatively calm until the San Francisco Mime Troupe arrived on campus for a performance in the spring of 1966.

Then, quicker than you could say “criminal communist conspiracy,” the UCI-Orange County honeymoon was over--and disillusionment set in. The Mime Troupe’s performance was called “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,” and UCI instantly was accused by the political right in Orange County of providing a platform for a passel of subversives.

This was Chancellor Dan Aldrich’s baptism of fire, and he simply refused to cave in to the pressures on him to cancel the Mime Troupe performance. It also established Aldrich in the years to come as possibly the only administrator in the UC system who could have maintained bridges between the Orange County community and the UCI student body

during the activism of the 1960s and early ‘70s. He refused to allow the Neanderthals on either end of the political spectrum to polarize the community and the campus to a point beyond repair.

The Mime Troupe performed, and Orange County was outraged--albeit typically most of the outrage came from people who hadn’t seen the show.

During the activist years that followed--when campuses all over the nation were in ferment--UCI functioned, uneasily and occasionally violently, under the steady-as-you-go hand of Aldrich. Speakers who were barred from other campuses-- including representatives of both the hard right and the hard left--spoke at UCI.

Meanwhile, the Orange County Coordinating Republican Assembly passed a resolution calling for Aldrich’s ouster because he “supported, permitted and protected activities of left-wing organizations on the UCI campus.” As perhaps a harbinger of 1988, the American Civil Liberties Union was cited as a “left-wing organization.”

Those of us on the UCI faculty were catching it from two directions during the activist period: the Orange County political reactionaries who were riding high, and some of the more excessive of the activist students on campus. It wasn’t very well understood then--nor is it now--that radical students had more trouble with liberals on the faculty who didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries than with the conservatives with whom they could shout and rail and call names and then go away mutually satisfied.I remember a good many sessions in my campus office in which I told radical students from my classes that they were narcissists who were a hell of a lot more interested in the choreography of action than in producing real social change. But whatever their motivation--and there were plenty whose zeal was strictly high-minded--they were exciting and did help accomplish some important social changes: the rejection of Lyndon Johnson, the 18-year-old vote, the ultimate cashiering of the Vietnam war, for starters. Contrasted with the present pale lot, I enjoyed them.

They probably look better in retrospect than they did at the time, because the students who followed them swung almost to the opposite end of the spectrum. At least the narcissism of the activists was directed toward social change; with this new group, the major--sometimes the total--concern was with individual well-being. I allowed students to select their own writing topics, and almost overnight, the topics changed from the environment and civil rights and social reform to investments, jobs and how-I-found-God.

Signs of the change were all over the campus. I knew we were in trouble when there was a massive resurgence of fraternities and sororities--heretofore moribund--at UCI in the mid-1970s. Instead of demonstrating against Watergate, UCI students built the world’s largest ice cream sundae (4,584 pounds of ice cream) in the plaza that a few years earlier housed political rallies. Shortly afterward, when a call came from the few surviving activists for a demonstration against the on-campus sale of Coors Beer (for its alleged racist personnel policies), four people showed up--and the apathetic period was in full swing.

State politicians helped it along. Govs. Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown (whose father had been so instrumental in building the superb UC system) squeezed the university economically, and UCI began to lose some of its finest faculty. Plans to make UCI the equal of UCLA and Berkeley were jettisoned. The Harvard of the West became a dim memory.

That was probably UCI’s most difficult stage, although it seemed to please the local citizens. We weren’t rocking many boats. Several of my activist students came back to visit during this period, and as a result, I wrote a nostalgic essay for Harper’s called “Apathy on the Campus.” It produced an avalanche of letters--mostly angry--from students all over the country. One--not untypical--called me “an over-age liberal living vicariously through recollections of his students’ burning banks.” So much for the apathetic period.

Somewhere in the early 1980s, Orange County’s high-technology industries, which had been flirting for years with UCI, decided to escalate the relationship into a full-time affair, and UCI hasn’t been the same since. Nor is it likely to be for some years to come.

Dan Aldrich, who had a warm relationship with local industry but never climbed into bed with it, retired. Jack Peltason, who had been around at the beginning of UCI, returned to lead this campus to new and unexpected heights with enormous infusions of corporate money and private gifts and grants, based in large part on UCI’s potential contributions to high technology.

I was winding down at UCI when all of this started to happen, and I watched it almost as if I were outside the whole operation. Enrollment went up dramatically, and classrooms were overcrowded. It was impossible to walk anywhere on campus without stumbling over construction equipment. New money made it possible to lure faculty stars away from other campuses.

But somehow it all--at least to me--had the impersonal feeling of an aircraft factory that had just landed a big contract and knew its future was secure for a long time to come. The rough edges of intellectual ferment were missing.

Today, it seems to me, UCI is in close consonance with the community in which it has finally settled comfortably. There are still some occasional academic high jinks that unsettle the community, but instead of being front and center, they are lost in the much larger picture of burgeoning technocracy.

If all of this is mildly distressing to an “over-age liberal,” blame it on age and the times--and a student body that seems to me mostly inert to social issues.

When I asked students in two of my classes what they were feeling after our invasion of Grenada in 1983, about half of them didn’t even know the invasion had taken place. I guess that’s when I first realized I should be thinking about retirement. I don’t expect to be around to watch it when--and if--the pendulum starts to swing back.