UC Irvine’s Daniel Aldrich Jr. Dies

Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., founding chancellor of UC Irvine and the only person in the University of California’s history to head three of the system’s campuses, died this morning at UCI Medical Center after a long battle with cancer. He was 71.

Aldrich, an athletic man with a strong, resonant voice, built UCI literally from the ground up, having picked the site for the campus in December, 1961. He is credited with making that new campus, which now has 16,000 students, one of the nation’s premier research institutions by the time he retired 22 years later.

In addition to heading the Irvine campus from its planning phases in 1962 to his retirement in 1984, Aldrich served as interim chancellor of UC Riverside in 1984-85 and interim chancellor of UC Santa Barbara in 1986-87 when the campus was struggling to recover from a financial scandal.

Aldrich’s 22-year tenure as head of UC Irvine is the longest of any chancellor in the nine-campus University of California system.

UC President David P. Gardner, borrowing a baseball term, had often called Aldrich his “utility chancellor.”

Gardner also had praised Aldrich for “unimpeachable integrity” and for the “courage and dignity” with which Aldrich faced his battle against intestinal cancer.

The UC Board of Regents, in a formal resolution in 1985, praised Aldrich as “an institution in himself, a man whose values are as rock-ribbed and solid as the hills of his native New England.”

Funeral services have not been immediately announced. Survivors include his wife, Jean; three grown children, Daniel G. III, Elizabeth and Stuart, and seven grandchildren.

Aldrich’s death followed a 3-year fight against intestinal cancer. When the ailment was diagnosed in May, 1987, Aldrich, a fierce, lifelong sports competitor who stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall, said he did not intend to slow his active lifestyle. “One goes on,” he said.

When Aldrich retired in 1984, UC Irvine had emerged from being a little-known, fledgling campus to a nationally known institution honored for its research.

Campus historians have said that Aldrich’s task in building a new campus was complicated by the turbulent 1960s--a time of national unrest on college campuses because of the Vietnam War. At one point in the late 1960s, some students occupied a building on campus.

“My position was that as long as they were not being destructive or disrupting classes, so be it,” Aldrich recalled later. He said he was low-key about the incident and sought to avoid a campus police-student confrontation. After three days, Aldrich sent the protesters occupying the building a note, saying they would soon be in the official position of being disruptive and should disband. With no fanfare, the protesters dispersed.

Conservative Orange County--and historians have noted that the county was considerably more strait-laced in the 1960s than today--sometimes looked aghast at liberal activities on the new UCI campus. Aldrich said he was able to keep peace between community and campus because he had no trouble in identifying with Orange County.

”. . . I identified with these people,” he said. “It didn’t even strike me that I was coming into a conservative county. I fit in.”