Founding Chancellor of UC Irvine Campus 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 Monday at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, following a prolonged battle with intestinal cancer. He was 71.

An athletic man with a strong, resonant voice, Aldrich started UC Irvine literally from the ground up. He picked the site for the campus in December, 1961. And he is credited with making the new campus, currently with an enrollment of about 16,000, into one of the nation’s premier research institutions.

In addition to heading the Irvine campus until 1984, Aldrich served as interim chancellor at UC Riverside and UC Santa Barbara. UC President David P. Gardner often called Aldrich his “utility chancellor.”

In a statement Monday, Gardner said that Aldrich “will be remembered above all by those of us who knew him well for his personal integrity, moral values, unimpeachable character and the dignity and courage with which he bore his illness the last several years.”

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

Clark Kerr, who was UC president from 1958 to 1967, on Monday described Aldrich as “one of the great and most successful builders of a new university campus.”

Jack Peltason, who worked with Aldrich during the early UC Irvine days and who succeeded him as chancellor in 1984, praised his friend’s courage in the face of a terminal illness. Said Peltason, “His whole life was an example, his last few years an inspiration.”

Peltason also said that Aldrich was “a man of courage, vision, commitment and kindness. His concern was always what was best for others. His memorial is all around us: it is UCI.”

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.”

Although he spent most of his adult years in California, Aldrich retained the accent of a New England Yankee. And he proudly said his roots remained in agriculture, where he began his academic career. “I am an aggie,” he said.

Aldrich had planned to retire in 1984, after stepping down as UC Irvine’s chief executive. But after the death that year of UC Riverside Chancellor Tomas Rivera, Gardner persuaded Aldrich to become interim chancellor at Riverside until a full-time administrator could be appointed.

Aldrich left the Riverside campus in July, 1985, but in July, 1986, Gardner again summoned him, this time to be interim chancellor at UC Santa Barbara. Aldrich took over the Santa Barbara campus following the resignation of Chancellor Robert A. Huttenback, who was accused of misusing UC funds. Huttenback was convicted of embezzlement and tax fraud in July, 1988.

After leaving UC Santa Barbara in June, 1987, Aldrich assumed the postion of chancellor emeritus at UC Irvine, maintaining an office on campus there. He and his wife, Jean, lived in Laguna Niguel.

Aldrich was born in Northwood, N.H., on July 12, 1918. He received his bachelor of science degree from the College of Agriculture at the University of Rhode Island in 1939. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Arizona in 1941, and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1943.

Aldrich took his first academic job in the UC system in 1943, becoming a junior chemist at the UC citrus experiment station at Riverside. Except for three years in the Army during World War II, Aldrich stayed at Riverside until 1958, when he was appointed as the UC system’s dean of agriculture, presiding over programs at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside and UCLA. He remained agriculture dean until 1962, when he was named chancellor of UC Irvine, which was then its planning stages. The campus did not open for classes until September, 1965.

In December, 1961, shortly before becoming chancellor, Aldrich and an internationally famous architect, the late William Pereira of Los Angeles, walked over the treeless hills of what was then part of the sprawling Irvine Ranch.

Pereira, in a 1984 memoir, recalled that Aldrich spotted a bowl-shaped area of land that had a rocky outcropping. Pereira said that Aldrich pointed to the rocks and said, “This should be the center.” The architect agreed, and he used a concentric circle design for the university campus, with the land that Aldrich pointed out serving as a park and the school’s geometric center.

When Aldrich left the campus in 1984, the UC Board of Regents named that central area Aldrich Park. Aldrich said the park had special meaning to him. It was, he said, a place “where those of us, in one capacity or another, have had occasion to come and to dream and to build.”

Private funeral services, with burial at sea as Aldrich requested, will be held on an undisclosed date, UC Irvine officials announced.

Survivors include his wife and three grown children, Daniel G. III of Santa Cruz, Stuart of San Diego, and Elizabeth Toomey of Irvine, and seven grandchildren.