Building UC Irvine

Before there were freeways leading to it, before the trees in Aldrich Park had grown over a person's head, before anyone knew what UC Irvine might become, the people who would help build it were already at work - arguing over street names, hauling equipment into half-finished labs and watching cowboys drive cattle past their office windows.

This year, UC Irvine celebrates its 60^th anniversary. To mark the milestone, four of the university's pioneers - neurobiologist James McGaugh, physicist William Parker, first-class alumna and administrator Barbara Davidson, and physician Thomas Cesario - reflect on what it meant to be present at the creation of an institution that now ranks among the nation's top public research universities.

'Like being a kid in a candy store'

James McGaugh arrived in 1964, lured from a tenured position at the University of Oregon by a phone call from Edward Steinhaus, the visionary founding dean of UC Irvine's School of Biological Sciences. Steinhaus wanted McGaugh to chair what would become the world's first academic department devoted entirely to the scientific study of the brain. It was an extraordinary offer - and the campus itself was extraordinary in a different way.

"Friends of mine would come, and they'd look and say, 'You came to this from the University of Oregon?'" McGaugh says.

His lab was housed in a temporary building at the corner of Jamboree Road and what is now Campus Drive. There was no Route 405, no Route 5. "I flew to LAX, got a helicopter and landed at a heliport on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Jamboree," he says.

McGaugh would go on to serve as dean of biological sciences, vice chancellor of academic affairs and executive vice chancellor. He also founded the world-renowned Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. But in those first heady months, the work felt more like adventure than institution-building. "That first year was like summer camp," McGaugh says. "It was like being a kid in a candy store."

'A real sense of campus community'

William Parker arrived three years later, in September 1967, as an assistant professor of physics. He remembers a campus defined by youth - in its people and its landscaping.

"It's a bit of an exaggeration, but I like to say that the trees in Aldrich Park and I were the same height," Parker says. The eucalyptus trees that now tower 50 feet high had barely cleared the ground. What Parker remembers most vividly, though, is not the physical campus but its social character.

"We had a functioning faculty club where at lunch I would have meals with faculty members from social sciences, humanities, arts, and, of course, physics and chemistry," he says. "There was a real sense of campus community and camaraderie around Aldrich Park that characterized those early days." In a physics department with far fewer than today's 50 faculty members, colleagues from across disciplines gathered to share ideas and conversation.

Parker would go on to help found University Hills - one of the nation's first on-campus housing communities for faculty and staff - and serve as vice chancellor for research and dean of graduate studies. But one morning in October 1995 stands out above all others. Driving down Turtle Rock Drive on his way to campus, Parker heard a radio announcement that astonished him: UC Irvine chemist F. Sherwood Rowland had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Then, in the very next moment, came another announcement: UC Irvine physicist Frederick Reines had won the Nobel Prize in physics.

"UC Irvine became the first public university to win two Nobel Prizes in two different fields in the same year," Parker says. "It was a great day for UC Irvine."

Back on campus, champagne corks struck the ceiling of the chancellor's office with such force as to create dimples - one for Reines, one for Rowland.

Another memory, more somber but no less powerful, came six years later. In September 2001, after the terrorist attacks back East, the campus held a candlelight vigil. Parker stood on a rock outcropping in the center of Aldrich Park and watched what seemed like a thousand students, faculty and staff circle it with candles.

"I couldn't help but think of the story that [founding Chancellor] Dan Aldrich and [campus architect] Bill Pereira once stood on that same rock, in the middle of a cattle ranch, and said they would build a great university there," he says. "Looking at that circle of light, I felt the university Dan imagined - a community dedicated to tolerance, peace and understanding - had been realized. I only wished he could have been there to see it."

'All we had was mud'

Barbara Davidson came even earlier - as a student. Her father had read about the new University of California campus in the newspaper and drove her down from their West Covina home to see it while she was still in high school. "There was basically nothing there," Davidson says. She enrolled in the founding class of 1965, majoring in English literature, and helped raise the flag before the university formally opened. A photograph from that day still circulates online.

Davidson met her future husband, Doug, at the campus Commons - he was working part time there, greeting students as the breakfast manager. "He said, 'Hello, ladies, how is your breakfast?'" she remembers with a laugh. They married in 1969 and have remained part of the Anteater family ever since.

After graduating, Davidson returned to work at UC Irvine, eventually rising to associate chancellor and chief of staff. She served under Chancellors Ralph Cicerone and Michael Drake and was awarded the UCI Medal upon her retirement, a rarity for a staff member.

Her clearest memory of the early campus? Mud. Lots of mud. "All we had was mud," Davidson says, recalling storms that left cars stranded in unpaved parking lots and the park itself a sodden mess. But she watched the campus grow - more students, more buildings, more programs - and today she's proud of how far it has come. "It's meeting its master plan," Davidson says. "Finally."

'A lot of sweat and anxiety went into it'

Thomas Cesario arrived in 1971 as a fellow and joined the medical school faculty the following year, four years before the UC system formally assumed control of the Orange County Medical Center. The hospital he encountered was unlike anything he had seen in his training at Boston City Hospital - and not in a flattering way.

"There was no air conditioning," Cesario says. "When I first walked in, I went into one of the rooms, and there was a cubic-foot block of ice on a bedpan with a fan behind it. And I said, 'What is that?' They said, 'That's air conditioning.'" The hospital also housed jail cells for those incarcerated at the nearby O.C. Jail who fell ill.

Cesario, who served as dean from 1995 to 2006 of what is now the School of Medicine, spent years working to bridge the divide between the medical school and the main campus - a tension rooted in the school's earliest days. The turning point, he said, came when Chancellor Laurel Wilkening made clear that the medical school was not going anywhere. "She recruited Sid Golub from UCLA as executive vice chancellor, which signaled that the campus and medical school would work together," Cesario says.

Those partnerships - with biological sciences, social ecology and, eventually, the business school - helped launch joint degree programs and a steady rise in stature, both on and off the campus. The new UCI Health - Irvine hospital, Cesario says, is the fulfillment of a dream that pioneers fought for across decades. "It was more than 50 years in the making," he says. "A lot of sweat and anxiety went into it, and now we finally have it."

Sixty years on, what unites these four founders is less nostalgia than amazement - at how much was built, how quickly and from how little. McGaugh perhaps put it best when describing the early students who flocked to a campus mostly still on paper: "We were the only department of this kind in the world. We attracted high-quality people from all over. Our international recognition grew very quickly."

From a helipad on Pacific Coast Highway to a university of nearly 37,000 students and an academic health system that boasts six hospitals, UC Irvine grew because people like McGaugh, Parker, Davidson and Cesario chose to believe in something that did not yet exist but over 60 years came into being.