The Bell Curve

From the Daily Pilot – UC IRVINE, NEWPORT BEACH – Thursday, February 7, 2002
By Joseph N. Bell

Making UCI more public

Chancellor Ralph Cicerone arrived at UC Irvine's first baseball game in 10 years a half-hour early because he and Athletic Director Dan Guerrero were scheduled jointly to throw out the first two pitches of a new season and the chancellor wanted to work out the kinks in his arm. That's when Cicerone discovered he'd forgotten his baseball glove. So he and Guerrero played barehanded catch with a hardball behind the stands before the game. It worked. The chancellor threw a perfect strike. But he paid a price. His hands were bruised and sore the next morning.

Cicerone also threw from the mound rather than fudging closer to the plate. And he stayed to the end of a game that dragged on for almost five hours in arctic weather. All of this seems to symbolize rather well the determination of his UCI administration to gear up to the new and growing prestige of a campus that U.S. News and World Report ranks among the top 10 public universities in the United States. UCI also stands in the same rarefied company in the total number of applicants for admission last year.

And part of that gearing up, Cicerone told me in an interview at his office last week, is to seek a stronger connection with the community in which UCI lives. I can get behind that. Even though I had a small part in UCI's growth as a teacher there for two decades, I can certainly be a lot more neighborly. "Look around our campus tonight," he said.

"Princeton is playing volleyball and UCLA is playing baseball here. I don't know how many lectures and other activities open to the public are going on tonight. There are our extension courses, which are a real resource. Besides our performing arts, exciting activities are taking place in engineering and computer science. On any day of the week, top people from all over the world are giving special lectures on our campus.

"But I still hear from too many local people saying, 'I didn't know that was happening.' Martin Luther King's daughter spoke here last week, for example–a dynamic, spiritual and dramatic stage presence. I think more people would have been on hand to hear her if we had publicized it better. We haven't done a good enough job of this or of making it easy for community people to come to activities on the campus. We're working hard at both of these things now."

He ticked off a number of examples, starting with his satisfaction that the Pilot is now covering the UCI campus. Facilities at the school of the arts are being upgraded around a newly designed plaza. Parking capacity is being steadily enlarged. The university's CEO Roundtable–comprising a group of Orange County corporate leaders dedicated to building bridges to the community–is setting the tone for an increasing number of community volunteers involved in campus activities. The new baseball stadium will soon be enlarged so it will be suitable for NCAA playoff games. There is more. Much more. But the biggest challenge is getting the word out to UCI's neighbors.

And, to that end, efforts are underway to create a master calendar that can be assembled well enough ahead to permit planning and will provide daily information on campus activities. The calendar would be offered to newspapers, posted on the university's Web site, and sent out to campus mailing lists. On a more modest scale, a new electronic sign on campus, paid for by students, is putting up messages 24 hours a day describing campus activities.

Chancellor Cicerone–an internationally acclaimed atmospheric scientist–is sympathetic to interscholastic athletics and admits to feeling some pressure about adding a Division I football team now that UCI is in the big time in so many other ways. He explained to me in detail the economic trade-offs that make it impossible for him to support such a move.

Then he added: "Our athletic programs are built on student athletes, and I think we're doing that so far. For example, three of our basketball players are on the dean's list, and a fourth is very close. But the only way to get the money to start a football program is through television, and it requires a winning team to get on TV. Big money makes it very difficult to run a clean program and have real students on the team."

But his enthusiasm for what is taking place at UCI these days is boundless. So is his desire to involve the campus with its neighbors. He talked with special satisfaction about UCI's outreach programs to local students that range from a professor who plays Saturday morning math games with gifted school kids to the support faculty members offer to public school students in the arts.

Like Dan Aldrich, UCI's first chancellor, Cicerone assiduously picks up trash he encounters on the campus because he feels strongly that "the beauty of the campus is vital."

That beauty is just one of the many reasons UCI's neighbors should take a closer look at how we can share in the depth and breadth of its phenomenal growth.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.