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The Promises and Compromises of the University of California

I grew up in a neighborhood manufactured by the University of California, Irvine. It felt like a utopia for academics—until the university forsook its mission of serving the public.

Crews clean up the area of a pro-Palestinian encampment at UC Irvine in Irvine, CA on Thursday, May 16, 2024.

My mother likes to tell a story about one of her first experiences in Irvine. Our family had just moved from a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan—my brother and I, ages 2 and 5, had shared an alcove—to a stucco house with a brilliant green lawn and a real backyard. It was a perfect day, as most days in Southern California are: cloudless and seemingly untroubled. She ventured out for groceries with us, still unaccustomed to the luxury of doing errands by car. As the cashier packed up my mother’s purchases, he volunteered to carry them out to the parking lot for her. He didn’t realize that he was speaking to a hardened New Yorker. This condescending guy thinks I need help? my mother thought. Later, as she was herding us back to the car, laden with plastic bags, it occurred to her that maybe he really was just being friendly—that such earnest displays of generosity were to be expected in our strange new home. If we were to fit in, we would have to dispose of our East Coast wiles and learn to live like proper Southern Californians: utterly assured of our supreme luck and bounty.

We hadn’t meant to end up on this side of the country. But my father, a scientist, had been offered a tenured position at the University of California, Irvine, one of the 10 campuses that make up one of the largest and most well-known public university systems in the country. It was an offer too good to pass up: a stable gig, with plush benefits for relocators. Even then, in the late 1990s, the academic job market was beginning to look dire. Young academics were steeling themselves for careers spent scrounging for low-paid work in high-cost cities. Irvine was remarkably expensive—filled with glittering sports cars and Xanadu-like mansions—but UCI would help offset the costs of living there. New professors were granted access to affordable housing in a neighborhood set up by the university in the low-slung foothills of Orange County, and there were strong public schools nearby. My parents had never thought they’d own a real home, but suddenly they had one—with a below-market-rate mortgage subsidized by the university, at that.

Irvine, a suburb of Los Angeles, was not like New Canaan or Scarsdale: the genteel, majority-white hamlets outside of New York City that my NPR-listening, electric car–driving parents pledged they’d never move to. UCI’s 15,000-student campus was home to thousands of first-generation students, many of them the children of immigrants and refugees who had settled in Orange County after World War II. Scattered around the campus were Chinese churches, Iranian restaurants, and Korean grocery stores. With its Brutalist buildings and cavernous expressways, Irvine had none of the bucolic charm of a New England college town. But it felt remarkably modern and heterogeneous, almost uncannily so—as if parts of the “It’s A Small World” attraction from nearby Disneyland had come to life.

For the first few years, we didn’t ask questions about the deal we’d accepted: whether the university could always be counted on for its largesse, say, or whether Irvine was truly the Benetton-esque utopia it appeared to be. We were Southern Californians now, after all. We were learning to “practice gratitude,” as the locals said, and there was much to be grateful for. Irvine was a community dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge in a country that seemed stubbornly opposed to it. Every street in our neighborhood was named for a famous thinker, and when we went on walks, my parents would point them out to me: Twain Street, Zola Court. We marveled about the Nobel Prize shortlisters whom we saw collecting newspapers from their driveways in bathrobes. Our next-door neighbors included physicists, deconstructionists, and a well-regarded mathematician named Abel Klein. (I sometimes spotted his son, Ezra—you might have heard of him—trooping home from the school bus.)

We lived in handsome Spanish-style houses, most of them nearly identical to one another (and which the UCI housing authority did not permit us to paint different colors). The university even paid for landscapers to mow our lawns and trim our hedges. I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what a university was or what it did, but I was already developing a sense of loyalty to this institution for all it had given my family, and for all it seemed to represent: security, progress, the triumph of intellectualism. If there was something disquieting about this Levittown for the scholarly set, it hadn’t yet registered to me.

Irvine felt manufactured because it was: It had been planned around the university, instead of the other way around. In the early 1960s, the state acquired a tranche of land from the affluent Irvine family, whose 100,000-acre ranch, studded with citrus groves, ran from the Pacific Ocean to the inland mountains of Riverside County. The idea was to build a new campus for the rapidly expanding UC system—sometimes referred to by its wonkish, tongue-tripping sobriquet, the “multiversity.” When UCI opened in 1964, the architect tasked with its design, William Pereira, was hard at work on a “city of intellect,” as he called it, to complement the new campus. In later years, Irvine would become one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country, and thanks to its architect’s master-planning, an astonishingly pristine, orderly city—devoid of the urban sprawl that Pereira, a former Hollywood art director, found unsightly. None of this would have been possible without the state’s investment in higher education for the masses.

Almost exactly 100 years before Irvine was constructed, a group of New England Congregationalists who had settled in Northern California during the Gold Rush founded the college that later became known as UC Berkeley. As the journalist and historian Miriam Pawel writes in her sprawling history of the UC system, California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California, most of Berkeley’s founders were Yale graduates, but they considered themselves converts to the rugged manifest-destiny lifestyle. They weren’t interested in replicating the clubbiness of the Ivy League out West, but in seizing on a pioneer ethos of reinvention. In 1868, they volunteered their fledgling school to become California’s designated land-grant university under the Morrill Act, which provided federal funding for new state colleges that would serve the nation’s growing working class. (The secession of the Southern states had provided a window of opportunity to force through such patently progressive legislation.)

These early leaders made their aims clear: to mold an educated elite in the state of California. Berkeley would not be a vocational school, or focus solely on agriculture and mining,........

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