UCI chancellor looks forward to university’s next 50 years

If UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman has his way, the next 50 years will mark significant growth for the university.

Gillman, who was officially installed as UCI’s sixth chancellor in March, spoke about the university’s future and recent achievements and controversy during the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce’s monthly Wake Up Newport breakfast Thursday.

Though Gillman said UCI is already well-regarded as a research university, with its focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, he said he hopes to further the work being done by students and professors to help leave a lasting impact on Orange County.

“We have a unique role to play,” he said. “The ongoing development of Orange County should be inextricably aligned with the development of its great research university.”

UCI is the county’s second-largest employer, behind Disneyland, and, with an annual operating budget of $2.4 billion and a swelling student population, it has already left an impression on the region’s economy, Gillman said.

As chancellor, he hopes to foster relationships with the business community to assist research endeavors and encourage businesses to hire UCI graduates, he said.

UCI was built 50 years ago on land that eventually became part of the city of Irvine. Placing the university in Orange County was deliberate, Gillman said.

“It was believed that if you create a great research university, then the rest of the area would thrive,” he said.

For more than a decade, UCI Medical Center in Orange has been ranked among the nation’s top hospitals. The university’s law school, which opened in 2009, ranked 30th on U.S. News & World Report’s list of the best law schools in the country.

The university also has given local school districts million-dollar research grants.

“The list of contributions in Orange County is endless,” Gillman said.

Gillman touched on increasing the 30,000-member student body in the next several years. He said he also plans to work with the rest of the universities in the UC system to make it easier for community college students to transfer to a four-year school.

One person who attended the meeting asked for Gillman’s thoughts about a group of student government leaders who voted in March to ban the display of all national flags, including the American flag, in an office on campus.

The executive cabinet of the student government quickly vetoed the measure, but not before the vote made national news and sparked outrage in much of the state.

At the time, Gillman called the short-lived ban “outrageous and indefensible.”

Gillman noted Thursday that the flag was never removed from the campus and “still flew proudly every day.”

He called the situation a beneficial learning experience.

“In the long run, we think [those conversations] are good for society,” he said.

[For the record, updated at 12:49 p.m. May 9: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that UCI’s annual budget is 2.4 million.]