Survivors of my war, World War II, who were burdened with the label of the Greatest Generation, are beginning to be consigned to the role of hero-in-waiting simply because we’re still around. Society hasn’t yet grasped our increasing longevity, so the role making is premature. And it is from this place that déjà vu takes over as we watch the modest campus protests today.
But hold on. Wondering anew why we didn’t allow the role model of Vietnam to keep us out of Iraq isn’t where I am headed with this.
I’d like to stay at UCI and offer up a human role model who had to learn on the job how to deal with campus protests when they were becoming lethal.
His name was Dan Aldrich, and he was the first and longest-serving chancellor of UCI. I was teaching there during his tenure, and for a decade I watched Aldrich keep his cool and tamp fires that threatened to become violent while he was being savaged from both ends of the political spectrum.
It is worth studying today, not just on college campuses but in Washington, D.C., as well.
When President Johnson helicoptered in to dedicate the UCI campus in 1964, the Vietnam War was escalating, Gov. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for a second term on a promise to “clean up the mess at the University of California,” and an editorial in the Santa Ana Register said “the last thing we want at Irvine is another Berkeley.”
Orange County and UCI were able to co-habit in a superficial sort of harmony for a year. The biggest controversy was over the selection of the anteater as the mascot.
Then the San Francisco Mime Troupe entered our lives, and Aldrich made it clear that he was his own man who would have to be reckoned with there.
