40 Fun Facts About UC Irvine

Which animal did UC Irvine students vote in as their mascot in 1965, beating eagles, unicorns and seahawks?

Anteater won the November 1965 student ballot, with 'None of these' the runner-up. Campus administrators at first thought the choice too undignified.

For what price did the Irvine Company sell 1,000 acres of land for the UC Irvine campus in 1960?

One dollar changed hands because company policy barred donating property to a public body, so the sale was a gift in all but name.

Which US president dedicated the UC Irvine campus site before a crowd of about 15,000, over a year before classes began?

Lyndon B. Johnson spoke on what was then open farmland, more than a year before the first 1,589 students arrived in October 1965.

UC Irvine's business school is named for Paul Merage, who made his fortune from which frozen snack?

Hot Pockets came from Chef America, the company Merage co-founded and sold to Nestlé for $2.6 billion in 2002. Three years later he and his wife gave the school $30 million.

UC Irvine residence halls named Rivendell, Mirkwood and Isengard come from which author's fantasy world?

J. R. R. Tolkien supplied every name in the Middle Earth housing complex, where residents eat at Brandywine and the towers added in 2019 are called Telperion and Laurelin.

UC Irvine's campus was a location for a 1972 film set in the future about an uprising of which animals?

Apes rise against their human masters in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film of the series, which was shot mostly in Century City in Los Angeles.

For his UC Irvine master's thesis, performance artist Chris Burden spent five days shut inside what?

A locker held Burden for the 1971 thesis work he called Five Day Locker Piece. The same year he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle for another performance.

UC Irvine's founding class voted in 1965 against having a team in which popular college sport?

Football was voted down by the first class and never arrived, yet the Los Angeles Rams chose the campus for their 2016 training camp.

UC Irvine chemist F. Sherwood Rowland won a 1995 Nobel Prize for showing that CFC gases damage what?

The ozone layer was at risk, Rowland and his postdoctoral colleague Mario Molina found at Irvine in 1974. The pair shared the chemistry prize 21 years later.

In 2007 a stuffed toy of UC Irvine's mascot made which journey with researcher Tracy Caldwell?

A flight into orbit: the toy rode Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-118 with Caldwell, who had earlier studied atmospheric chemistry at UC Irvine.

UC Irvine's battle cry 'Zot!' copies a sound from which Johnny Hart newspaper comic strip?

B.C. is Hart's strip about cavemen, and the cry it inspired gave its name to the campus email service, Zotmail, and to the Zot 'n Go convenience stores.

UC Irvine's core campus, built around a central park, is laid out in roughly which shape?

A circle was the plan: buildings line the Ring Mall around Aldrich Park, with undergraduate schools placed nearer the center than graduate schools.

UC Irvine is older than the city of Irvine; both take their name from landowner James Irvine's vast what?

Ranch country surrounded the university when it opened in 1965, and the city of Irvine that grew up beside it was not incorporated until 1971.

In 2016 UC Irvine became the first US public university to launch an official program in what?

Esports got a varsity program and its own campus arena, fitted out with high-end gaming computers and the equipment for live commentary and streaming.

UC Irvine students broke a Guinness World Record three years running for the largest game of what?

Dodgeball was one of the student government's yearly record attempts, which also produced the largest pillow fight and the largest water pistol fight.

A UC Irvine legend claims the utility tunnels under the campus were built so faculty could escape what?

A riot by students is the danger in the story, but the tunnels really carry electricity and air conditioning from the Central Plant and are open only to maintenance staff.

A UC Irvine craze that began in the late 2010s has students racing across campus to collect what?

Stickers of 'Petr', a jokey misspelling of the mascot's name Peter, are handed out by anonymous students who post each drop location on Instagram.

David Benioff, who earned a UC Irvine writing master's in 1999, co-created which HBO fantasy series?

Game of Thrones made Benioff famous, but his Irvine thesis was the novel The 25th Hour, which became a Spike Lee film starring Edward Norton.

UC Irvine drama graduate Bob Gunton played the villainous warden in which 1994 prison film?

The Shawshank Redemption cast Gunton as Warden Samuel Norton opposite Tim Robbins. He finished his UC Irvine drama degree in 1968, three years after the campus opened.

UC Irvine theater graduate Greg Louganis won four Olympic gold medals in which sport?

Diving great Louganis won both the springboard and platform golds in 1984 and again in 1988. He transferred to UC Irvine in 1981 and added a minor in dance.

UC Irvine graduate Erin Gruwell's years as a high school teacher inspired which 2007 Hilary Swank film?

Freedom Writers follows the 150 students whose diaries Gruwell turned into a 1999 book. Every one of them went on to graduate from high school.

Tyler Hoechlin played second base for UC Irvine before starring on television as which DC Comics hero?

Superman was Hoechlin's role in Supergirl and then in Superman & Lois. He had transferred to UC Irvine from Arizona State in 2008.

UC Irvine art graduate Phil Tippett, a Star Wars animator, won his second Oscar for which 1993 film?

Jurassic Park kept Tippett on to direct how its digital dinosaurs moved, after computer graphics replaced the go-motion puppets he had been hired to make.

UC Irvine's Reeve-Irvine Research Center, named in honor of actor Christopher Reeve, studies injuries to what?

The spinal cord became Reeve's cause after a fall from a horse in 1995 left him paralyzed. Joan Irvine Smith then worked with UC Irvine to found the center in his name.

Which Saturday Night Live star of 1985 to 1990 studied drama at UC Irvine, graduating in 1979?

Jon Lovitz earned two Emmy nominations for the show, having trained at UC Irvine under the acting teacher Robert Cohen.

Joe Lacob, who earned a UC Irvine biology degree in 1978, became principal owner of which NBA team?

Golden State Warriors ownership cost Lacob's group $450 million, and he had to sell his minority stake in the Boston Celtics to complete the deal.

In which men's sport did UC Irvine win four NCAA national titles between 2007 and 2013?

Volleyball brought championships in 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2013, the last of them under a first-year head coach who was himself a UC Irvine graduate.

UC Irvine earned its first NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament win in 2019 over which fourth-seeded Wildcats?

Kansas State lost 70–64 in the first round, four years after UC Irvine's Division I tournament debut ended in a narrow defeat by Louisville.

Which former UC Irvine point guard was named NBA Coach of the Year in 2010 with Oklahoma City?

Scott Brooks scored 43 points on the night UC Irvine's Bren Events Center opened in 1987, and as a coach he took the Thunder to the 2012 NBA Finals.

UC Irvine physicist Frederick Reines won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting which particle?

Neutrino hunting seemed so ghostly a task that Reines and Clyde Cowan named their 1950s experiment Project Poltergeist. Reines moved to UC Irvine in 1966 as its first dean of physical sciences.

UC Irvine scientists documented the first case of hyperthymesia; what can people with the condition do?

People with it recall their past vividly: Jill Price, hidden in the 2006 study as 'AJ', said her memories ran like a movie in her mind.

Which architect of San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid drew up the master plan for the UC Irvine campus?

William Pereira also planned the surrounding city, work that put his photograph on the cover of Time magazine in 1963, two years before the campus opened.

UC Irvine's main teaching hospital stands about 12 miles from campus in which nearby city?

Orange is home to the UC Irvine Medical Center because the university shelved plans for an on-campus hospital in 1976 and bought the county medical center instead.

Which long jumper, who began college at UC Irvine, broke Bob Beamon's world record in 1991?

Mike Powell leapt 8.95 meters in Tokyo to beat a mark that had stood for almost 23 years. He had started at UC Irvine before transferring to UCLA.

Which country produced Mamadou N'Diaye, the 7-foot-6 center who was Division I basketball's tallest player at UC Irvine?

Senegal also produced Tacko Fall, another 7-foot-6 center, and when the two met on court it was the tallest tip-off in US college basketball history.

UC Irvine writing graduate Alice Sebold wrote which 2002 bestseller about a murdered teenage girl?

The Lovely Bones was filmed in 2009, and its success lifted sales of Sebold's earlier memoir, Lucky, to more than one million copies.

Which Pulitzer-winning novelist wrote his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, as a UC Irvine thesis?

Michael Chabon's professor sent the thesis to a literary agent without telling him, and it earned the young author a $155,000 advance.

Which French founder of deconstruction was a UC Irvine professor for the last two decades of his life?

Jacques Derrida joined UC Irvine in 1986. After his death in 2004 the university sued his widow and children over papers it believed he had promised it, then dropped the case.

Paul Mockapetris, who earned a UC Irvine doctorate in 1982, invented which piece of internet plumbing?

DNS, the Domain Name System, was set out by Mockapetris in two technical memos in 1983, the year after he finished at UC Irvine.

UC Irvine philosophy graduate Aras Baskauskas won the 2006 Panama season of which reality television competition?

Survivor named Baskauskas its Sole Survivor in a 5–2 jury vote, after he had added a UC Irvine business master's to his philosophy degree.