Following an aggressive construction project timeline, the UC Irvine campus emerged out of open ranch lands, from groundbreaking to university campus, in less than five years. However, the campus was not “made whole” until the charter class of students arrived for the first day of classes on October 4, 1965.

This exhibit features excerpts from a special edition of the Orange Coast Daily Pilot newspaper published on that first day. Welcoming the newest UC, the paper is a time capsule forecasting UC Irvine’s future growth and the deep cultural and economic impact it would have on the local community and beyond.

With no alumni, upperclassmen, mascot, or established curriculum, UC Irvine’s 118 founding faculty and charter class of 1,500 students were brimming with possibilities. A snapshot of the 1960s, the Daily Pilot issue, sourced from the UC Irvine Libraries’ University Archives, also explores the topics of the era weighing heavily on all their minds — civil rights and race relations, Vietnam War and draft, communism, and nuclear war.