FROM THE CHANCELLOR

On behalf of the entire UCI community, welcome to the Irvine campus, and to a new world of intellectual opportunity for you as students. You've arrived as the University is embarking on a period of expansion, both in size and academic programs. We anticipate a steady rise in enrollments over the next decade as the State's college-age population increases. At the same time, UCI's reputation for innovation and high academic standards is attracting more of the nation's brightest students and faculty. UCI students compete successfully for the most coveted scholarships and fellowships. Their competitive edge comes from being at a research university where involvement in the intense creativity of the research process often begins during the undergraduate years.

UCI is regarded as one of the top ten public universities in the country. And many of our programs have achieved standing with those of the best private universities. Our strong faculty are the key. Two of UCI's founding faculty have received Nobel Prizes. Many others have attained worldwide recognition for their research, while gaining equal respect on campus for their ability to engage students in the excitement of learning. Faculty also are responsible for UCI's strengths in virtually every discipline from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, to technology and management.

Increasingly, society and the workplace demand knowledge that crosses traditional boundaries. So we have developed programs that combine studies such as art and technology, medicine and engineering, ecology and the social sciences, business and computer sciences, all designed to prepare students for roles as citizens and scholars in the new century.

UCI's partnerships with the fast-growing Orange County community also create incomparable opportunities for our students. They include work experience in a dynamic international marketplace, learning as you serve the community through the campus' outreach and public service groups, or simply benefiting from the advice of UCI alumni and leaders from every area of society.

Whether you are a graduate or undergraduate student, UCI offers a place to pursue whatever course you have in mind for your future, or to change that course should you decide to explore other educational goals. I look forward to seeing you on campus, and to sharing these next few years in your lifetime of learning.

Sincerely,

Ralph J. Cicerone
Chancellor

UCI ACADEMIC SENATE DISTINGUISHED FACULTY

CHARLES A. LAVE

Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Distinguished University Service Award, 2000

Professor Emeritus of Economics

As I understand the assigned writing task here, I'm supposed to say something about me and something about why I received the award.

Why me? And more especially, why do I have to do this difficult piece of writing? One of my colleagues tells the story of a man who has been tarred and feathered and is now being carried out of town on a rail. The man remarks, "If it weren't for the honor, I'd just as soon walk."

So I'm going to cheat a bit here: I'll try to answer the "Why me?" and the "Who me?" questions at the same time.

I'm told there are people who decided at age 10 what they were going to be in life, pursued it, got it, and kept at it. Not me. I got through my junior year in high school with the belief that I was probably going to be a carpenter. Then my best friend said he was going to go to college, my parents didn't object to the idea, so I went off to Reed College in Portland. Standards were lower in those days.

There didn't seem to be a carpentry major available so I went through physics and sociology. I thought about dropping out. Our dean of students, a wonderfully wise woman, didn't think much of that idea: "In my experience, too many students drop out of college to find themselves before they've made anything of themselves worth finding." I was prepared to follow her advice, but my declining GPA precluded that option.

So I did some time in the Air Force, taught electronics, and wrote a pretty amazing argument and set of promises to get readmitted to Reed. They bought it. I switched to political science and made a decision to try to live up to the lies I'd told the admissions office. Maturity helps too. Did a bang-up last two years, graduated well, and went off to Stanford to pursue economics. I did economic history and economic development, and ran a little electronics company in Silicon Valley on the side--claiming to be an electronic engineer. Standards were lower in those days. Eventually I discovered transportation economics, turned out an oft-quoted thesis, and escaped from grad school.

Then came the one part of my "career" that worked well from the beginning, my time at UCI. I arrived in 1966 when the School of Social Sciences was trying to implement every intellectual goal I held sacred, and most of the faculty were working together in pursuit of those goals. Not quite "one for all and all for one," but close. So it seemed pretty natural to spend time working on tasks toward the common good. But it wasn't all work and no play--I also got to spend a lot of time pursuing my off-beat research ideas. Caught some too.

In any event, the community building habits I learned in those days stuck with me (...old dogs, new tricks). And I guess that's why I'm receiving this award. I can't claim to be the equal of Dan Aldrich, its namesake, or even the equal of the faculty who have won the award in past years. But fortunately, standards are lower now....

MASAYASU NOMURA

Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, 2000-2001

Professor of Biological Chemistry, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and Biological Sciences, and Grace Beekhuis Bell Chair in Biological Chemistry

I attended college during the miserable post-World War II era in Japan, and did not receive a good education in basic science. Nevertheless, during my student time, I did have the occasion to find an intellectual joy and a sense of self-fulfillment in participating in some research related to fermentation biochemistry. So, I decided to make a career as a research scientist. I was also fortunate to have had the opportunity to come to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow and to work with some first-class scientists in the mainstream of a then fledgling new science, molecular biology, which has revolutionized biology as we now know. The fundamental question people wished to solve at that time (my postdoctoral time from 1957 to 1960) was how information encoded in genes is transferred to protein to express phenotypes. Because there were no guaranteed approaches to solve this question at that time, this new field attracted bright and ambitious people with various backgrounds, including physicists, biochemists, geneticists, and microbiologists. I could witness that creative research accomplishments were often made by people who did not have a formal education and training in biology or biochemistry. This realization and the actual participation in the research related to the discovery of messenger RNA may have helped in my subsequent development as a research scientist, and as a professor in academia, and I am very grateful to my mentors during that time.

It is obvious in natural science that technologies used in research change in time and the amounts of specific information in a certain research area also increase. This is certainly very remarkable in the field of molecular biology or biology in general. Many of the biochemical techniques I learned as a student or during the subsequent years became obsolete and are not used now. I also quickly lost the knowledge of many specific factual descriptions in textbooks, which I had tried to memorize. Nevertheless, I feel that my early experiences have been important. Perhaps, one of the most important things to learn during student times (or during those early training times in one's career) is how to think through a problem. In research in biological science, and perhaps in natural science in general, one has to learn how to ask a question correctly and then how to find approaches to solve the question asked. These things might be difficult for students to learn, and equally difficult for professors to teach. Participating in actual research activities done by creative people may be one way to realize this goal, as must have been the case in my career.

WILLIAM M. MAURER

Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2000-2001

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Ruth Benedict, one of the founding figures in American anthropology, remarked in 1934 that the West's blindness to the cultural embeddedness of its own sciences would hinder its understanding of social and cultural diversity, and lead scholars to make unfounded grand claims about the big questions of human existence. "When a student has assembled the vast data for a study of international credits, or of the process of learning, or of narcissism as a factor in psycho-neuroses," she wrote, "it is through and in this body of data that the economist or psychologist or the psychiatrist operates. He does not reckon with the fact of other social arrangements where all the factors, it may be, are differently arranged.... He identifies the local attitudes of the 1930s with Human Nature, the description of them with Economics or Psychology."

My research uses anthropology to question deeply held beliefs about the nature of law and economic processes, and I have found UCI to be an environment where a diversity of methodological and theoretical perspectives helps point up the limits of any one disciplinary approach. My field research in the British Virgin Islands sought to explain why the place attracts so many Caribbean migrants. One reason is the fact that the territory is an offshore financial services center, or tax haven, and has been experiencing an economic boom since the late 1980s. While citizens benefit from good jobs in banks, immigrants come to take on work in the construction and service sector. I became interested in the cultural ramifications of offshore finance, and this has led me to my current research project. In this work, I have been bringing anthropological analyses of cultural forms to bear on the world of finance--an area often assumed to be bereft of cultural content. I am interested in the impact of financial globalization on places like the British Virgin Islands which are so intimately caught up in it. I have been looking at the way Caribbean tax havens market themselves to international investors--"wizarding up" images more reminiscent of the British Empire than they are of Club Med--and asking questions about how those images redound into people's self-perceptions.

Currently, I am looking at alternatives to financial globalization put forth in various quarters. These alternatives seek to rewrite the cultural scripts of finance from the ground up. These include alternative currency movements in the U.S., digital cash or e-cash efforts of banking and computer companies, and Islamic banking in Southeast Asia. I am interested in what happens when people seek to redefine (or undermine) some of the taken-for-granted cultural terms of finance--terms like "money," "property," "capital," "interest," and so forth--that are our "native" categories and that we rarely subject to cultural analysis.

Like Benedict, I use my teaching and research to encourage anthropologists and others to give more serious consideration than they have to the cultural forms of the West as these forms spread around the world and are taken up, resisted, or possibly transcended. The ultimate goal of my research is to demonstrate that law and economics are above all cultural domains that encode whole cosmologies, and that shape and structure the worlds we inhabit and transform.

RICHARD A. LEO

Distinguished Assistant Professor
Award for Research, 2000-2001

Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society

GABRIELE SCHWAB

Distinguished Faculty Lectureship
Award for Teaching, 2000-2001

Director of the Critical Theory Institute and UCI Chancellor's
Professor of English and Comparative Literature