THE BELL CURVE:

For one fascinating week, UC Irvine offered us a welcome news diversion from Newport Beach’s City Hall.

Now, they have abdicated the front page — at least temporarily — by hiring the law school dean they had hired and fired once before. But in the ashes of that law school conflagration, there are some useful embers that remain to be stirred, even though they were formulated on the premise that given all the substantial egos involved, the settlement wouldn’t happen quickly.

Well, the principals get points — sorely needed — for settling it in the only possible manner and speed that allows some modicum of dignity for the campus and optimism for the quality of the law school to come.

But as I read all the often contradictory statements and counter statements, one vision was always before me: the vision of Dan Aldrich spinning in his grave.

Aldrich was UCI’s first chancellor. He shaped the campus with a kind of unpretentious strength and rectitude, from its groundbreaking in 1962 until his retirement 22 years later. I served under him for most of those years, and I suspect my faculty associates from that period, alive and dead, who still have a sense of identity with UCI share my wish that the current chancellor, Michael Drake, who stirred up this mess, might have reviewed some UCI history before he apparently allowed outside pressure to influence his rescinding of a commitment he made prematurely.

The pressure exerted on Drake — if we ever find out its specific nature — had to be a walk in the park contrasted to the heat Aldrich took, especially during the Vietnam War period when campuses were battlegrounds where the chancellor was in the sights of the provocateurs.

For much of his long regime, Aldrich was caught between protecting First Amendment rights for abrasive and radical students and faculty and the equally abrasive and radical members of the John Birch Society, flourishing in Orange County, who saw our universities, starting with the chancellor, as a breeding ground for communists.

Aldrich was quite possibly the only educator of stature in California who could have kept the peace in Orange County as well as he did. He was a registered Republican who was an excellent athlete, wore his patriotism proudly and had a prestigious background in agriculture.

He was square enough to make it with Orange Countians who regard incipient intellectualism with dark suspicion and erudite enough to mingle with equal facility with scholars.

But that wasn’t enough to turn away the demands for his head from the political right.

That all began in Aldrich’s second year as UCI chancellor with the arrival on campus of the San Francisco Mime Troupe to perform “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

A visiting reporter saw a poster advertising the show, remembered the Troupe’s inclusion on the California State Assembly’s list of un-American activities and wrote a piece portraying UCI as providing a platform for a passel of subversives. From there, it was easy to blame Aldrich for allowing it to happen — and we were off and running.

When Aldrich refused to cave in to the pressure on him to cancel the troupe’s performance — which had followed proper campus booking procedures and had a long history of accredited appearances — Orange County was outraged.

Typically, most of the outrage came from people who hadn’t seen the show. I was one of the relative handful of people who did, and I can remember only that it was the most potent civil rights polemic I’d ever seen, and that it was delivered in brutally frank terms.

I didn’t know then that it was also going to set the tone for a lot of similar clashes over the years that followed.

There’s no better example than a statewide election the following year in which the people still smarting over the Mime Troupe dispute tried to portray that episode as a reason for defeating a badly needed college bond issue.

Aldrich was bloodied up considerably in that process — first by a mailing piece given wide distribution by the Orange County American Legion claiming that because Aldrich refused to stop the “sick propaganda” on his campus, he was “incapable of exercising responsible judgment.”

And, second, by personal attacks on him by the Orange County Coordinating Republican Assembly — that wanted him fired as UCI’s chancellor — and United Republicans of California that opposed efforts to name him president of the University of California with charges of “flagrant and complete disregard for decency, morality and responsibility in the educational community.”

There was more, much more over the years. There was activist Eldridge Cleaver who spoke at UCI after being denied at Berkeley and former Students for Democratic Action officer Mike Krisman, to whom Aldrich appointed an administrative job at UCI because he was by far the best-qualified candidate (but strongly opposed by the Costa Mesa Chamber of Commerce).

These and similar actions were in accord with university policy and staunchly supported by Aldrich. My warmest recollection of him is standing on a balcony overlooking the library plaza and defusing an antiwar rally of students that was threatening violence.

Last week, the appointment of a highly respected liberal professor to a deanship was unsettling enough to the conservative establishment to bring its big guns to bear on Drake as they once did on Aldrich.

Where Aldrich was unflinchingly resolute, Drake has waffled.

But after a bad start, he has apparently saved the day for his new law school.

It remains to be seen if he has also saved his job.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.