Gary Singer ’74 recently became the first alumnus to be named chair of the UCI Foundation. Since his graduation from the School of Social Sciences 50 years ago this June, he’s been an avid Anteater athletics fan, a UCI lecturer, a volunteer and a leader of multiple university support organizations – all of which give him a unique breadth of perspective on the campus’s past, present and future.

Singer enumerates many points of pride about the campus: the caliber of faculty, quality of students; the achievements of its alumni; and the growth of professional programs that didn’t exist when he was a student including business, education, law, pharmacy and nursing. Over the decades, Gary and his wife Melanie haven’t just had a front row seat to the university’s growth and evolution – they’ve played an active role in it. And that’s something he hopes a growing number of alumni will do in the years to come.

“Your lives after UCI will take many different twists and turns, but find a way to keep in contact with the organizations and people you’re involved with,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be every day, as you begin careers and families, but make an effort to stay involved at UCI, because I think you’ll find over time there will be more opportunities to be involved in more and more significant ways.”

Anteater beginnings

Gary was recruited from Orange County’s Fullerton Union High School to play both golf and water polo at UCI – the latter under legendary coach Ted Newland. Immediately, Gary loved the warm, welcoming campus.

Studious by nature, he dropped water polo to focus on golf and academics, earning the Tony Lema Memorial Golf Scholarship, which is given to only four collegiate athletes annually. Gary thrived with the breadth of academics at UCI. He majored in social sciences with a concentration in political science, took pre-law classes that helped him set his sights on a legal career, and completed a senior project advised by Caesar Sereseres, who is now an associate professor emeritus. But Gary fondly remembers biology, statistics, art history and computer science courses where faculty asked students to grapple with big questions: Should the U.S. have dropped the atom bomb? What would the role of computers be in the future?  

College wasn’t all hard work. Gary played squash and handball with junior faculty and, after living his first year in Mesa Court, he moved to a home on Balboa Island with golf teammates, which he recalls as “nirvana.” He vividly remembers standing in line to have his name called at his graduation. Back then, the UCI student body was just a few thousand students, small enough that all the schools gathered in Aldrich Park for a single commencement ceremony.

Gary went straight to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he met Melanie during their third year. The couple launched their careers in LA, Melanie being hired by then-district attorney John Van de Kamp, and Gary joining O'Melveny & Myers LLP focusing on corporate finance, securities, and mergers and acquisitions.

Returning to UCI

Within a couple of years, the Singers moved to Irvine, where Gary was assigned to O'Melveny’s Newport Beach office and Melanie worked for the OC district attorney specializing in juvenile justice issues. They lived right next door to campus, and quickly became fixtures at Anteater basketball games, cheering alongside the CIA (a.k.a. Crazy Insane Anteaters).

They also got involved in various UCI support organizations such as the Chancellor’s Club, which offered them insight into aspects of the campus from arts to engineering. Gary stepped up to serve as the club’s president – the first of many leadership roles he would take at UCI, including serving on the Alumni Association board of directors and twice chairing the board of the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Of course, Gary has a soft spot for programs that were important to his own experience as a student, including social sciences and athletics. Gary joined the School of Social Sciences Dean’s Advisory Council at the invitation of then-dean William Schonfeld, who has remained a close friend and mentor over the years. Gary has continued working with the group for decades, spanning the tenures of three deans, and he and Melanie also became founding members of the school’s Dean’s Leadership Society.

"Gary embodies the best of what we strive for in social sciences and at UC Irvine--a broad-minded, inquisitive attitude toward the world's problems and possibilities, and the can-do spirit to take on new challenges,” says Bill Maurer, dean of the School of Social Sciences. “His contributions to the campus have already been incalculable, and in his new role as chair of the UCI Foundation he has an even bigger platform to steer the campus toward even greater things in the years to come."

Gary and Melanie also established the Gary and Melanie Singer Endowed Scholarship Fund to support student athletes in the School of Social Sciences. And when women’s golf, a relatively new team with few alumni, needed support, they “adopted” them, hosting an annual fundraiser for the athletes.

Law school

Perhaps nowhere has Gary left a larger imprint than on UCI’s School of Law, which he helped bring into existence. After several years advocating to establish a law school in Irvine, the stars aligned in the mid-2000s. Gary was among a small group who helped generate the private and public support necessary to encourage the University of California Regents to approve the law school proposal in 2006. He remained deeply involved in the law school’s formative years.

“We need really good, strong lawyers, and the law school is marvelous,” he says. “It feels good for UCI Law to have had such a strong start, with high rankings, extremely well respected and accomplished faculty and wonderful applicants.”

With the support of his firm, Gary and Melanie launched the O’Melveny & Myers Diversity Scholarship in 2022, providing funding for law students from low-income, first generation and underrepresented communities.

After Melanie retired, she became a member of the OC Juvenile Justice Commission, visiting facilities that house minors and advocating for the care and services of the children in custody. Toward the end of his career, Gary joined RSI Holding as senior vice president and general counsel, and after retiring from there, he still wasn’t ready to slow down. So he began teaching classes at UCI Law on mergers and acquisitions, his area of expertise, and gained yet another perspective on the UCI experience.

“Teaching is hard work, and it was very challenging,” he says. “But we have very bright and dedicated students, and it was very rewarding to see them go out into the world.” Sometimes students still reach out to him to tell him they are using what they learned from his class.

Brilliant future

As Gary embarks on a three-year term as chair of the UCI Foundation, he brings all of these experiences and perspectives to the role. Melanie says UCI is an inextricable part of their lives, from the close friends they’ve met through campus organizations to the medical care they receive through UCI Health.

Gary agrees: “I’ve always found it personally, professionally, and family-wise, very rewarding to be associated with UC Irvine.”

Gary takes the helm of the foundation with less than a year left in the foundation’s Brilliant Future Campaign, which aims to raise $2 billion and meaningfully engage 75,000 alumni. He’s optimistic about the campaign, and the future of UCI.

“I am so proud of UCI’s spectacular growth and the contributions we have made to Orange County, the nation and the world, on so many fronts,” he says. “I feel like we are now close to there being a widespread understanding of what the Anteater culture is, and that’s very exciting.”

-Christine Byrd for UCI Social Sciences
-photo by Luis Fonseca, UCI Social Sciences