Simpson’s Visit Puts UC Irvine in Uproar

IRVINE —  Three weeks ago and unbeknownst to university officials, O.J. Simpson slipped onto the UC Irvine campus to speak to students at the invitation of a criminology professor.

The university hasn’t calmed down since.

Peppered by angry phone calls and hate mail since news of Simpson’s May 21 visit hit the campus newspaper, one school dean has been busy distancing the university from the decision to have the ex-football star speak. On Wednesday, the professor who issued the invitation without telling the university bowed to pressure and had a lawyer with the Nicole Brown Simpson Charitable Foundation speak to the class.

Simpson’s visit to a seminar taught by William Thompson, a DNA expert and member of Simpson’s criminal defense team, was one in a series of public appearances on college campuses. Last year, he spoke at Oxford University and at El Camino College in Torrance. He is mulling an invitation from former counsel Alan M. Dershowitz to speak at Harvard.

Simpson’s surprise appearance during Thompson’s 10-week course entitled “Seminar on the O.J. Simpson Case” has the campus in an uproar, even though many of the 25 students who took the course welcomed the opportunity to talk with him.

“After we did the story, people were calling in disgust that we had such a person come to the school,” said junior Kiersten Robinson, managing editor of New University, the campus paper. “We didn’t get any calls applauding the professor for having him speak.”

Thompson’s boss, Dan Stokols--dean of the social ecology school--wrote a letter to several domestic violence groups that had complained. In the letter, Stokols denied the university’s “support or endorsement” of Simpson and said he learned of the visit after the fact--from the campus newspaper.

“I share some of those feelings of concern, frankly, but does that mean we should bend to censorship?” Stokols said Saturday. “I don’t accept that.”

Among the most vocal complaints came from the nonprofit organization named for Simpson’s ex-wife and dedicated to fighting domestic violence.

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were slain outside her Brentwood home on June 12, 1994. In 1996, Simpson was acquitted by a Los Angeles jury of both slayings. This year the Brown and Goldman families won a wrongful death suit against Simpson in connection with the deaths.

Last week, Merritt McKeon, an attorney who co-authored a book with Brown’s father on domestic violence, spoke to Thompson’s class.

For students in the class, who had spent five weeks examining details of the criminal case, Simpson’s visit was the semester’s highlight.

“It wasn’t Simpson visiting the ‘O.J. Simpson Appreciation Society’ or stopping by for a fan club visit,” said Paul Brar, 27. “He was asked a number of really tough questions on the case.

“From a sheer thrill standpoint, this opportunity to interrelate to someone who is a historical figure, well, you just don’t get the chance very often,” he added.

Senior Lissete Garcia, 21, called Simpson’s appearance a matter of academic freedom.

“I feel bad for the professor because I know his intentions were not at all to get us to try to support Mr. Simpson,” Garcia said. “If you don’t invite people who are controversial to a university, you might not learn a lot.”

The 20-minute lecture, followed by more than 2 1/2 hours of questions and answers on Bruno Magli shoes and bloody gloves, was the flashiest part of the seminar.

Thompson said he called Simpson on a whim sometime in May to ask him to speak, and agreed to Simpson’s only condition: to keep the visit a secret.

But from the moment he walked unaccompanied onto campus at dusk, word seeped out.

An hour into the seminar, enough passersby had glimpsed Simpson in Thompson’s classroom to draw a crowd. The campus newspaper learned of the visit from a student who ran out of class and over to the editor’s apartment.

Even on the relatively deserted campus at night, the class of 25 swelled to more than 100 by the end of the first hour. Dozens crowded around Simpson during a break seeking autographs.

For Thompson, who kept the visit secret until walking into the classroom with Simpson and “seeing the jaws drop,” the ensuing firestorm has all been worth it.

“I remember in my graduate career, what an impression it made when people who were notorious, controversial showed up,” he said. “It seemed to me that this would be a great opportunity.”

The experiment seemed to pay off. “Usually I lose students by the end of a three-hour class. This time I was gaining,” Thompson said. “I had to apologize to one of my colleagues. He said all his students found out about it and defected.”