Orange Coast College was formed after local voters passed a measure in the January 1947 election to establish a new junior college on a site, secured from the
War Assets Administration in Washington, D.C., and part of the deactivated
Santa Ana Army Air Base. The board of trustees hired the college's founding president and district superintendent, Basil Hyrum Peterson, on July 28, 1947. Construction of campus classrooms and facilities began when Peterson hired Fran Albers as the college's carpenter in February 1948. Albers' crew of 35 workers (mostly Coast football players paid 60 cents an hour) turned an Army movie theater into an auditorium and concert hall, a service club into a 500-seat gymnasium, an Army chapel into a facility for theater productions and student/staff weddings, a military storage building into a library, an Army PX into a student center, a battalion headquarters building into an administration building, and several cadet barracks into student dormitories and married student and faculty housing. The first campus building phase occurred in the early 1950s when renowned architect
Richard Neutra was brought in to re-design the campus. Leaving many of the original buildings intact, Neutra added several
modernist structures including the minimalist Campus Theater and two large lecture halls. These were laid out on a 45-degree angle to the city street grid, similar to
The Parkinsons' layout of
USC. The second and largest building phase occurred in the 1970s when local architect William Blurock was hired to replace many of the original Army buildings with structures more suitable for educational purposes. In December 2002, Rabbit Island, a island located in the North Gulf Islands of the
Georgia Strait west of the city of
Vancouver in
British Columbia, Canada, was donated to the Orange Coast College Foundation. Since then the OCC Foundation, using funds designated for the Orange Coast College School of Sailing & Seamanship, has refurbished the facilities on the island, made significant capital improvements, and helped fund the use of the island as a field station to teach summer classes in island ecology, biological diversity, vertebrate biology, intertidal ecology, kayaking, and photography. It is now referred to as "Wheeler Station" at Rabbit Island in honor of the donor, Henry Wheeler. OCC marine science and biology instructors have used the island to conduct research on species diversity, standing stock, species distribution, and oceanography. Plans were underway to find separate funding for the island outside of OCC. Possible funding sources included the National Science Foundation, rental of the island facilities to Canadians, funding from the Associated Students of OCC (ASOCC), and through other foundation grants and private donations. In March 2007, the Orange Coast College Foundation Board of Directors voted to sell the island after determining that keeping and maintaining it was unfeasible. As of July 2007, the island was in talks to be sold to a private party for $2.41 million. However, the sale did not materialize and the island was sold in March 2008 to a privately held Canadian corporation for $2.19 million. In 2015, a plan was in effect to remove the early Neutra buildings in the center of the campus and open up a large central park around which both the outlying 1970s buildings and several newer buildings will be clustered.
2016 recording controversy In November 2016, an OCC student recorded a lecture by a professor of human sexuality, violating the school's Student Code of Conduct. In the lecture, the professor criticized
President Donald Trump and
Vice President Mike Pence, calling their election "an act of terrorism" against members of the
LGBTQ community. The student shared the recording with a student club on campus, which then posted it on their public Facebook page. The video promptly went viral, sparking backlash and death threats against the professor. After an investigation, the student was suspended for one semester and required to write an essay and apologize to the professor. After public outcry, the punishment was overturned in a special meeting of the Coast Community College District Board of Trustees, in the interest of bringing "closure to a chain of events that has led to the distress for many, most especially, an OCC teacher and student". In 2017, the professor was awarded the Faculty of the Year award by her peers, which she declined to accept and did not want to participate in related activities. ==Organization and admissions==