Champion of Veterans Day Holiday Named Veteran of the Year

By Ioana Patringenaru I November 7, 2005

When you enjoy the day off for Veterans Day this year, you may want to thank one of UCSD’s longtime employees.

Aguilar was wounded in the right arm during a firefight and received a Purple Heart.

Nick Aguilar, director of student policies and judicial affairs, was instrumental in making Nov. 11 a holiday for the UC system beginning in 2000, colleagues said. Aguilar said he felt it was important to honor veterans with a day off, especially since other government agencies already celebrated the holiday. He calls the holiday his biggest contribution to the UC system – that coming from a man who is the founder and creator of many associations and programs for staff and students.

This feat, and many others, made Aguilar the ideal nominee for the 2005 UCSD Veteran of the Year award, colleagues said.

“He’s just somebody who has a tremendous amount of integrity,” said Jorge Rios, a former Veteran of the Year himself. “He’s a born leader.”

Nick Aguilar, director of student policies and judicial affairs

Aguilar , who will retire in January, will be recognized during a Nov. 9 ceremony on campus. He embarked on his campaign to make Nov. 11 a UC holiday after being asked to speak at a Veterans Day ceremony at UCSD. It suddenly dawned on him that UC was rare in that it was a public organization and yet did not celebrate Veterans Day as a holiday. It was all the more puzzling because the university receives large amounts of funding for military research projects and from the military itself, he said. UCSD veterans also couldn’t take part in Nov. 11 community events because they needed to work. Rios said that, at the time, there were about 100 people with a military background on campus.

Aguilar said he first received a dry, bureaucratic rejection letter for his proposal to make Nov. 11 a holiday. But he kept at it. He enlisted the help of local congressmen, state senators and assembly members. He also got in touch with Richard Atkinson, then UC president. The two knew each other from Atkinson’s time as UCSD Chancellor. Atkinson was instrumental in making Nov. 11 a holiday, even though UC’s Academic Senate voted against the proposal, Aguilar said.

It wasn’t the first time that Aguilar took action in support of a disenfranchised group. In the past quarter century at UCSD, he established the Student Affirmative Action Program, the Rape Prevention Education Program, the Education Equity Program and the Student Office for Human Relations, to name a few. He also helped found the Chicano/Latino Staff Association and of the Chicano Alumni Association.

Aguilar is dedicated and very good at promoting fairness, said staff member Edna Fugazzi, a founding member of UCSD's Veterans Association and of the Chicano/Latino Staff Association, who has known Aguilar since he was a student. “He’s just a great person to know and he’s very humble,” she said.

Nick Aguilar during his Vietnam days, with a care package from home.

Aguilar also has been very involved outside the UCSD campus. He is a member of the San Diego County Board of Education. In the past, he served on the Sweetwater Union High School Board of Education, the San Diego County Criminal Justice Council and was Chairperson of the Honorary Board for the San Diego Common Ground Theatre, among other things.

Aguilar traces his passion for equity back to his own experiences. He came to San Diego from Mexico with his mother at age 7. Once he got to Sweetwater High School in National City, counselors didn’t bother telling Aguilar that he was eligible for UC admission – no doubt because of his ethnicity, he said. So, he enrolled at Southwestern College, then dropped out to follow his older brother and join the army in 1965. Soon, he was off to Vietnam, where he served as a paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in 1967 and 1968.There, he received a Purple Heart after being wounded in the right arm in a firefight.

He kept the bullet as a souvenir.

Aguilar and a comrade in arms shake hands after building a foxhole.

Shortly after coming back to the United States, he transferred from Southwestern College to UCSD. Soon, he was lobbying to create an outreach program for minority students in local high schools. But his first visit to his alma mater, Sweetwater High, didn’t go well. The school’s principal made Aguilar and another student leave the campus. The principal later apologized after UCSD officials looked into the incident. Aguilar said that skirmish was one of the reasons he decided to go to law school.

“It’s just not enough to organize demonstrations and beat down windows and take over buildings,” he said. “I was in a time and place that made the importance of law clear and direct.”

Eventually, the minority outreach program was successful and the number of Chicano students at UCSD went up from about a dozen to about 250 in a couple of years. “It’s been so satisfying,” he said.

“It’s just been a labor of love for me.” Aguilar graduated from UCSD in 1972, becoming the second in his family to earn a college degree.

Aguilar graduated with a law degree from UC Davis in 1975. That same year, he came back to work at UCSD. He later left the university, returning again in 1979.

The rest, as he says, is history.