The newspaper's freedom of the press is legally guaranteed by California's Leonard Law, which was amended in 2006 to include public higher education institutions.

Members may opt to participate in fee-based courses in martial arts, team sports, SCUBA diving, sailing, and more.

The Cross-Cultural Center was also opened during this time with meeting rooms, Student Umbrella Organization offices, and study and lounge space.

From 2007-2009, the Student Center underwent Phase IV of its latest reconstruction developments with now triple the amount of space for conference and meeting areas along with a multipurpose room and large ballroom.

The Cross Cultural Center also had new developments as it is now double in size providing a large multipurpose room and additional conference and office space.

Some major recent and ongoing activism efforts include support for demands to increase wages and benefits for campus labor unions, support for Tagalog and Filipino Studies (TAPS), awareness for the situation in Israel-Palestine by Students for Justice in Palestine and Anteaters for Israel, awareness for the crisis in Darfur, protests against the conflict in Iraq, ASUCI-sponsored political debates, and lectures sponsored by the Muslim Student Union.

In March 2015, the legislative branch of ASUCI voted in favor of a resolution that would have banned all flags from a shared inner workroom in the undergraduate student government's offices.

The student representatives who voted in favor of the ban experienced intense harassment and received numerous death threats.

[17][18] UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman initially called the vote "outrageous and indefensible",[19] and stated that the campus would install additional flagpoles.

Pro-Israel groups such as the Orange County Hillel chapter, the Zionist Organization of America and the Brandeis Center got involved in the case which caused the school's Office of Student Conduct to launch an investigation.

UCI found that the MSU was involved in the protest and suspended it for one academic quarter, followed by two years of probation and sentenced it to 100 hours of university-approved community service.

[32] In 2004, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) filed a complaint with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) alleging that Jewish students were harassed and subjected to a hostile environment at UCI.

Among the charges pertaining to the MSU were that it sponsored an annual "Zionist Awareness Week"[fn 1] which, according to ZOA, featured anti-Semitic speakers.

[34][35] A local group associated with David Horowitz's Freedom Center, dissatisfied with the result of the investigation, released their own report lambasting the MSU.