This may have been a UCI or specific-department only. My husband was in the comparative literature PhD program at Berkeley 77-85. He paid tuition every quarter except for the year he studied in Paris and the 3 years he got a grant from the CIA to study/pass exams in a bizarre language. (In exchange he was to make himself available if the CIA found a need for Americans speaking said bizarre language.)
Getting that UCI grant would have been easier, though perhaps less interesting 