Chang-Lin Tien, 67; Headed UC Berkeley

Chang-Lin Tien, the first Asian American to head a major national research university as chancellor of UC Berkeley, where he garnered attention as a formidable fund-raiser and outspoken advocate of affirmative action, died Tuesday at a hospital in Redwood City. He was 67.

Tien, who was chancellor from 1990 to 1997, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and suffered an incapacitating stroke during surgery in September 2000. He spent the last two years under medical care at his Berkeley home and officially retired from teaching and other duties last year. He was admitted to the hospital again about 10 days ago as his condition declined.

The affable and popular campus leader stepped down as chancellor shortly after a bruising debate on the UC Board of Regents and throughout the state over affirmative action.

He was one of the highest-ranking public college officials to condemn Proposition 209, the successful 1996 ballot measure that repealed government affirmative action programs for women and minorities.

A mechanical engineer by training who began his teaching career at Berkeley in 1959, he was a highly regarded expert in heat transfer technology who helped design and solve problems with the heat-shielding tiles on the space shuttles as a NASA consultant.

He advised scientists dealing with the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island, and made a major contribution to the design of magnetic levitation trains in Japan.

Berkeley’s seventh chancellor, Tien spent all but two years of his four-decade UC career at the Northern California campus, where he relished mingling with students on Sproul Plaza. All three of his children are Berkeley graduates.

As chancellor, he weathered severe financial austerities, a wave of senior faculty retirements, a deadly fraternity house fire and an apparent assassination attempt by an assailant who disagreed with the university’s plans for Berkeley’s fabled People’s Park.

“Chang-Lin was an exceptional leader during one of UC Berkeley’s most challenging periods, a time of severe budget cuts and political changes,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl. “His energy and optimism, his willingness to fight for the principles he cherished, and his loyalty and love for this campus made it stronger and better.”

Tien frequently invoked his experiences in the United States as a poor Chinese immigrant in the 1950s when defending affirmative action programs in higher education.

Born in Wuhan and raised in Shanghai, he was one of eight children of a well-to-do government banking official who fled with his family to Taiwan before the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949. In Taiwan, Tien and his large family lived as refugees in a 12-foot-by-12-foot room.

Prosperity returned after the former mayor of Shanghai became the governor of Taiwan in 1950 and made Tien’s father his top deputy.

But when his father died of a heart attack two years later, the family’s fortunes were dashed again. All but one member of his family eventually immigrated to the United States.

Tien was the third to arrive. In 1956, the graduate of National Taiwan University was 21 and nearly penniless when he landed in Louisville, Ky., to study on a teaching fellowship in the University of Louisville’s department of mechanical engineering.

He stepped right into the pre-civil rights South.

In Louisville, he encountered signs that labeled the washrooms and drinking fountains either “whites only” or “colored.” For a long time he stood on buses near the driver, until he was finally told to sit in front with the whites. He avoided the bus for a year after that.

“I was really confused and scared,” he said in 1990. “I’m yellow. I don’t know if that’s colored or white.

“That left a very deep impression on me. This is a tremendous injustice to humiliate any human being that way.”

In class, a professor called him “chinaman” for three months until Tien learned that it was pejorative and challenged him. “So he’d say, ‘hello,’ ‘come.’ But he never called me ‘chinaman’ anymore,” Tien said.

When Tien was hired to teach at Berkeley, restrictive covenants prevented him from buying a house in certain neighborhoods. Decades later as chancellor, he encountered racism again when the university’s football team won the Citrus Bowl in Florida in 1992 and hecklers greeted him with chants of “Buy American, Buy American.”

Tien earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Louisville before moving on to Princeton, where he obtained a second master’s degree and a doctorate in 1959.

That year he joined Berkeley’s faculty. In 1962, he became, at the age of 26, the youngest professor to receive Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

He rose to full professor in 1968 and later headed the department of mechanical engineering for seven years. He was vice chancellor for research for two years, from 1983 to 1985.

He was away from Berkeley for only two years, from 1988 to 1990, when he served as executive vice chancellor at UC Irvine. In that No. 2 post, he was responsible for creating programs to turn the campus into a nationally prominent research school.

He was on track to become chancellor of UC Irvine when he was chosen to lead Berkeley, the oldest UC campus, long considered its flagship.

He became the first Asian American to head a UC campus at a particularly challenging stage: Tensions were rising over threatened draconian budget cuts, selective admissions policies that some charged discriminated against whites and Asians, and a brew of community issues.

Shortly after he arrived, a fraternity house fire killed three students. Later, a deranged gunman took 30 students hostage at a local pub, killing one before he was shot to death by police. Two years into his tenure, his campus residence was invaded by a machete-wielding activist who was upset with the university’s plans to build volleyball courts and other facilities at People’s Park, the scene of 1960s protests. She was killed when she lunged at police with the weapon, but Tien and his wife escaped unharmed.

The crises showcased Tien’s style. With his thick accent and goggle-like glasses, the chancellor was feared by some to be a chilly technocrat, but he proved quite the opposite. After the fire, he spent the entire day at the fraternity house, soothing students and even helping to identify one victim’s body to spare the parents a trip to the coroner’s office. During the hostage crisis, he was the first to embrace the students after they were freed and later wrote personal notes to their parents.

He said the most important crisis he faced as chancellor was the recession of the early 1990s, which left UC Berkeley with a $70-million shortfall within four years. During the same period, 27% of the faculty left on early retirement packages offered to help offset the fiscal problems. Tien said at the time that the combination of challenges could mean the difference between Berkeley being excellent or mediocre.

But the campus lost no academic luster. In 1995, for the third consecutive decade, UC Berkeley was ranked one of the nation’s premier research universities by the National Research Council.

Much of the credit was given to Tien, who personally recruited top young scholars to teach at the school and sought to ensure that prominent professors would remain on the faculty.

He also made fund-raising a top priority.

During his tenure, he helped bring in more than $975 million, becoming the most prolific fund-raiser in UC Berkeley history. He achieved that in part by drawing on the untapped largess of Asian donors. In the week before he announced his resignation, the school received a $15-million gift from Taiwanese donors for a new East Asian library. It was the largest international gift Berkeley had ever received.

Tien’s job heated up again in 1995, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson pushed the UC Board of Regents to end the use of race, ethnicity or gender in admissions. The regents voted to ban the policy over the objections of Tien, the eight other chancellors and faculty leaders on every campus.

The debate continued the next year, when Proposition 209 was placed on the ballot.

Tien spoke out against both drives, even though friends had hinted that, as he noted in a 1996 New York Times article, “it might make more sense” for him as an Asian American to support them. Affirmative action, critics said, gave priority to underrepresented minorities over qualified Asians and whites. But Tien maintained that the policy was needed until the playing field was level for everyone.

“He was really rather fearless in the way he spoke out on issues, so much against major currents,” said Berkeley Asian American studies professor Ling-chi Wang, who noted that Tien also spoke out against Proposition 187, the controversial anti-immigrant measure that was passed by voters in 1994 but largely invalidated in a court challenge. “That’s what made him such a great leader and intellectual.”

In 1995, after reports surfaced that Tien was considering other jobs, the regents gave him a $20,000 raise. He used $10,000 of it to start the Berkeley Pledge, a $1-million program to help prepare disadvantaged students to meet admission requirements at UC Berkeley. The first concrete step taken by any UC campus to maintain racial diversity after the regents banned affirmative action, it targeted youths for the college track as early as the seventh grade, providing university mentors, special academic coaching and scholarships.

Tien’s announcement in July 1996 that he planned to resign within a year caught the campus by surprise. Although there was speculation that he was embarrassed by the regents’ handling of the search for a new UC president the previous year (several regents had led him to believe he was a leading candidate), the chancellor acknowledged only that budget worries and the difficulty of satisfying the often conflicting constituent groups had made the job more challenging.

He remained on campus as a distinguished professor of engineering and was the first recipient of UC’s presidential medal.

An ardent defender of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist once suspected of passing nuclear secrets to China, Tien was active politically as a founder of the Committee of 100, a national organization of prominent Chinese Americans.

His survivors include his wife, Di-Hwa, of Berkeley; daughters Phyllis, a UC San Francisco physician, and Christine, deputy city manager of Stockton; a son, Norman, who teaches engineering at UC Davis; and four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Nov. 14 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. A reception will follow.

His family requests that memorial donations be made to the UC Berkeley Foundation for the Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies, c/o Vice Chancellor-University Relations, 2440 Bancroft Way, No. 4200, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-4200.