Chang-Lin Tien

Chang-Lin Tien

Chang-Lin Tien was chancellor of University of California Berkeley. He was considered for Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton. Chang-Lin Tien was a member of the Committee of 100 from 1990 - until his death in 2002. He was born in Wuhan, China.

Obituary

From the San Francisco Gate dated Oct. 31, 2002:

"Chang-Lin Tien, the first Asian American to head a major American research university as chancellor of UC Berkeley in the 1990s, died Tuesday at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Redwood City. He was 67.

Tien was diagnosed with a brain tumor in September 2000 and never fully recovered from a stroke.

Throughout his tenure at UC Berkeley, he was heralded for his unflagging enthusiasm, his stand against erosions in affirmative action and for steering the campus through a dark period of budget cuts. Acclaimed as a teacher, scientist, administrator and a powerhouse fund-raiser, he wore his love for the UC community on his sleeve and found that affection reciprocated by students and faculty.

"It is a very tragic loss. He was a person of prodigious energy, just a force of nature who represented the campus well and with distinction," said current UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl.

Tien was a ubiquitous figure on campus, where he took daily walks, stopping to greet and chat with students and even bringing cookies to students studying late at the library. He was so enthusiastic about Cal's athletics that he was rumored to be the man inside the Oski bear costume. During football games he jumped around on the sidelines of the field, shouting "Go Bears!" a refrain he worked into almost every conversation and speech he gave.

Tien was an unlikely choice as chancellor, said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, but he proved beyond all doubt that he deserved it.

"When he came in, people wondered: What is this? He . . . was an engineer, not a humanist. People wondered: Would he know the right people? Would people pay attention?" Schell said. "He really got their attention."

During his 1990-1997 tenure as the university's seventh chancellor, Tien strengthened undergraduate education, fostered diversity on the Berkeley campus and revitalized its intercollegiate athletic programs.

His challenges as chancellor were great. His biggest hurdle was the lagging California economy in the early 1990s, when state funding to the campus dropped $70 million, and 27 percent of active faculty took advantage of an early retirement program.

PRODIGIOUS FUND-RAISER

He raised nearly $1 billion for UC Berkeley and managed to increase financial support for research by 35 percent, even as federal contributions declined. Under his leadership, the campus built several new facilities, including the Haas School of Business. A week before telling UC regents of his plans to resign, Tien announced a $15 million gift from Taiwanese donors toward construction of a new East Asian Library.

"He would sit next to somebody on the plane, and by the time they got to Hong Kong, he would have a donation of a couple of million dollars in his pocket," Schell said of the chancellor's powers of persuasion.

On the political level, Tien had some fractious dealings with UC regents, many of whom did not share his enthusiasm for affirmative action and his commitment to campus diversity.

Gov. Gray Davis, then lieutenant governor, lamented the surprise retirement announcement by Tien in 1996 and attributed it to "shabby" treatment by his fellow regents, saying they showed insufficient respect for Tien's views on affirmative action.

Many of Tien's admirers remain convinced that it was the regents' failure to support him on the issue of affirmative action that led to his resignation. But he refused to blame the board.

In 1995, when rumors began to circulate that Tien was thinking of resigning, regents approved a $20,000 raise. Tien used $10,000 of it to start the Berkeley Pledge, a program designed to maintain campus diversity by preparing underprivileged high school students for UC.

Despite Davis' prediction, UC did not lose Tien as an educator. He returned to the classroom, where he taught thermal engineering, a field in which he had won international recognition for his research in heat transfer technology.

In 1999, the International Astronomical Union approved a request by Chinese astronomers to name an asteroid Tien Chang-Lin Star.

Born in Wuhan, China, Tien was twice a refugee as a young man -- first from the Japanese, then from Mao Zedong's communists. After completing his undergraduate work in mechanical engineering at the National Taiwan University, he came to the United States in 1956 and earned master's degrees at the University of Louisville and at Princeton, where he also earned a doctorate.

Tien joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1959, rising through the ranks to become a full professor, chair of the engineering department and, for two years (1983-85), vice chancellor for research.

In 1962, at age 26, Tien became the youngest professor ever to win UC Berkeley's distinguished teaching award. He was one of only 20 faculty members in the nine-campus UC system to hold the title of "University Professor," a title reserved for scholars of international distinction. Last year, Berdahl awarded him the Berkeley Citation, the highest honor for a retiring faculty member.

Except for two years as executive vice chancellor at UC Irvine, Tien spent his entire professional life at the Berkeley campus.

When he left Irvine for Berkeley, about 1,000 people in the Chinese community, including Secretary of State March Fong Eu, showed up for a farewell banquet. He told the crowd that many of his values were shaped by the racism and discrimination he encountered in America.

During graduate school in the South, he boarded a bus and saw that all the black people were in the back and the whites in the front. Not sure if he was colored or not, he stood perplexed until the driver told him to sit in the front. The experience so disturbed him that he bought a bicycle and didn't take a bus again for a year.

He emerged as an energetic and tireless advocate of diversity and affirmative action. While at UC Berkeley, he raised the profile of women in leadership, appointing the first female vice chancellor and provost and the first female chief of the campus police. He also brought more ethnic diversity to the leadership.

In February 2000, Chevron Corp. named its newest tanker, launched in Korea, the Chang-Lin Tien. The vessel was christened by Tien's wife, Di-Hwa Tien, who survives him.

Tien is also survived by his son, Norman Tien, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis; daughters Phyllis Tien, a physician at UCSF, and Christine Tien, deputy city manager of Stockton; and four grandchildren.

Committee of 100 Delegation to China

From the Committee of 100, Chang-Lin Tien led a delegation to China in 1997:

"A C-100 delegation led by Chancellor Chang-lin Tien attended the reunification ceremonies in Hong Kong and Beijing and later visited Taipei.

'a very pro-Chinese Communist'

An FBI memo from 1973 described Chang-Lin Tien as "a very pro-Chinese Communist".

Praise of Chang-Lin Tien

In 2012, George P. Koo was quoted at the Daily Californian praising Chang-Lin Tien, who was considered to be Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton while he was chancellor of University of California Berkeley, but was removed from the running in the wake of Chinagate, where the Chinese government used agents to funnel money to the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, and Asian donors were solicited in a "pay to play" scheme where high donors were offered invitations to the White House.

"“He’s a symbol of Chinese-American success and contribution in this country, and it’s almost in spite of xenophobia that this country has about China … an example of somebody rising above the barrier,” said George Koo, a member of the Committee of 100, an organization dedicated to improving the political stature of Asian Americans and the United States’ relationship with China."