Immigrant of the Day: Chang-Lin Tien

June 20, 2007

Chang-Lin Tien (田長霖, pinyin: Tián Chánglín, July 24, 1935–October 29, 2002), was chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1990-97. As chancellor, Tien was an outspoken supporter of equal opportunity in higher education and preserved the campus’s preeminence despite a prolonged state budget crisis.

One of the most popular and respected leaders in American higher education and an engineering scholar of international renown, Tien spent nearly his entire professional career at UC Berkeley. He was the campus’s seventh chancellor and the first Asian American to head a major research university in the United States.

Tien was born on July 24, 1935, in Wuhan, China. in 1949, his family fled China’s Communist regime for Taiwan. After completing his undergraduate education at National Taiwan University, Tien arrived penniless in the United States in 1956 to study at the University of Louisville. Supported by scholarships, he earned his master’s degree there and then a second master’s degree and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Princeton University. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1959 as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. In 1962, when he was 26 years old, Tien became the youngest professor to receive UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He became a full professor in 1968, later served as chair for seven years of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and, for two years, 1983-85, was UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research. In 1988, Tien left UC Berkeley when he was appointed executive vice chancellor at UC Irvine. He returned to UC Berkeley as chancellor in 1990.

Known for his “Go Bears!” spirit, Tien was very popular with students, often showing up at student rallies and sporting events wearing his “Cal” baseball cap. He was not uncommonly sighted picking up trash in Sproul Plaza, appearing in the library in the middle of the night during finals week, or checking up on students in the residence halls and classrooms.

Tien was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Academia Sinica (in Taiwan), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (in mainland China). The Tien Center for East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley began construction in 2005.

Tien said his values and ideals were shaped, in part, by the racism and discrimination he encountered in America. To explain his support for affirmative action as a tool to level the playing field in college admissions, he often told the story of how, as a new immigrant, he confronted a South still divided along color lines. “One day I got on a bus and saw that all the black people were in the back, the white people in front. I didn’t know where I belonged, so for a long time I stood near the driver,” Tien would recall. “Finally, he told me to sit down in the front, and I did. I didn’t take another bus ride for a whole year. I would walk an hour to avoid that.

Tien said that, as a student, he had to stop a professor in Louisville from addressing him only as “China man” and confronted housing restrictions against “Orientals and Negros” in Berkeley in the 1950s and ’60s. These experiences made him sensitive not only to victims of racism, he said, but to all people who suffer disadvantage or pain.

In a 1996 essay in the New York Times, Tien made his case for the use of affirmative action in university admissions, in direct opposition to the UC Regents’ decision in 1995 to abolish its use. Tien wrote that America had come a long way since the days of Jim Crow segregation, but that equal opportunity for everyone was not yet a reality. “It would be a tragedy if our nation’s colleges and universities slipped backward now, denying access to talented but disadvantaged youth and eroding the diversity that helps to prepare leaders,” he wrote.

Tien was a naturalized U.S. citizen who said he was deeply grateful to be an American, but he also was proudly Chinese. When he became chancellor, he declined the suggestion from well-meaning supporters that he seek coaching to speak with less of an accent.

For more about Chang-Lin Tien, including links to pictures from his life, click here.