Tien Chang-lin (
Tien became the first Asian-American to head a major research university in the US.
He traveled to Taiwan several times to attend the annual Aca-demia Sinica meetings before he became ill.
Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (
The aide said that Academia Sinica's Preparatory Office for the Institute of Applied Sciences and Engineering Research will organize a seminar in the near future in memory of Tien.
Tien learned in 2000 that he had a brain tumor and suffered a severe stroke during a diagnostic test; he never regained his health, the university said.
In an essay in The New York Times in 1996, Tien said that his strong aversion to racism and support for affirmative action grew out of his experiences as a University of Louisville graduate student in 1956.
He said that on his first bus ride in the South, he noticed that the black people were all seated in the back and the white people in the front.
"I didn't know where I belonged," he wrote, "so for a long time I stood near the driver. 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."
He sometimes recalled how a Louisville professor he worked for repeatedly addressed him as "Chinaman," and how, in the 1950s and 1960s, he had run into restrictions against "Orientals and Negroes" in Berkeley's housing market.
He said that while there had been progress, serious problems remained and so did the need for affirmative action.
Tien was born in Wuhan, China, in 1935. In 1949, his family fled to Taiwan, where he completed college. He went to the US as a penniless 21-year-old to study, first in Louisville and then at Princeton, where he earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering in 1959. He then joined the faculty at Berkeley.
His management career started as chairman of Berkeley's mechanical engineering department; he was promoted to vice chancellor for research and then became executive vice chancellor at the University of California's Irvine campus.
When he became Berkeley's chancellor, California was struggling financially, and Berkeley lost about US$70 million in funds over four years.
As chancellor, he slept only four or five hours a night, and continued to lead a research laboratory and guide graduate students, sometimes taking them out for pizza and beer. He also tried to improve undergraduate education.
An expert in thermal sciences and engineering, Tien advised the US government on insulating tiles for its space shuttle and on the nuclear reactor problems at Three Mile Island.
He also took an active interest in Asia and helped found the Committee of 100, a group of Chinese-Americans who worked for better relations with China.
Former education minister Wu Jin (
"Tien offered many valuable suggestions on Taiwan's academic, educational, social and political affairs during his visits here," Wu recalled.
Tien is survived by his wife and three children. His funeral will be held in San Francisco this weekend.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching