Academia Sinica mourns death of Tien Chang-Lin

Tien Chang-lin (田長霖), the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley from 1990 to 1997, an outspoken advocate of affirmative action and a member of Academia Sinica, died Tuesday at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Redwood City, California. He was 67.

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 (李遠哲) has sent a condolence message to Tien's family in San Francisco, Lee's aide said.

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 (吳京), also a member of Academia Sinica, said Tien was a kind-hearted man with a big smile.

"Tien offered many valuable suggestions on Taiwan's academic, educational, social and political affairs during his visits here," Wu recalled.