Chu Rejects UC Offer; Will Remain in Houston
Paul C. W. Chu, a leader in the evolving superconductor revolution, ended a vigorous recruiting tug-of-war Friday by rejecting UC Berkeley’s efforts to lure him from the University of Houston, university sources said.
Chu, who hedged his answer when faced with a March 1 deadline, complied with a second deadline Friday morning by calling P. Buford Price, chairman of Berkeley’s prestigious physics department, to announce that he will stay in Texas.
“He has built up a group there and he feels responsible to them,” said Marvin L. Cohen, the Berkeley physics professor who first recommended that UC try to recruit his friend in Houston.
“The program there is coming along at a resounding clip. The university has been very supportive, as have the federal government and local sources,” Cohen said. “And a lot of this centers around him.”
Chu was concerned that by leaving for Berkeley, he would be abandoning the people who had faithfully supported him in his 10 years at the University of Houston, where he has advanced the development of practical superconductors.
Superconductors are materials that transmit electricity without resistance. Scientists and engineers believe that superconductors, if made practical, may revolutionize computers, trains, motors and many other electrical devices.
Until recently, however, superconductors worked only at fantastically cold temperatures, hundreds of degrees below zero. Chu and others have been working to find new materials that can carry useful amounts of electricity at warmer, more practical temperatures.
The potential benefits of the new superconductors have attracted large sums of research money to Chu and other scientists in the field and have, in the words of one scientist, “put (the University of) Houston on the map.”
Some of that support, perhaps most of it, might have been lost by the University of Houston had Chu left for the more prestigious appointment at Berkeley.
“I suspect much of the support (at the University of Houston) was coming in with his name on it,” Cohen said.
Both schools offered to put at Chu’s disposal entirely new, well-funded, well-staffed superconductivity laboratories, and both had offered teaching schedules that would accommodate both his research and the global demand for his services as a speaker and consultant.
Houston also offered a nine-month teaching salary of $150,000, along with an option to earn as much as $50,000 more during summers. Berkeley did not disclose its salary offer, but a university spokesman said senior UC professors usually earn a maximum of half that amount.
Chu is a very visible figure in Houston, where his scientific successes inspired many civic and business leaders who had seen the city battered by financial problems in the oil industry.
When it was announced that UC was interested in hiring Chu, elected officials in Texas pleaded with him to stay and urged people to write letters encouraging him to reject the California offer.
Chu also had to consider his wife’s career, Cohen said. May Chu studied physics at UC but later earned a graduate degree in business and now is vice president of a Houston bank.
Her father, Shiing-Shen Chern, 77, is a professor emeritus of differential geometry at UC. The University of Houston offered him a part-time teaching postion as part of its incentive package to keep Chu, but it is not known if he has accepted.
