Berkeley May Beckon UCI’s Tien : Education: Executive vice chancellor at Irvine is said to be a leading candidate for the top job at Cal, which would make him the first Asian-American to head a UC campus.

Chang-Lin Tien, currently second in command at UC Irvine, is a leading candidate to become chancellor of UC Berkeley and thus the first Asian-American to head a UC campus, sources said Sunday.

Tien, a 53-year-old China native, is an internationally recognized expert in mechanical engineering and a former vice chancellor for research at UC Berkeley. He joined UC Berkeley in 1959 and came to UC Irvine as executive vice chancellor in 1988.

If chosen, Tien, who once faced segregated drinking fountains in Kentucky, would head a prestigious and argumentative campus that has been under fire for its policies on admission of Asian-American students and hiring of minority faculty.

Tien declined to comment Sunday on reports from several sources that he is among the finalists recommended to UC President David P. Gardner by a search committee.

“Any comment has to come from the university,” Tien said.

Gardner must recommend one name to the UC Board of Regents to succeed Ira Michael Heyman, who is retiring after 10 years as Berkeley’s chancellor.

The regents are scheduled to meet Thursday in San Francisco to discuss the location of the first of three proposed new campuses. Ron Kolb, a spokesman for Gardner, said that if the Berkeley chancellorship is to be taken up at that meeting, the matter would have to be added to the agenda by this afternoon.

“The fact is that President Gardner has not made a decision or a recommendation,” Kolb said Sunday.

The San Francisco Examiner reported Sunday that Tien is in line for the job.

Faculty and administrators at UC Irvine said Tien’s candidacy had been rumored there for months. Several were disappointed by the reports and said they would consider the departure of a talented administrator and scientist a great blow to UC Irvine.

“To be quite truthful, I’m kind of disappointed if he’s leaving,” said John Liu, co-chairman of UC Irvine’s Asian Faculty Staff Assn. “I think he’s brought dialogue the campus has long needed and he’s shown a sensitivity to a lot of pressing issues that the administration hasn’t always (shown).”

Liu and others said Tien had played a leading role in recruiting minority faculty and instituting a new “international breadth requirement.” As of next year, all incoming freshmen will be required to take one class on a multicultural issue and one class on an international issue.

Kathy Jones, associate vice chancellor at UC Irvine, said Tien had also taken steps to give faculty a greater voice in managing the campus.

Tien was born in Wuhan and fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Communist takeover on the mainland. He graduated from National Taiwan University and went to Louisville, Ky., in 1956 to earn a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

“When I got off at the bus station, I saw drinking fountains that said ‘whites only’ and drinking fountains for ‘colored,’ ” Tien told The Times in a 1988 interview. “I was very disturbed. I didn’t know which fountain I was supposed to use.”

Tien went on to earn a second master’s degree and then a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Princeton University.

Tien has won a distinguished teaching award from Berkeley, a Guggenheim fellowship, and prestigious scientific awards from West Germany and Hong Kong. He also held the Berlin Chair in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.

As a consultant for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he helped solve the problem of keeping heat-shielding tiles from falling off U.S. space shuttles in the early days of the program.

Tien lives with his wife, Di-Hwa, in University Hills.