Regents Choose Asian to Head UC Berkeley

The UC Board of Regents on Thursday named Chang-Lin Tien, a mechanical engineer born in China, as the new chancellor at Berkeley. Tien, now second in command at UC Irvine, will be the first Asian-American to head a UC campus.

Asian-American activists say the appointment is especially symbolic because UC Berkeley has been investigated several times for possible anti-Asian bias in admissions.

Tien, 54, was a professor at UC Berkeley for 29 years and was vice chancellor for research there for two years before becoming executive vice chancellor at UC Irvine in 1988. He is an expert in heat transfer and helped design tiles for space shuttles.

After a closed-door vote of the regents, who met at UC San Francisco, UC President David P. Gardner said Tien was unanimously approved as chancellor. He will take over July 1. Gardner said Tien’s ethnicity played no role in the decision.

“Dr. Tien is a scholar of international reputation, an award-winning teacher and a seasoned administrator, who brings impeccable academic credentials to the position,” Gardner said.

Tien said his priorities at UC Berkeley will be strengthening academic programs and adding women and minorities to the student body, faculty and administration. “I think the most important thing is that excellence and diversity are not in conflict. They are complementary to each other,” Tien said.

Tien, whose three children are UC Berkeley graduates, succeeds Ira Michael Heyman, who led the 31,000-student campus--widely considered one of the world’s finest research universities--for 10 years. The job pays $165,100 a year.

The appointment also may be a breakthrough nationally. Asian-Americans have headed large universities before: S. I. Hayakawa was president at San Francisco State University before becoming a U.S. senator. But Tien appears to be the first Asian to lead any of the 56 top-rung research institutions that are members of the Assn. of American Universities, said Peter Smith, an association spokesman.

Tien’s selection was greeted warmly by Henry Der, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco-based group, which has been active in the UC admissions controversy.

“His appointment is substantively and symbolically very important to the Asian-American community in the state,” Der said. However, it does not mean the end of his organization’s push for equal opportunity for Asians in the UC system and should not be interpreted as a “payoff” to the Asian-American community, Der said.

The UC Berkeley campus is considered nationally as the flagship of the UC system, although UCLA, which is larger, bristles at the notion. Chancellor at UC Berkeley is a prestigious, highly visible and often aggravating job. While there is much less political activism than during the 1960s, the Berkeley school and its surrounding city still occasionally explode into protest. And the faculty, with a string of Nobel laureates, can be difficult to manage.

“That is not an easy post,” Der said. “Everybody, including their grandmother and uncle, are coming at you on issues of animal rights, women’s groups, alumni, faculty. Tien may not have the outward bravado of a Michael Heyman, but he certainly has the street smarts and ability to get things done. . . .”

The announcement represents a victory for another minority in academia: engineers. They long have felt passed over for leadership posts in favor of experts in law, science and the humanities, professors say.

However, a high-ranking UC Berkeley professor who said he admires Tien said non-engineers are skeptical that an engineer is the best choice. “There is some concern that his level of imagination might be stunted,” the humanities professor said of Tien.

After Heyman announced his retirement plans in July, Gardner appointed a committee of regents, professors and students to advise him on selecting a new chancellor.

Tien’s competition, sources said, included: UC San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson, who, according to some reports, withdrew his name; UC Berkeley history professor Robert Middlekauff, former director of the Huntington Library in San Marino; and University of Chicago President Hannah Gray. However, Gardner refused to identify any of the five finalists from an original field of 250 and stressed that reports of Atkinson being a candidate were wrong.

One committee member said Tien was the choice of liberal members, and that there was discussion about the symbolism of a minority chancellor. Another person close to the situation said the ethnic issue received too much attention, and that Tien is highly qualified: “It would be damned hard to say he got the job because he is not white.”

UC Irvine teachers, administrators and students said they are upset about losing Tien, who many assumed would succeed Jack Peltason as chancellor there. As executive vice chancellor at Irvine, Tien is credited with bringing more minorities onto the faculty, giving professors more of a say in administration and guiding the school’s academic master plan for the future, including a proposal to start a law school.

As a result of Tien’s move, Peltason will continue as UC Irvine’s chancellor past his expected July, 1991, retirement date, Gardner said.

Over the past few years, several studies and legislative hearings on possible anti-Asian bias in UC Berkeley’s admissions procedures have proven provocative but inconclusive. Last year, a faculty report found that some policies had hurt the admissions chances of Asian-Americans, but that there was no clear evidence of discrimination. In 1987, the state auditor general found that whites appeared to have a slightly easier time in gaining admission than Asians but also found no pattern of bias.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced it will soon start an investigation of a complaint from an Asian man that UC Berkeley’s affirmative action policies for blacks and Latinos constitute illegal quotas and hurt the chances of other possible freshmen.

Chancellor Heyman has apologized for possible insensitivity to the Asian community and last year instituted admissions reforms that stress test scores more than in the past and ethnicity less. Asian-American activists wanted those changes but say they are not sure the problem is solved.

During the 1980s, the campus accepted all black and Latino applicants who were “UC eligible”--in the top academic 12.5% of all California high school graduates. Partly, as a result of that policy, the percentage of whites among the UC Berkeley freshman class dropped from about 60% to 33% over the past eight years, officials said, while the figures rose from 6.4% to 20% for Latinos, from 5.2% to 11.3% for blacks, but a much more modest rate of 26.2% to 28.6% for Asians.

That angered some highly qualified Asian and Anglo applicants, who felt they were forced to attend second-choice UC campuses, and sparked protests by Asian-American activists that resulted in investigations.

Another issue sure to face Tien is the school’s prickly relationship with the city of Berkeley. UC is planning large increases in student housing away from the central campus, raising suspicions of some city residents and leaders that the university will intrude into residential neighborhoods. In a related matter, the future of People’s Park--and whether student housing should be built there or the land leased to the city as open space--remains unsettled.

Tien was born in Wuhan and fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Communist takeover on the mainland. He graduated from National Taiwan University, earned one master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Louisville and then a second master’s and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Princeton University.

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