Berkeley’s Unashamed Achiever : Education: Chang-Lin Tien is used to the debate over Asians as academic stars. He’s one himself.

A stereotype has lurked behind the controversy about alleged anti-Asian bias in UC Berkeley’s admissions policies: Asian-Americans as academic super-achievers.

The culture and discipline of Asian-Americans have propelled them to extraordinary success in higher education. But, Asian-American activists say, bigots resent their achievement and fear that universities will be swamped by Asian students.

Into this debate steps Chang-Lin Tien, named Thursday as the next chancellor of UC Berkeley and thus the first Asian-American to head a UC campus, or possibly any major research university. He and his family make no apologies for the super-achiever image.

“I think he is a super-achiever and can accomplish anything,” Masayoshi Tomizuka, mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley, said of the man who was once his colleague and will soon be his boss. “Aggressive might not be a good word, but he is very outgoing.”

Tien, 54, and his wife Di-Hwa have two daughters and a son. All three children graduated from UC Berkeley and are enrolled in tough graduate programs: Norman in microelectronics at UC San Diego, Phyllis at UC San Diego Medical School and Kristine at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Multiple degrees is a family tradition. Born the son of a banker in pre-revolutionary China, the chancellor-designate earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from National Taiwan University, a master’s from the University of Louisville (where, as a non-white, he felt anguished in the segregated South of the 1950s) and another master’s and a Ph.D from Princeton. All by age 24.

He went on to a long, prize-winning teaching and research career, specializing in heat transfer technology, at UC Berkeley, and was vice chancellor for research there. He was praised for helping to improve--after much controversy--conditions for laboratory animals. Since 1988, Tien has been second in command at UC Irvine.

Tien’s big disappointment appears to have been when he, at 5 feet, 6 inches, realized that he was too short to play college basketball in the United States, as he had in Taiwan. “I like a challenge, but that was just a little bit too much,” he once recalled.

Prof. Joseph Frisch, who worked with Tien in the mechanical engineering department at Berkeley, described him as a bright, friendly and hard-working man “who can be very hard-nosed if he has to be. He is not the typical engineer. He is not just a problem-solver. I think he has a very good understanding of psychology.”

Ling-chi Wang, chairman of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, said that Tien, a naturalized American citizen, “is not the stereotype of the Chinese scholar being very reserved, very dignified, very soft-spoken, nor is he the stereotype of the aggressive, white executive slapping people on the back. He is sort of in between.”

Tien takes over at UC Berkeley on July 1. He faces replacing a large number of professors expected to retire in the next few years and boosting the number of minority teachers while maintaining the school’s worldwide reputation for excellence. He also inherits a federal investigation into possible ethnic bias in admissions, which follows several inconclusive state and university probes into the same area.

“I don’t think any world class university can achieve excellence without diversity,” said Tien, who retains a strong Chinese accent. “So diversity and excellence must come hand in hand.”