UC Berkeley Chancellor Encourages Ethnic Mix

With the increasing ethnic diversity of student populations, university and college administrators should create a campus atmosphere that fosters integration as well as individual ethnic pride, UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien said Thursday.

“I tell the ethnic students at my school, ‘I encourage you to get your own, strong identities,’ but I also like to make all groups comfortable to interact,” Tien said.

This should help ease tensions resulting from the new boom in Asian-American students, but he downplayed any trouble as “a natural process when we go through demographic changes.”

Tien was executive vice chancellor at UC Irvine for 1 1/2 years before becoming the first Asian-American to head a major research university in the United States in July, 1990. He spoke to about 50 people from the county’s Asian community in a meeting sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove) at the Kono Restaurant in Santa Ana.

In an interview before his speech, the chancellor said there have been at most two racial incidents at his school in the past two years.

Tien said this school year has yielded record-breaking percentages of Asian-American students on campuses in the UC system, 51.4% of the freshman class at UC Irvine, 37% at UCLA and 35% at UC Berkeley.

Tien told the gathering that he recently made it a requirement for Berkeley students to take classes in American culture because it is important for young people to understand its diversity.

“We got a lot of heat for that because my specialty is heat transfer,” quipped the chancellor, who first joined UC Berkeley in 1959 as an internationally recognized mechanical engineer specializing in heat transfer technology.

“They said, ‘Why did you do this? This is ethnic study,’ ” he said. “But in America, so many different groups are contributing to the culture so we need to study our own cultures.”

Tien, who served as UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research in 1983, assumed his newest position at a time when shifting demographics have resulted in increased challenges for school officials in higher education, as racial tensions are high on campuses across the country.

Thursday’s gathering was Umberg’s second meeting with his Asian-American Advisory Committee. Umberg said he invited Tien to create a dialogue between Orange County’s Asian community and leaders of higher education.