California’s Loss, Integrity’s Gain

Chang-Lin Tien’s resignation announcement surprised many people. It shouldn’t have. The integrity of the UC Berkeley chancellor, his passion for academic excellence and his commitment to the student body would not allow him to continue holding his job in the current political environment that, regrettably, has permeated the UC system.

I am not a personal friend of the chancellor, but I have been fortunate to have met with him every few months over the past several years as part of a group-- scientists, politicians and academics, and corporate and media people--that discusses problem areas in the nation and explores possibilities for consensus in what to do about them. It sounds big and pompous, and some people who participate are indeed so. Others look at it as a futile exercise and act as if they were already back from all possible destinations while the rest of us are still struggling to get there. Not Tien. At 60, his energy and enthusiasm are those of a freshman. He fills the room with his powerful voice and easy laughter, and what he says invariably brings the group to the realities of present-day higher education, and to the enormous challenge that the information age and new technologies pose to learning institutions. As an accomplished engineering professor, he understands the need--and is not short of suggestions for how--to adapt the curriculum to 21st-century demands.

But if that were all Tien has to offer, he would not be at the crossroads he is today. He is a man of singular experience in what is becoming the norm in California: being an immigrant. He remembers how this country offered him not only the possibility to continue his education; it also gave him, a poor student from China, the opportunity to work hard and succeed. He still speaks with disarming awe of the openness he encountered, the social and professional acceptance of the foreign-born, people with different accents and different faces, that few countries in the world exhibit.

In conversation, Tien often reminds people that America is the land of opportunity. He says it like that, in the present tense. California, however, with its increasing animosity against immigrants and minorities, is putting it in the past tense, and Tien is pointing out this grave mistake in the grammar of our history in all possible ways, including quitting his job.

The compliance of the UC Board of Regents with the demands of Gov. Wilson, cynically inspired as they were by the governor’s brief presidential primary bid, fills many a Californian with shame.

How could this University of California chancellor be part of the dismantling of affirmative action, a policy that opens doors to people like him? How could he deny his past, as some prominent minority people are doing these days for reasons that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with politics?

A demanding academician, Tien is a passionate promoter of excellence, which, he believes, does not exclude diversity. On the contrary, he recognizes that in our time, and for the benefit of our collective future, excellence and diversity go hand in hand, intertwined by demographic trends.

Affirmative action’s detractors claim that the admission program lowers academic standards by bringing in unqualified students who, unable to keep up, drop out in large numbers. Tien says that, more often than not, African American and Latino students fail to graduate not because they are unprepared for the intellectual rigors of the UC system but because of their families’ economic needs.

Does this fact make a case for the shifting of racial considerations in college admissions to the apparently more palatable class considerations? Not really. Projections done at UCLA and UC Berkeley show that without the racial criteria, the drop in numbers of African American and Latino students would be huge--30% and 60%, respectively--even when their socioeconomic status is factored in.

Race matters, and it matters on both sides of the fence, in the mainstream and the other streams. Which of us would like to be the only one of our race in a class of 60 or more? More important, what are the chances for long-term support of a public university system that doesn’t serve all segments of the population?

Some obvious ways to improve college eligibility among minority students are, of course, better elementary and high school education and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. Short of any help in that regard from government and other institutions, university administrators have to make decisions that will affect the lives of thousands of youngsters. They could say, as the regents want them to say, “If Berkeley is going to be mainly Asian American and Caucasian, so be it. We are colorblind.” Or they could say, “We want to be colorblind, but racism and inequalities of all kinds abound in our society. We can make a difference in the life of disadvantaged students and offer them the opportunity to study and succeed.”

That is what Tien would want to continue saying to the youths who knock on Berkeley’s doors. He wants to continue instilling in them the concept of America as a land of opportunity. If he can no longer do so, it is California’s loss, and it is shameful.