A Position of Prominence : Education: Chang-Lin Tien, new chancellor of UC Berkeley, is the first Asian-American to head a major research university in the United States.

BERKELEY — On a September afternoon in 1956, 21-year-old Chang-Lin, next-to-youngest son of the Tien family of Taiwan, descended the steps of a Greyhound bus and walked into the unfamiliar world of the pre-civil rights South.

Tien had arrived in Louisville, Ky., to study on a teaching fellowship in the University of Louisville’s department of mechanical engineering. His modest means of transportation and the $4,000 that his family had borrowed to help finance his education, belied their recent history of political power and affluence.

Before his death four years earlier, Tien’s father, Yun-Chien Tien, had been second in command in the Nationalist government of Taiwan. His sweetheart and wife-to-be, Di-Hwa Liu, was the daughter of Gen. Ru-Jen Liu, who had commanded Chiang Kai-shek’s army against Mao Tse-tung’s Communists and again against the Japanese during World War II.

Now, however, the family’s finances were depleted and Tien was arriving in the United States in the manner of many an immigrant. But neither his hopes nor his uncertainties had prepared him for the realities of the Louisville bus station. Around him signs announced the segregation of washrooms, lunch counters and drinking fountains: “whites only” and “colored.”

“I was really confused and scared. I thought, ‘I’m yellow. I don’t know if that’s colored or white,’ ” he remembers.

“That left a very deep impression on me. This is a tremendous injustice to humiliate any human being that way.” In a rare departure from his habitual composure, Tien raises his right hand to his forehead, crooking his fingers into a claw.

It has been more than three decades since he got off the bus in Kentucky, and Tien, 55, now sits on a cream-colored leather sofa that’s as soft as a baby’s skin, in the living room of his spacious home high in the Berkeley hills.

In a life marked by reversals of fortune and steep ascents, Tien has achieved a new position of prominence. In July, he assumed his duties as chancellor of UC Berkeley, becoming the first Asian-American to head a major research university in the United States.

He does so at a time when racial tensions are high on campuses across the country and rapidly shifting demographics are presenting the paramount challenges of the decade in higher education.

As Berkeley’s 31,000 students begin fall classes today, Tien faces high-ignition issues of revising minority student admissions and increasing cultural diversity in curriculums. His most pressing priority, however, is recruiting more minority professors to reflect the changing composition of the student body.

In the wake of the school’s affirmative action policies in the 1980s, white enrollment has declined from 67% of Berkeley undergraduates in 1983 (72% of the nine-campus UC system) to 45% last year, and 39% of the freshman class. The faculty, on the other hand, is 89% white.

As at universities from Stanford to Harvard, and notably at UCLA and UC Irvine, Berkeley meanwhile has seen rising numbers of Asian-American students, who accounted for 26% of last fall’s freshmen. At the same time, Asian-Americans accounted for only 5.6% of the faculty, compared to 15% of the country’s Ph.Ds. Latinos composed 17.3% of 1989 freshmen compared to 2.4% of faculty, and blacks 9.4% of freshmen compared to 2% of faculty.

Over the next 10 years, about half of Berkeley’s professors, recruited in the 1950s, will retire. As he replaces them, observers say, Tien will face the dual challenges of maintaining the university’s standard of excellence while increasing the faculty’s ethnic diversity.

A sensitivity to multicultural issues gives Tien an advantage in dealing with diversity and makes him a potential national role model whom educators will watch. But even handled with Solomonian wisdom, it is a situation that experts judge is all but impossible to manage without inflaming emotions.

“The two largest assignments he has may be in conflict because the pool of extremely able people for faculty appointments within some of the minority groups is regrettably small,” notes Clark Kerr, former Berkeley chancellor and UC system president. “Putting them together, they’re really quite an overwhelming assignment.”

For university chancellors generally, Kerr predicts, “it won’t be as bad as the ‘60s, but it’s going to be a tough decade.”

The challenge does not unnerve Tien, however. When he gathers with his three brothers (a fourth brother died of cancer 15 years ago) and two sisters, they repeat to each other with sibling pride in their heritage: “You have to do your best because you are responsible for Tien’s family.”

Whether meeting foreign diplomats, student leaders or journalists, Tien greets new acquaintances with the warm handshake and sizable smile that prompt people to describe him immediately as personable. Athletically compact, self-assured and relaxed, he wears goggle-sized glasses and endures unruly tufts of hair that give him the air of a boyish scholar.

Longtime friends and associates characterize him as consistently cheerful and positive, and can remember no time that he expressed frustration or lost his temper. “He would have made a good Boy Scout,” quips Noble Prize-winning chemist Yuan T. Lee, who has known Tien for 15 years.

By his own evaluation, the chancellor is a comfortable combination of Chinese and American cultures, with a Confucian emphasis on qualities of self-discipline and moderation, family loyalty and a strong work ethic, and an American insistence on democratic principles and open lines of communication.

“I’m very straightforward. I’m not a flashy type,” he says. “I like to do my homework, organize, consult with people. But once I have consulted a lot, I like to make decisions.”

“He doesn’t govern by consensus. He’ll make decisions that are not necessarily popular,” says George Leitmann, a neighbor and associate dean in the College of Engineering. “He’s not confrontational, but that doesn’t mean he’s in agreement with what you say.”

His rise to the post of chancellor, Tien believes, is a logical outcome of his career. He joined Berkeley in 1959 as an internationally recognized mechanical engineer specializing in heat transfer technology, became vice chancellor for research in 1983, and served for 1 1/2 years as executive vice chancellor at UC Irvine before returning to Berkeley in the No. 1 post.

In announcing Tien’s appointment, UC President David P. Gardner brushed aside any suggestion that the choice was influenced by his ethnicity. Tien allows, however, “I think they probably feel very happy to find a highly qualified minority to assume this office. It’s good for the University of California and for the state. It also shows the commitment of the chairman of the regents and the president to affirmative action.”

For the country’s Asian-American community, Tien’s vault to the top spot marks a quantum break-through of “the glass ceiling.”

Previously, the largest U.S. university headed by an Asian-American was San Francisco State, where Chia Wei Woo was chancellor from 1983 to 1988. Before that, Asian-Americans led colleges of 5,000 students and less, says S. B. Woo, president of the national civil rights group, the Organization of Chinese-Americans.

While Woo calls Tien’s appointment “salubrious” for Asian-Americans, he says, “The advantage of having a minority as a CEO or the chancellor of a university is not that this person will be bending backward to help the minority. It’s because that person from his own experience would have a special sensitivity in this area. His experience is different than that of most people who have made it to that high level.”

Evidence of widespread Asian-American support for Tien’s appointment comes most noticeably in the morning’s mail. On a late summer’s day, Tien sits at his massive oak desk, ticking through letters, many in Chinese characters--fan mail (“I’m a national hero (in Taiwan),” he says) and a sheaf of requests for admission to Berkeley and aid in coming to the United States.

Around him a few artifacts define the office: a statue of a slim figure pushing a boulder, a small meditative Buddha and a miniature basketball hoop (Tien played semiprofessional ball in Taiwan), given to him by the academic staff of UC Irvine. There is no errant scrap of paper on a working surface.

“Even when I was a boy I always tried to organize everything,” Tien avows. Confronted with clutter, he says, “I just feel I’m not in control.”

Besides the cheers of approval from individuals, governments and private businesses of the Pacific Rim--including Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore--have indicated they will offer Berkeley a previously little-tapped source of financial support.

On his first day in office, the San Francisco-based Tang Foundation, a private philanthropic group, presented Tien with $1 million. And in a one-two punch that demonstrated his diplomatic relations with Taiwan and China, he one day welcomed the powerful liberal mayor of Shanghai, Zhu Rongji, and on the next accepted his second $1-million check, from the minister of education of Taiwan.

Such relations are rooted in the hyphenated identity of his youth. Raised in Shanghai, China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, Tien enjoyed an affluent boyhood in an imposing residence staffed with servants. His father was the city’s finance commissioner, an influential position that assured the family’s escape before the Communist takeover in 1949.

Tien recalls the Sunday morning when word came that Communist troops were 20 miles from Shanghai. Carrying only hand luggage, the family rushed to the airport.

“It was like the fall of Saigon,” he says, remembering the panic and fright. As a 14-year-old, his greatest regret was leaving behind his stamp collection.

“I feel so bad. I had so many good stamps and I lost all of them,” he says wistfully.

Arriving in Taiwan, the large family lived as refugees in a space the size of Tien’s present living room. Under the strain, his father’s health began to deteriorate. “He was devastated by the shock. He worried so much about my sisters and brothers’ education,” Tien says.

When the former mayor of Shanghai became the governor of Taiwan in 1950, Yun-Chien Tien was made his No. 2 man, and the family regained its economic status, with a gardener, a butler, a chauffeur, a town and a country house.

But two years later Tien’s father died of a heart attack. The family was obliged to abandon its life style, and all but one of the children eventually emigrated to the United States.

Tien was the third to arrive, and in Louisville he encountered racism for the first time face to face.

“I personally had difficulties,” he says, remembering the older professor he was assigned to assist in the laboratory.

“For the first few months he called me ‘Chinaman’ in front of the other students. I didn’t know ‘Chinaman’ was an insulting term.” When the lab technicians told the new graduate student that he was the object of discrimination, he decided to speak directly to his superior.

“That took some courage,” Tien says. “I relied on this teaching fellowship. I was afraid that if I had any confrontation with the professor my support might be cut off. But I feel very strong that I can’t let this go on.”

When the professor denied that “Chinaman” was a derogatory term, Tien pressed him. “I said, ‘No, you call my name.’ He said, ‘How can I pronounce your name, Ching, Chang, Chong? ‘ I got so geared up I said, ‘If you can’t remember my name don’t call me anymore.’ So he’d say, ‘Hello, come.’ But he never called me ‘Chinaman’ anymore.” Tien laughs hoarsely at his anecdote.

If racial prejudice was harsh for Tien, so was stretching his meager budget. “I tried to save every penny,” he says. At the University of Louisville, he ate only once in the school cafeteria, walking long distances to a poor section of town where a meal could be had even more cheaply.

Later, at Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, he would walk two miles carrying a large suitcase of dirty clothes to a graduate school dormitory where the washing machines cost 40 cents less than the town’s Laundromats. He would make the trek at midnight, he says, finding it “awkward” to be seen.

From Princeton, Tien came to Berkeley as acting assistant professor of mechanical engineering, following the proddings of his thesis co-adviser.

Today, Tien and Di-Hwa have three grown children, all former presidents of Berkeley’s honor society. Reflecting their dual heritage, they each bear an Anglo-Saxon and a Chinese name: Norman Chihnan (meaning the very best wood ) , 28, is working on his doctorate in microelectronics at UC San Diego; Phyllis Chihping ( peaceful ), 25, is in her third year of medical school at UC San Diego; Kristine Chihyih ( happy, outgoing ), 22, is studying at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Tien and Di-Hwa speak Chinese together (they met in Taiwan when Tien was her math tutor) and Tien stops daily to buy a Chinese newspaper on his way home from work.

He has maintained close ties to China and Taiwan over the years, despite difficulties. Traveling often to China since President Richard M. Nixon’s watershed visit in 1972, Tien was blacklisted, then restricted to a single-entry visa by Taiwan.

He protested the Tian An Men Square massacre in a telegram to senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and has not returned to the country since, though he says he is considering a trip.

He has also improved his rapport with the more progressive Taiwanese governments of recent years, dining privately in July with President Lee Teng-Hui.

Already he is proving decisive in campus affairs, making his stance on faculty hiring policies clear.

“I would never sacrifice quality for the sake of affirmative action,” he declares. “I feel very strongly that if you try to promote diversity or affirmative action at the expense of quality, you are actually doing a tremendous injustice to the minorities, because you are creating a second, lower class. You have to maintain excellence.”

On the other hand, he is unambiguous about the need for diversity in education, pointing to projections that after the year 2000, there will be no “majority” population in California; whites will dip below the 50% mark.

“If the university is going to educate future leaders, we have to educate in terms of a multicultural society,” he says.

Indeed, in his first meeting with student government representatives, the motivation for faculty diversity becomes evident. The three students are Chinese-American, Pakistani-American and Caucasian; the vice chancellor for undergraduate affairs is African-American and student body president Bonaparte Liu, from Newport Beach, is Chinese-American.

Tien emphasizes that he wants open communications to be the hallmark of his administration. From time to time, he reaches over and pats Liu’s arm for emphasis. Now, at the close of the meeting, Tien escorts the young man to his office door, where they bid each other a farewell thanks that’s as casual as a ciao.

“Hsieh, hsieh, “ says the chancellor.

“Hsieh, hsieh, “ Liu replies.