Wednesday, October 30, 2002
IN THREES
That's how death seems to roll. Radio is now reporting Jason Mizell, better known as Jam Master Jay, was shot in the head and killed in a Queens studio just a couple of hours ago.
I also got word this morning that a towering Asian American, Dr. Chang-Lin Tien, passed away. Dr. Tien was a shining role model for many of us. He fought many difficult battles for justice on behalf of Asian Americans and oppressed people with the greatest of integrity. He was always the embodiment of grace, style, and joy. He will be deeply missed.
Here's the AP wire this morning on Dr. Tien's passing.
HEADLINE: Former Berkeley chancellor dead at 67
BYLINE: By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: BERKELEY, Calif.
BODY:
Chang-Lin Tien, who became the first Asian-American to head a major U.S. university in his seven years as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, has died. He was 67.
Tien, who had a debilitating stroke after surgery for a brain tumor in fall 2000, died Tuesday at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Redwood City, Berkeley officials said in a statement released Wednesday.
An internationally known expert on heat transfer and thermal science - he helped developed the insulating tiles for the space shuttle - Tien was also famous for his support of social causes, speaking out in favor of affirmative action before and after UC's governing board of regents dropped race-based admissions in 1995.
"His energy and optimism, his willingness to fight for the principles he cherished, and his loyalty and love for this campus made it stronger and better," Berkeley chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement.
A small man with a big smile, Tien was well known on campus as an unabashed Cal booster. He was a cheerleading, fist-pumping fixture at Berkeley games and rallies and was apt to squeeze an ebullient "Go Bears!" - delivered with the Chinese accent that never left him despite decades in the United States - into speeches and conversations of every stripe.
The 5-foot-6 Tien, who for one year played semiprofessional basketball in Taiwan, used to joke that his one frustrated ambition was to play in the NBA. "I worked really hard but my height never changed in the upward direction," he told Asian Week in 1997.
Born in Wuhan, China, on July 24, 1935, Tien's family fled the Japanese to Shanghai during World War II. In 1949, after civil war put Chinese communists in control, they fled again, this time moving to Taiwan.
In 1956, Tien traveled to Kentucky to get his master's degree at the University of Louisville. Living in the south in the 1950s, he felt discrimination firsthand, an experience he never forgot.
In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press he recalled standing in confusion before water fountains labeled "whites only" and "colored."
Which one, he wondered, was for him?
A professor took to calling him "Chinaman." Tien told him to stop.
Tien got his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1959. He finished fast, 20 months. He had an incentive. His family had forbidden Tien and fiancee Di-Hwa to marry until the doctoral degree was his.
That same year, Tien joined the Berkeley faculty, where he would spend 38 of his 40-year teaching career, leaving briefly in 1988 to serve as executive vice chancellor of UC Irvine. In 1990, he was appointed Berkeley chancellor.
In his first year Tien dealt with a fraternity house fire that killed three students and a hostage taking at a hotel bar near campus in which a gunman killed one student and injured seven others before being fatally shot by police.
In 1992, a local activist with a history of mental illness broke into Tien's campus residence wielding a machete. Police shot and killed the woman.
In one of his less serious crises, he also dealt with the Naked Guy, a student who briefly led a go-bare movement until Tien countered with a nudity ban.
One of the biggest challenges Tien faced was financial, as the California recession of the early 1990s shrank state education funding. Tien put his formidable fund-raising skills to work, helping bring in millions in donations.
In 1995, Berkeley and the rest of the UC system plunged into the national spotlight with the regents' tense 14-10 vote to drop UC's affirmative action programs. Tien argued for keeping race-based admissions and later publicly lamented the drop in the number of black and Hispanic students at Berkeley following the vote.
In 1996, Tien submitted his resignation as chancellor, saying he had accomplished his goals.
Later that year, he was in the running for Energy Secretary in President Clinton's cabinet. But that did not materialize after it was reported he had helped relatives of Mochtar Riady, an Indonesian businessman at the heart of a controversy over Democratic campaign financing involving Asian money.
Riady asked Tien for help getting three relatives into Berkeley and also donated $200,000 to Cal. The donation, which was part of $8.5 million from several Asian philanthropists, was legal and Tien was never accused of any impropriety, but there was speculation the connection sank Tien's chances.
Although he never held a cabinet office, Tien earned international recognition for his scientific work in radiative heat transfer. He worked on the Saturn rocket boosters developed in the 1960s to send machines and man into space, helping estimate how much the exhaust plume would heat the base of the rocket. In the 1970s, he worked on the problem of keeping the thousands of insulating tiles glued to the space shuttle to withstand the heat of reentering the Earth's atmosphere.
Tien was a visionary in the field of thermal sciences, said Richard O. Buckius, a former Tien student and now head of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"He marked out new high-impact areas, he did seminal work in those areas, and then he led everybody to the next area," Buckius said.
Tien became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 and was elected in 1991 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, the International Astronomical Union approved the naming of an asteroid after him.
Tien is survived by his wife; three children, Norman, Phyllis and Christine, and four grandchildren.
posted by Zentronix @ 8:09 PM
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