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Award Recipients 2007 |
HOME > SCHOLARSHIPS & AWARDS > TIEN EDUCATION LEADERSHIP AWARDS
Archive of ReflectionsChang-Lin Tien: Facing Challenges
Budget Cuts | Affirmative Action and Diversity | Language
"I thought most chancellors viewed him as being very innovative and were often steps behind him as he proceeded to do things that needed to be done in the University of California. He was very vigorous in his defense of the university's policies. He took on some formidable forces." Richard Atkinson
"He always felt that you could sit down and talk issues through. He was very optimistic about that, that all these issues can be resolved in some way. And he really did believe that every crisis, there's an opportunity there that you want to be looking for, what do you learn from the situation. Failure is very important to scientists. So much of what they do in terms of experimental science, they're failing at. They're doing experiments, they don't work, they don't work, they don't work. But they're learning at the same time, why it didn't work, try it another way, etc. And he certainly brought that into this job and so would be wiling to take risk and do things. John F. Cummins
"I mentioned his experience in Louisville about whether he was white or colored, about which water fountain, where on the bus. When he moved to Berkeley, he had trouble finding housing. There were some places they didn't allow Asian Americans to live in Berkeley. He has come through as a person for all people. Sometimes when people have those experiences, they become hardened with respect to people who put them in those kinds of situations. For him it was an opportunity and challenge rather than crisis and he moved past it." Horace Mitchell
"We went through very difficult budget cuts. His greatest contribution to the campus may well be his unbelievable ability to be optimistic. I think there was only once or twice that I ever saw him be a little bit down and that was only with me. You never see that in the public eye. He had one personality, and that was upbeat, optimistic, we can solve issues, etc. Obviously the optimism was very, very important. It was the way he was the public face of the institution at a time when it was extremely difficult, when we went through major, major budget cuts. If you were a pessimist in an environment like that, the power of a leader to communicate their feelings and infuse the organization is really a big deal. That was a very, very significant accomplishment, getting people to know we're going to be as good as ever, there wasn't any question about that, we need your help. He was a great fundraiser. There was a huge budget problem. We had these crises. It would have to do with your way of thinking. On the budget, we lost a number of faculty to early retirement. He would look on that as an opportunity to bring new people, really creative people. He was great at doing that. He was just a true champion of the campus." John F. Cummins
"We were having some major budget issues, reductions in state support. A primary concern for Chancellor Tien was that we make sure we preserve the university's academic programs. To achieve that, he actually made deeper cuts in other areas of the university. In anticipation of the [big cuts], the university was considering a voluntary early retirement incentive program with some very good incentives for faculty and staff to retire. Chancellor Tien was very concerned that this would devastate the Berkeley faculty so he took a very strong stance that at Berkeley there needed to be a different system than that, and essentially put his job on the line saying, 'I can’t agree to this.' He got a different arrangement than the rest of the campuses, which is practically unheard of. He had initiated a $1 billion dollar campaign fundraising campaign, which at the time was the largest ever in American higher education. When he heard that Stanford was going to have a $1 billion fundraising campaign, he said that ours should be $1.1 billion. There's a certain competitiveness to him. Certainly this rivalry with Stanford was a rivalry around excellence. He valued that. That particular campaign ended at $1.4 billion, six months ahead of schedule." Horace Mitchell
"Tien came to the Berkeley campus in the early '90s, a very difficult time, when budget cuts were threatening its sense of self-confidence. But even during the most uncertain times, Tien managed to project a sense of direction and hope." Orville Schell
Affirmative Action and Diversity "I remember this was when the Regents passed SP-1 [which dramatically reduced the freshmen enrollment of students of color]. Chancellors got substantial raises, abd I forget what his raise was, $10 or 15,000, a bonus or something. And so he turned right around and gave it to our outreach efforts. I remember other chancellors saying, 'What the hell are you doing?' And he didn’t even think of that. It was just natural." John F. Cummins
"He brought with him values on people as people, and very strong values around diversity, as well as strong values around excellence, and he emphasized that one can have excellence and diversity. That was at a time when people were talking about excellence or diversity, as if you couldn't have both. He just did an outstanding job. A prime example was in the face of the regents' passage of SP-1 and SP-2, the anti-affirmative action rules, in 1995. Chancellor Tien decided that he would start the Berkeley Pledge, which was a way to deal with the consequences of that in a way that would continue to have an avenue for underrepresented students to get into UC Berkeley. We were really working hard to recruit students, many whose families had not had the opportunity, and were first-time college students. Many came from disadvantaged backgrounds. Then came this whole anti-affirmative action movement about whether the university was denying access to qualified white students by admitting under-qualified students of color. The culmination of that was passage of SP-1 and SP-2. It was a very difficult time for us, and how do you maintain these values in an environment that said, 'No, you don’t have a chance'? It was a context in which Chancellor Tien developed the Berkeley Pledge. We spent a good deal of time [discussing] how do we preserve the institutional values, how do we preserve the historic values on diversity that Berkeley has had. Chancellor Tien obviously was central in those." Horace Mitchell
"I think [he had a] clear understanding that affirmative action had been, despite all of the critics' claims, instrumental in increasing the quality of the university. The University of California, certainly Berkeley was there, moved dramatically during that period, and it had it greatest movement towards greatness during the period in which it was most engaged in affirmative action, and in which the diversity of the campus grew as rapidly. It's the right thing for the university. It's the right thing for higher education. He would have said the same thing. Every doctor who graduated from the University of California in the '90s is a better doctor than one who graduated in the '80s because they had been educated in something that's like the real world. The same is true for every teacher, every lawyer. He understood that clearly, and that's the base from which he started. He used to talk about when he came to the United States, what happened to him and how much he was able to accomplish, and he wanted to provide that same opportunity for everybody." Charles Young
"This was in his first year and he was like an acting assistant professor. He was teaching, there were a lot of complaints about how people couldn't understand him in his classes. And the next year, he made fundamental changes to how he taught, which included every night before every lecture being in the classroom with Di-Hwa, his wife, rehearsing the lecture, writing things on the board, so that by the end of that year he received the outstanding teacher award. I mean, if there's anything that exemplifies who he was, that's a very good example. He had to deal with his language issues when he was chancellor too, where did people understand what he was saying. I was hearing complaints that people were having a hard time. I said, 'Well, here's an option. People have been asking questions, there is a person that can do this.' He said no, that Henry Kissinger has an accent, etc., that he just thought that, no, he didn’t have to do that. We were careful in terms of prepared speeches, but in a way it was interesting, because people respond at the emotional level too. It's not just exactly what you're saying. The emotional level, that’s where he was astounding." John F. Cummins
Photo of Chang-Lin Tien by John Blaustein, courtesy UC Berkeley |
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