Chang-Lin Tien got his first taste of American racism in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the late 1950s, and the Taiwanese graduate student had just arrived at the University of Louisville, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, to study engineering. When Tien boarded a bus for the first time, he paused, shocked to see all the black passengers in the back and all the white riders up front. The driver told him to sit in the front. Reluctantly, he did. The incident disturbed Tien so much that for the rest of the year, he walked or rode a bike to class.

At the University of Louisville, an engineering professor routinely addressed Tien as "Chinaman." When Tien realized the term was derogatory, he asked to be called by his name. The professor wondered how he was going to remember all those crazy-sounding Chinese names and stuck to a plain "hello."

From a graduate student never referred to by name, Tien rose to become the first Asian American to lead a major university. From 1990 to 1997, he served as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. An internationally renowned scientist, he was nearly appointed energy secretary by then-President Bill Clinton. Tien was one of the most recognized Asian Americans in the country, someone who was taken seriously by the mainstream.

Tien died in late October at the age of sixty-seven, two years after being diagnosed with a brain tumor and suffering a stroke. The numerous articles that have been published since his death have remembered him as a scientist and educator of global stature. But there has been less attention paid to another important facet of Tien's remarkable career: his lifelong crusade against racism. The extent of racial inequality in this country had disturbed him from the first time he set foot on an American campus, and as a public figure Tien spoke repeatedly against discrimination and on behalf of Asian Americans and other people of color. In this sense, Tien was the closest thing to a national leader that we Asian Americans have ever had.

One of my first memories of Tien is at his daughter's wedding. The groom was a close friend of mine. After a beautiful ceremony and pleasant dinner, the dance floor opened up and Tien led the charge, jumping up and flailing about with the energy of a nuclear explosion. It wasn't my image of a university chancellor, but I didn't know enough about Tien at the time.

Tien was a man of stark contrasts: a maniac dancer and a leading authority in the science of heat transfer, an academic revered in the business community, a builder of bridges between cultures who refused speech tutoring to remove his strong accent. He was truly a "people" person in all senses of the term, someone who was as comfortable running onto the field with the Cal football team as he was meeting with former Chinese premier Jiang Zemin. And people of all types responded to his charisma. Astronomers named an asteroid after him. Tien was picked to serve on the boards of numerous corporations and institutions. Today, one of Chevron's oil tankers sails as the Chang-Lin Tien.

"When we walked down the streets of Taipei together, it was like walking through the streets of Chicago with Michael Jordan," said Dan Mote, who served as vice chancellor under Tien, at a recent memorial service attended by 1,500 people at UC Berkeley. "People ran out of their shops and restaurants to greet him. Hotels offered him suites."

In spite of his popularity in many circles, Tien was not afraid to take controversial positions. He was a staunch supporter of affirmative action even as the voters of California and the University of California Regents moved to dismantle the programs at university and state institutions in the mid-1990s.

In 1996, Tien wrote an essay for The New York Times in support of affirmative action policies. The university chancellor talked about his own experiences with racism forty years earlier, as a graduate student in Louisville. "As I struggled to finish my education here, I also encountered the ugly realities of racial discrimination," he wrote. "This, too is part of America's legacy and--like it or not--it is inextricably connected to the need for affirmative action."

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