Most Asian-Americans, especially Chinese-Americans, view the resignation of U.C. Berkeley chancellor Chang Lin Tien as a response to six years of humiliating treatment by university and state officials that can only be described as institutional racism. Coming at a time of surging immigrant bashing, his departure dashes hopes that california could finally overcome a century of anti-asian racism. PNS commentator Henry Der, former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, is a veteran civil rights activist.

U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Chang Lin Tien shocked Californians last month when he unexpectedly announced that he will vacate his post at the end of the academic year. Ostensibly, Tien wants to spend more time with his family and in his engineering lab.

In fact, Tien is stepping down because he's been the target of institutional racism -- a racism that California has directed at Asian-Americans, particularly Chinese-Americans, for over a century.

While most non-Asian Californians are largely oblivious to this history, Asian-Americans and overseas Chinese throughout the Pacific are not. For them the U.C. campus always represented a special refuge even during periods when elsewhere in the state they were excluded, exploited, prevented from raising families or otherwise persecuted.

The campus, in fact, was the one equal playing field where Asians could excell regardless of race. In the eyes of many Asians, having an immigrant Chinese with a heavy accent and a Ph.D in mechanical engineering become U.C. chancellor was almost akin to having an Asian elected president of the country.

But if Tien's appointment raised expectations that maybe the era of anti-Asian racism was finally drawing to a close, his resignation has now dashed those hopes. It will be years before Asians, whether in California or in the capitals of the Pacific Rim, feel that same optimism again. Tien's resignation came after a series of humiliations largely unnoticed by the media but deeply felt in the Asian community.

Last year in its bungled search for a president, the U.C. Board of Regents never even considered Tien as a serious candidate for the post. Certain regents faked a positive attitude toward a Tien candidacy, but it was a calculated move aimed at blocking another candidate from being appointed as U.C. President.

Yet here was a man who had raised over three quarters of a billion dollars in private funds for the Berkeley campus since becoming chancellor in 1990. Last year, Tien raised a campus-record $175 million, second only to what Harvard raised, and this year he launched an ambitious billion-dollar development campaign for the campus. While the U.C. system was suffering horrendous budget cuts during the first half of this decade, Tien fought off even deeper cuts that would have decimated his faculty. Under Tien's leadership, Berkeley won distinction as the top-ranked research university in the nation. In 1995, the National Research Council rated 36 of Cal's 37 graduate programs among the nation's top ten.

When Tien spoke out against California's Proposition 187 and immigrant bashing, he received not-too-subtle messages to shut up from higher on. Later on, at the July 20, 1995 UC Regents meeting to dismantle affirmative action, Tien clashed with Gov. Pete Wilson when Berkeley's admission policies to create a diverse student body were misrepresented. After the regents' anti-affirmative action vote, Tien aggressively created the $60 million Berkeley Pledge to identify, recruit and admit promising low-income high school students as Cal freshmen students.

Did the regents or the U.C. President applaud Tien for his initiative? Hardly. When asked to comment about Tien's resignation, U.C. Regent Ward Connerly derisively characterized the Berkeley Chancellor as a "good act" who "got a little sneaky." With this kind of demeaning language, is it surprising that Tien is fed up with the politically manipulated U.C. Regents?

Tien has been an unwavering voice for academic excellence and student diversity. He's the single most effective university leader in the country who at the same time has managed to maintain close contact with students in the classroom and on the campus. He has strengthened the university's ties with former alumni and alumnae especially those in the Pacific Rim nations on the eve of the new Pacific century. The only problem is U.C. doesn't want to recognize him or his accomplishments.

The academic beacon that shone for so many Asians throughout California and the Pacific for almost a century has gone out -- at least for now.