Albert Bowker, 88, chancellor of UC Berkeley in the 1970s
LOS ANGELES - Albert H. Bowker, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, who was a stabilizing force on the campus after student unrest of the 1960s, died Jan. 20 at a retirement home in Portola Valley. He was 88.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said.
Dr. Bowker came to Berkeley in 1971 with a reputation as an innovator who championed an open-admissions program at City University of New York, which he had led for eight years.
The Berkeley campus, a central battleground of the student protest movement of the 1960s, had not entirely settled down when Dr. Bowker took over, but he moved quickly to demonstrate that a new era was beginning.
Early in his tenure he suspended two students who had disrupted the class of a noted East Asian history scholar. He ordered the police to clear a building that had been occupied by students opposed to his dismantling of Berkeley's criminology school.
Once the tumult subsided, Dr. Bowker began to refocus the institution on its academic mission, abolishing weak departments and opening others. He met the financial constraints imposed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan with practicality and an emphasis on fund-raising.
Under his leadership, alumni support rose from $3 million in 1973 to $23 million in 1979. He also helped create the Berkeley Foundation, which raised the capital for the Bechtel Engineering Center and an expansion of the optometry building.
A native of Winchendon, Mass., who grew up in Washington, D.C., Dr. Bowker joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1947 as an assistant professor of math and statistics. He chaired its statistics department for 11 years until becoming dean of the graduate division in 1959.
His success developing graduate education at Stanford drew the attention of the City University of New York, which named him chancellor in 1963. Over the next several years, enrollment in the system's 20 campuses doubled to more than 200,000.
