Albert H. Bowker, a former chancellor of UC Berkeley who was a stabilizing force on the campus after the student unrest of the 1960s, died Sunday at a retirement home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 88.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said.
Bowker went to Berkeley in 1971 with a reputation as an innovator who championed a controversial open admissions program at the 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 '60s, had not entirely settled down when 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 Bowker's dismantling of Berkeley's criminology school.
"I think the main function of the university . . . is teaching and scholarship and not changing the world, no matter how desirable that may be," he told The Times in 1971.
Once the tumult subsided, Bowker began to refocus the institution on its academic mission, abolishing weak departments and opening others. He met the severe financial constraints imposed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan with practicality and a new emphasis on fundraising.
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.
"Al Bowker was an outstanding chancellor who paved the way for UC Berkeley into the modern era," Robert J. Birgeneau, Berkeley's current chancellor, said in a statement this week.
A bulky, rumpled man (descriptions of him often included the phrase "unmade bed"), Bowker was an MIT-trained mathematician who earned a doctorate in statistics from Columbia University in 1949.
He was born Sept. 8, 1919, in Winchendon, Mass., and grew up in Washington, D.C. Bowker joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1947 as an assistant professor of math and statistics. He was chairman of the 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.
