Frank H. Wu () is an American law professor and author currently serving as the president of Queens College, City University of New York. He served as the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at UC Hastings. He previously served as Chancellor & Dean, receiving unanimous and early renewal for a second term. Wu was also the first Asian American to serve in that position. In November 2015, he announced he would return to teaching. In 2013, the National Jurist ranked Wu as the most influential dean in legal education and the third in the nation among legal educators and advocates influencing the ongoing debate about legal education. He was the first Asian American professor to teach at Howard Law School, as well as the first Asian American to serve as dean of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan. At Wayne, he was the youngest law school dean in the nation at the time of his appointment (36). Wu is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately re-printed in hardcover. Arguing for a new paradigm of civil rights that goes beyond a black-white paradigm, while also addressing subtle forms of racial discrimination, the book has become canonical in Asian American Studies and is widely used in classes on the subject. It has been especially influential for debunking the model minority myth and the perpetual foreigner syndrome. Yellow appears in both the film Americanese, an adaptation of American Knees by Shawn Wong, and the book Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. Wu himself has appeared as a character in Asian America: The Movement and the Moment.
In addition, Wu received a $95,000 grant issued by the federal Civil Liberties and Public Education Fund, to co-author Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese Internment. He is a frequent commentator to newspapers and online journals, including a regular column for Diverse Issues in Higher Education and Daily Journal, the legal newspaper of California. Wu has published professionally in Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian (UK), Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, and Legal Times. He maintained a blog with the Huffington Post and writes as part of the LinkedIn Influencers program. He has published an op-ed article "Why Vincent Chin Matters" in The New York Times and is currently writing a follow-up book to Yellow about the Vincent Chin case. Wu has appeared in Investigation Discovery's televised documentary program "Fatal Encounters" discussing the events and background of the Vincent Chin case.
Early life
Wu was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 20, 1967. Wu's parents were immigrants from Taiwan to the United States. Wu's father was an engineer at Ford Motor Company and his father lived in Detroit, Michigan.
In his book Yellow and other writings, Wu recounts how his childhood experience of being the only Asian American among his classmates and the schoolyard taunting he endured as a result of his race alerted him to racial inequalities at an early age. He further describes how his attempts to assimilate and reject what was "Asian" only seemed to reinforce his marked difference to his peers.
When Wu was a teenager, a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, was killed by two white autoworkers in Highland Park, Michigan. The multiple criminal and civil cases that ensued throughout the 1980s have been recognized as birthing the Asian American victims and Asian American movement, and were marked as the 34th Michigan Legal Milestone in 2009. It was the Vincent Chin case that inspired Wu to pursue an active role in civil rights advocacy and the law.
Education
Wu earned his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1988 and his J.D. degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1991. He completed courses at Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Career
Wu was formerly a law professor at Howard University, resuming a role he held from 1995 to 2004, and visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught Asian Americans and the Law. He also was a CV Starr Foundation Visiting Professor at the School of Transnational Law at Peking University, in its English language JD program, in summer of 2009. He has previously taught at Stanford, Michigan, Columbia, Maryland, George Washington University, and Deep Springs College.