Frank H. Wu

For other people named Frank Wu, see Frank Wu (disambiguation).
Frank H. Wu
吳華揚
Born (1967-08-20) August 20, 1967
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation Law professor, author, academic administrator
Education B.A., Johns Hopkins University
J.D., University of Michigan Law School
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Spouse Carol L. Izumi

Frank H. Wu (Chinese: 吳華揚; pinyin: Wú Huáyáng) is a law professor and author. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor at UC Hastings. He previously served as Chancellor & Dean, receiving unanimous and early renewal for a second term. In November 2015, he announced he would return to teaching.[1] 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.[2] He was the first Asian American professor to teach at Howard Law School,[3] as well as the first Asian American to serve as dean of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan. 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. 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.[4]

In addition, Wu received the largest grant issued by the federal Civil Liberties and Public Education Fund, to co-author Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese Internment, now the leading textbook on Asian Americans and the law. He has contributed to Fanfare Magazine, reviews for ATPM.com (About This Particular Macintosh), and regularly publishes in various law reviews, newspapers, and online journals. He maintains a blog with the Huffington Post[5] and writes as part of the LinkedIn Influencers program.[6] He has published an op-ed article "Why Vincent Chin Matters" in the New York Times [7] and is currently writing a follow-up book to Yellow about the Vincent Chin case.[8] Wu has appeared in Investigation Discovery's televised documentary program "Fatal Encounters" discussing the events and background of the Vincent Chin case.[9]

Biography

Early years

The son of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan to the United States, Wu was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 20, 1967. In his youth, Wu’s parents moved to Detroit, Michigan, where his father worked as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. In his book Yellow and other writings, Wu claims that 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 civil rights movement, and were marked as the 34th Michigan Legal Milestone in 2009.[10] It was the Vincent Chin case that inspired Wu to pursue an active role in civil rights advocacy and the law.[11]

Career

Wu served as chancellor and dean of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco from July 2010 through December 2015.[12] In 2012, Wu gained national publicity for rebooting legal education, by announcing that his school would be voluntarily reducing its enrollment by 20 percent over the next three years.[13][14][15][16]

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.

From 2004–2008, Wu served as the ninth dean of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan, succeeding the law school’s first female dean, Joan Mahoney (1998–2003). Along with Harold Hongju Koh of Yale Law School and Jim Chen of the University of Louisville School of Law, Wu was one of only three Asian American law school deans in the United States. In April 2007, Wu announced he would resign as dean in May 2008, a year before his appointment was to end, citing his wife's health problems as the leading cause of his resignation.[17] In 2008, he was one of two recipients of the Asian Pacific Fund Chang-Lin Tien Award, given for leadership in higher education. Named for the first Asian American to head a major research university, the award comes with a $10,000 honorarium. He also has received the Trailblazer Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Wu earned his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1988 and his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1991.[18] In 2006, he completed the Management Development Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Prior to his academic career, Wu held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland, Ohio. He then joined the law firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco, concentrating on complex litigation and devoting a quarter of his time to the representation of indigent individuals.

Other activities

Wu accepted the Trustees of Deep Springs' invitation to serve as vice-chair of the college's governing board.[19] Wu previously served as a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, from 2000-2010. As a board member, Wu emphasized the significance of shared governance, asserting that decision-making authority at a university leads by serving its many stakeholders, the most important of which are the students.[20] He became Vice-Chair of that Board following the protests over the appointment of Provost Jane Fernandes as President, in 2006.

Wu is a board member of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights Education Fund, and director of the Committee of 100 (United States), the non-profit group of Chinese Americans seeking to promote better US-China relations and the active participation of Chinese Americans in public life, and has chaired its many research projects.[21] He was the Project Advisor for the Detroit Historical Museum exhibit on Chinatown, which opened in spring 2009.[22]

Wu is a commissioner of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission,[23] an organization created to find ways to eliminate any barriers to advancement of minority Service members.[24] Wu is also one of the 18 current members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, an organization that advises the Secretary of Education on matters related to postsecondary or higher education accreditation and the eligibility and certification process for higher education institutions to participate in the Federal student aid programs.[25]

In 2008, Wu testified before the Detroit City Council regarding governmental reforms following the controversy regarding Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. He also has testified before the United States Congress and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and he appeared as an expert witness on behalf of students who intervened in the historic University of Michigan affirmative action case.

Wu frequently appears in the media and on the college lecture circuit. He has debated Dinesh D'Souza[26] and Ward Connerly, among others, on affirmative action and has appeared on both the O'Reilly Factor and Oprah discussing the same. Wu is represented by the American Program Bureau.

Honors and awards

Publications

Books (author)
Books (chapter)
Books (foreword)
Articles (op-ed)
Articles (law)
Articles (scholarly)

Filmography

References

  1. ↑ A High-Profile Law School Dean’s Sudden Departure, Above the Law, Nov 19, 2015.
  2. ↑ 2012 Most Influential People In Legal Education, National Jurist, Jan. 2013.
  3. ↑ Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White 316 (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
  4. ↑ Louie, Steve, and Glenn Omatsu, eds. Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2001. p. 126.
  5. ↑ Blog Entries by Frank H. Wu, Huffington Post.
  6. ↑ LinkedIn Influencer Posts by Frank H. Wu, LinkedIn.
  7. ↑ Frank H. Wu, Why Vincent Chin Matters, New York Times, June 22, 2012.
  8. ↑ Audio tape: 5th Annual Conference in Citizenship Studies, held by the Center for Study of Citizenship (Mar. 27–29, 2008) (on file with Wayne State University)
  9. ↑ “Killer Swing.” Fatal Encounters. Investigation Discovery. July 25, 2013.
  10. ↑ Hwang, Roland. "Killing Spawned Asian American Civil Rights Movement," Michigan Bar Journal 30 (2009).
  11. ↑ Tom Kervin, WSU Law School's Dean Wu takes pragmatic approach, Detroit Legal News, July 30, 2007, at 1.
  12. ↑ Frank Wu Named UC Hastings New Chancellor & Dean, University of California Hastings College of Law, Dec. 2009.
  13. ↑ Mitch Smith, Prestigious Law School Reduces Admissions, Marks New Trend, US Today, May 1, 2012.
  14. ↑ Eric Young, Lawyer Glut: UC Hastings Slashes Class 20 Percent, San Francisco Business Times, August 31, 2012.
  15. ↑ Richard Zitrin, Viewpoint: Reducing Class Size Is the Right Thing to Do, The Recorder, June 8, 2012.
  16. ↑ Elie Mystal, The Hastings Gambit, Above The Law, May 2, 2012.
  17. ↑ Kervin, p. 2.
  18. ↑ Kervin, p. 1.
  19. ↑ Deep Springs College, Trustees elect newest member to the Board.
  20. ↑ Frank H. Wu, Some thoughts on shared governance at Gallaudet University, 38 On The Green (2009).
  21. ↑ As Hacking Continues, Concerns Grow That Chinese-Americans May Suffer March 21, 2013 New York Times
  22. ↑ Renita A. Smith, WSU graduate opens Chinese cultural exhibition, The South End, Mar. 31, 2009.
  23. ↑ Military Leadership Diversity Commissioners.
  24. ↑ About the Military Leadership Diversity Commission.
  25. ↑ Boards & Commissions, National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity.
  26. ↑ "Affirmative Action Debate." C-SPAN Video Library. Debate broadcast Nov. 8, 1997.
  27. ↑ Wu, Why Vincent Chin Matters p. 4.
  28. ↑ Frank H. Wu, Why Law School Is for Everyone, U.S. News & World Report, Apr. 22, 2009.
  29. ↑ Frank H. Wu, FDR New Deal Legacy Intact, but Internment of Japanese-Americans Lives in Infamy Too, U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 19, 2009.
  30. ↑ Frank H. Wu, On Race: A mockery of Olympic ideals, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 20, 2008.
  31. ↑ Frank H. Wu, The Invisibility of Asian American Scholars, The Chronicle Review, June 14, 2002.
  32. ↑ NOW: Race in America (PBS television broadcast Apr. 12, 2002.)
  33. ↑ NOW: Fourth of July (PBS television broadcast July 5, 2002.)
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