Frank H. Wu

Frank H. Wu became a Distinguished Professor following service as Chancellor & Dean. He was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university (HBCU), for a decade; Dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit; a visiting professor at Michigan; an adjunct professor at Columbia; and a Thomas C. Grey Teaching Fellow at Stanford. He taught at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in its inaugural year and again a decade later. In his leadership roles at UC Hastings and Wayne, as well as on faculty at Howard, he was the first Asian American to serve in such a capacity. 

He is dedicated to civic engagement and volunteer service. In April 2016, he was elected by the members of Committee of 100 as their Chair; then in February 2017, the Board named him as the group’s first-ever President. C100 is a non-profit membership organization which invites Chinese Americans who have achieved the highest levels of success to join, working on twin missions of promoting good relations between the US and China and the participation of Chinese Americans in all aspects of public life. Professor Wu was appointed by the federal Department of Education to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), and by the Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission. He currently is a Trustee of Deep Springs College, a highly-selective full-scholarship school enrolling twenty-six on a student-run cattle ranch near Death Valley, where he previously taught for several short periods. He was a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons, from 2000 to 2010.

Professor Wu is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment. He blogged regularly for six years at HuffPo, and his work has appeared in The New York Times and Washington Post.

Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients. He received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins and a J.D. with honors from Michigan. He completed the Management Development Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.