Frank Wu, Esq.

Frank H. Wu was named president of Queens College, The City University of New York (CUNY), effective July 2020. Wu previously served as chancellor and dean, and then William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Before joining UC Hastings, he was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university (HBCU), for a decade. He served as dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit, and he has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan; an adjunct professor at Columbia University; and a Thomas C. Grey Teaching Fellow at Stanford University. He taught at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in its inaugural year and again a decade later, and at Johns Hopkins University twice. In his leadership roles at Queens College, UC Hastings and Wayne, as well as on the faculty at Howard, he was the first Asian American to serve in such a capacity. 

Wu was appointed by the United States Department of Education (USDOE) to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which advises the administration on higher education accreditation, serving for nine years, including as vice chair; and by the U.S. Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, which submitted to Congress the report From Representation to Inclusion. He was a trustee, vice chair, and faculty member of Deep Springs College, a highly selective full-scholarship school enrolling twenty-six on a student-run cattle ranch near Death Valley. He was for a decade a trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons, and vice chair for the final four years of his tenure. Wu served on the board of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. Members of the Committee of 100--a by-invitation nonprofit group of extraordinary Chinese Americans dedicated to promoting positive U.S.-China relations and the civic participation of Chinese American--elected him the organization's chair and subsequently its first president, a role he held for two and a half years. 

Wu is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in hardcover, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, which received the single greatest grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. He blogged regularly for six years at Huffington Post, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, LA Times, Detroit Free Press, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Law Journal. He had a regular column in The Daily Journal, the legal newspaper of California. Wu has maintained an extensive schedule of media appearances and public speaking. His professional credits include commentary for National Public Radio and "Now" with Bill Moyers. He has appeared as a guest on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," "O’Reilly Factor," and C-SPAN "Booknotes" with Brian Lamb. He has won the John Hope Franklin Award and the Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien Award, among other honors. 

Prior to his academic career, Wu 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 BA from the Johns Hopkins University and a JD with honors from the University of Michigan. He completed the Management Development Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The American-born son of Chinese immigrants, Wu is married to Carol L. Izumi, an internationally known dispute resolution teacher and scholar. He is an avid runner, having finished more than 100 half-marathons; and theatregoer, having completed the Shakespearean canon.