Our Events
Serica Storytellers: The Presidents | David Wu & Frank Wu
A hybrid panel with Queens and Baruch College presidents explores how student visa revocations are reshaping CUNY campuses, immigrant communities, and New York’s educational landscape.
Dec 02, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST
Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, 219 W 40th St 3rd floor, New York, NY 10018, USA
As federal visa policies evolve, international students at City University of New York (CUNY) campuses face growing uncertainty.This timely conversation — Serica Storytellers: The Presidents — brings together two trailblazing CUNY leaders, Frank H. Wu (President, Queens College) and S. David Wu (President, Baruch College), to explore how student visa revocations are reshaping New York’s educational landscape.
Moderated by Joan Kaufman, Senior Director for Academic Programs for the Schwarzman Scholars Program, this hybrid panel delves into how immigration policy shifts ripple across classrooms, immigrant communities, and the city’s public higher education system — and how institutions can better advocate for and support affected students.
Co-presented with AAARI (CUNY’s Asian American / Asian Research Institute) and the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College CUNY, this program continues Serica’s commitment to amplifying Asian diaspora voices and advancing inclusive, forward-looking dialogue across communities.
Drinks & networking with guests & the presidents included!
Your ticket includes:
Networking with other academics and elites
In depth discussion and Q&A
Drinks by Sanzo
David Wu | Baruch College President
Dr. S. David Wu became the eighth president of Baruch College in 2020, making history as the first Asian American to lead a CUNY institution (tied with Frank). Under his leadership, Baruch has gained national acclaim as a top public institution, highlighted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and U.S. News & World Report for its exceptional quality and accessibility. For three consecutive years—2024, 2025, and 2026—The Wall Street Journal ranked Baruch College the Best Value University in the United States and the #1 Public College in the Northeast. The New York Times hailed Baruch as a “model college” and an “upward mobility machine.”
Dr. Wu has transformed Baruch into a hub of innovation and excellence, achieving a 26% surge in applications and a 12% increase in student enrollment to over 20,000 since 2021, even as national enrollment trends declined. His efforts to expand Baruch’s reach, forge strategic partnerships, and challenge traditional higher education paradigms have earned him recognition as one of the Top 50 U.S. College and University Presidents and on City & State’s “Manhattan Power 100” and “50 Over 50 Lifetime Achievement Award” lists. In 2024, the New York State Senate recognized him as a champion of opportunity, excellence, and transformative outcomes.
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Before joining Baruch, Dr. Wu served as provost and executive vice president of George Mason University from 2014 to 2020. Under his leadership, George Mason experienced historic growth in academic programs and diversity, culminating in its designation as the youngest Carnegie Research 1 (R1) university. Previously, he was Dean and the Iacocca Professor of Engineering at Lehigh University, where he established himself as a bold and visionary leader.
An accomplished scholar in systems engineering and operations research, Dr. Wu has published extensively in game theory, optimization, and high-tech innovations. His research, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense, and Sandia National Laboratories, has been implemented at leading firms such as Intel, HP, and IBM. A Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, Dr. Wu’s intellectual property has been marketed for licensing and applied to high-tech and large-scale planning projects, including collaborations with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
He has served on the board of Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, in addition to prestigious panels and advisory boards, including those with the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Science Foundation of Ireland, the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong, and the Science & Engineering Research Council of Singapore.
Dr. Wu earned his M.S. and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and has held visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His career reflects an unwavering commitment to academic excellence, innovation, and the transformative power of higher education.
Frank H. Wu | Queens College President
Frank 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.
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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.
MODERATOR
Joan Kaufman, MA, MS, ScD, is the Senior Director for Academic Programs for the Schwarzman Scholars Program. She is also a lecturer on global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. She was previously the director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia, founder and director of the AIDS Public Policy Program as well as principal and faculty affiliate of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and distinguished scientist and senior lecturer at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
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From 2012-2016 she directed Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia, one of eight global centers working with the university to lead work on issues of global concern, and was Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health. From 2008-2011, she was the associate director for academics for the masters in science program in international health policy and management, one of two sustainable international development master’s degree programs at the Heller School, Brandeis University. Dr. Kaufman also worked as the China team leader for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative from 2002 to 2012. Dr. Kaufman was the first UNFPA international program officer in China in the 1980s and from 1996 to 2001, she was the Ford Foundation’s reproductive health program officer for China based in Beijing.
She spent 2001–2002 as a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard and 2005-2006 as a Soros reproductive health and rights fellow. In 2002, she founded the AIDS Public Policy Project at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a program which trained government officials in China and Vietnam about the multi-sectoral and governance requirements for an effective HIV/AIDS response.
She holds a doctorate in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health, master’s degrees in Asian studies and health and medical sciences from UC Berkeley, and BA cum laude in Chinese studies from Trinity College. She has published widely on AIDS, reproductive health, gender, population and international health policy, emerging infectious diseases, and civil society and health with a focus on China.
