DeanWuBlog

Jin Wu

My uncle passed away this week. Dr. Jin Wu was a wonderful role model for any professor who aspires to a leadership role in higher education. An immigrant who had been born in China and raised in Taiwan, he was educated at the University of Iowa. An expert in the interaction of the atmosphere and the oceans, he eventually held an endowed chair and supervised a major research laboratory at University of Delaware. It would have been quite a career for anyone, to move around the world, establish one’s self, and make contributions in a highly technical field. (Accordingly to the obituary and other accounts, my uncle also was a Renaissance man: I knew he was a sports fan, but I didn’t know he served as a media commentator in Taiwan on the NBA playoffs!)

Instead of retiring a decade ago, however, my uncle accepted the position of president of his alma mater in Tainan, just south of Taipei. After two highly successful years, he was offered the opportunity to serve as the Education Minister, a cabinet-level position. In a culture that has always valued education greatly but that also is suffused with a strong sense of hierarchy, my uncle became a reformer, bringing about comprehensive changes to the post-secondary system. At the time of his death, he was working on an article advocating changes here, increasing the scope of access for everyone who wished to improve their lives and increasing the level of support to students of all abilities. The ability to make the transition from academe to high public office, and to leave the position widely admired, is rare.

Along the way, my uncle developed a fascination with the Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho, the Muslim eunuch who commanded an armada of enormous vessels that may actually have reached the West Coast of the North American continent before Columbus became the European discoverer of the New World. He was heavily involved in studies that blended history and science, most recently holding a position as a distinguished scholar at the United States Library of Congress. Bridging the gap between the two cultures of science and the humanities is at least as difficult as integrating East and West.

For me, my uncle’s legacy offers many lessons. Among the most important are the ability to blend the most rigorous scholarship with an interest in interacting with the general public, wearing one’s educational accomplishments as lightly as possible while bringing intellectual insights to bear on practical problems of policy; cultivating a genuine curiosity about the infinite variety of human endeavors and the natural world, without being limited by the confines of formal training or the artificial categories of contemporary disciplines; and pursuing ever greater challenges over the course of a career that was more than a series of jobs.