Northwestern University urged to apologize for “unjust treatment” of Jane Ying Wu
The star Chinese American neuroscientist from my hometown was forced by Northwestern and Chicago police to a mental ward before she took her life, her estate's lawsuit alleges.
More than 1,000 U.S.-based academics have signed a letter pressing Northwestern University to publicly acknowledge and apologize for its unjust treatment of the late Professor Jane Ying Wu.
The sign-on letter—released on February 12, 2026, by the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF) and the Federation of Asian Professor Associations (FAPA) to Northwestern leadership quoted recent media reports of troubling acts that the Northwestern University has been alleged to take in the aftermath of the infamous, now-defunct China Initiative in the first Trump Administration.
According to recent reports, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began an administrative investigation of Dr. Wu in 2019. Based on these reports, Dr. Wu was not charged following the NIH investigation. Despite this, Northwestern University allegedly conducted a number of concerning actions against Dr. Wu during and after this investigation, despite her ultimately never being accused of any wrongdoing. These efforts include “limiting her work, partly closing her lab space, breaking up her research team and reassigning her grants to white, male faculty colleagues and isolating her.
Even more concerning is that Northwestern University allegedly continued to punish Dr. Wu even after the close of the NIH investigation in 2023. After the conclusion of the NIH investigation in December 2023, it was reported that “[her] grants were not returned to her” and her lab was “shut down by May 2024, preventing her from applying for new NIH funding”. Moreover, Northwestern University allegedly “cut her salary and raised new requirements she had to meet to restore her funded status”. Even more concerning are the report allegations that “university and Chicago police removed [Dr.] Wu from her office in handcuffs” and then “admitted against her will to the psychiatric unit of Northwestern Memorial Hospital” “without notifying loved ones or consulting outside doctors”. Weeks after her release, Dr. Wu took her own life.
The signatories of the letter include current and former U.S. university faculty members covering 44 states and the District of Columbia. They are affiliated with more than 300 institutions nationwide, including Nobel Laureates and members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, according to AASF, a non-profit organization promoting academic freedom, government transparency, and the rights of Asian American and immigrant scholars.
The background of the investigations to Wu, which yielded no charges, is the infamous and now defunct Department of Justice’s China Initiative in the first Trump administration, which the Biden Administration shut down. NIH secretly ran its own “China initiative”, which upended hundreds of lives and destroyed scores of academic careers.
Born in 1963 in Hefei, Anhui Province, Wu naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2000. She was was a distinguished scientist and world-class academic.
Wu died on July 10, 2024. Her estate is asking for compensatory and punitive damages for the violation of her rights under Illionis state law.
Northwestern told NBC News in July 2025 it “vehemently denies” the allegations in the lawsuit. The university had moved to dismiss the case, its lawyer told a judge, the South China Morning Post reported in December 2025.
The tragedy of Dr. Jane Ying Wu invites reflection not only on institutional accountability but on a subtler, longer-running cultural phenomenon that shapes how Chinese citizens perceive the United States from childhood onward. The very name by which China knows America, 美国 (Meiguo), meaning "beautiful country," embeds an aesthetic and almost spiritual admiration into the most basic act of reference. A child learning geography does not simply learn that a country exists across the Pacific; they learn that it is, by name, beautiful. This is not a trivial matter. Linguists and psychologists have long understood that naming shapes cognition, that the words we assign to things condition our emotional relationship to them before reason has any opportunity to intervene. One would not name a poisonous toadstool "heavenly elixir" and then wonder why foragers kept reaching for it. Yet for generations, Chinese youth have been linguistically primed to reach precisely for a country that has, by its own policies and actions, treated Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans as suspects, as threats, as expendable, as evidenced so painfully in the fate of Dr. Wu.
The proposal here is not adversarial, not nationalistic, and requires no government decree. Language evolves most durably from the bottom, through conversation, through irony, through the quiet consensus of people who notice something and decide collectively to say it differently. Three names suggest themselves as genuinely neutral alternatives. 北美国 (North American country), purely geographic and directional, carrying no aesthetic charge. 北美联邦 (North American federation), technical and structural, describing what the country actually is organizationally rather than how it feels. And 那国 (that country), already circulating in Chinese internet culture with a knowing, deflating irony that reduces the subject to a pronoun and accomplishes more psychologically than any elaborate coinage could. Introduced organically online, in commentary, in academic writing, such alternatives could gradually reframe the psychological baseline without provoking the backlash that any official renaming would invite. Dr. Wu deserved to be seen clearly by the institutions that destroyed her. Perhaps it is time Chinese citizens extended that same clarity of vision to the country those institutions represent, beginning with what they choose to call it.
Good luck with that.
"I will never apologize for the United States—I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.": Vice President George H.W. Bush after America shot down Iran Air Flight 655, an international scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas on 3 July 1988
The aircraft was carrying 290 people: 274 passengers and a crew of 16. Of these 290, 254 were Iranian, 13 were Emirati, 10 were Indian, 6 were Pakistani, 6 were Yugoslavian, and 1 was Italian. 65 of the passengers were children. America officially in the UN security council said go f*ck yourself to all these countries repeatedly.