The ballad of Sherman Wu

What it means to be Asian American in fraternities between the 1950s and the present.

Design by Story by Kaavya Butaney & Xuandi Wang

In October 1956, a story broke on The Daily Northwestern that dominated the headlines for months. The Psi Upsilon fraternity removed Sherman Wu, a first-year Chinese student, from its ranks after several white students left the chapter to avoid being associated with an “Oriental.”

Archival documents and school newspapers reveal a jarring story of racial discrimination — one that shines a light on how Asian students have been historically excluded from Greek life at Northwestern.

The fraternity members decided having a Chinese member in their house “would degrade them in the eyes of other fraternities and make it more difficult to get dates from the sororities,” according to University archives.

During an interview with the magazine Newsweek that year, Jack Lageschulte, Psi Upsilon’s president at the time, said, “He’s got yellow skin, his eyes are slanted, and his hair is straight … Somebody walks into our living room and right away they say: ‘who’s that Chinese guy?”

While the Student Governing Board demanded the Interfraternity Council investigate Wu’s case, the council president said it could not take any punitive action because fraternities had the legal right to determine their member recruitment.

The story of Wu, a political refugee who fled to the U.S. after his father was ousted as Taiwan’s governor, soon escalated and drew attention beyond domestic media. Journalist Upton Sinclair sent a letter to Psi Upsilon and accused it of “disgracing the country before the whole world.” The incident even inspired a record by folk singer Pete Seeger, the “Ballad of Sherman Wu.”

On campus, NU students debated fiercely in the aftermath of the incident, writing one editorial after another to The Daily an open letter, the newspaper’s editorial board shifted the blame from Psi Upsilon to the Greek life system as a whole. They wrote that although Psi Upsilon was guilty of discrimination, it was economically wise because the fraternity would have faced “grave financial difficulties” had it kept Sherman Wu as a member.

“The Psi U’s were quite obviously wrong — but no more so than the system that fosters such an incident,” the editorial read. “Psi U is on fire only because it did not exercise the subtlety that usually surrounds fraternity discrimination here.”

Later on, Wu received bids to become an honorary member of three fraternities on other campuses. He eventually joined Kappa Sigma Alpha at Olivet College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan. He went on to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering at NU, specializing in spacecraft control systems, and eventually worked on the design for Apollo mission lunar modules. After teaching for 30 years at universities, Wu retired in 1992, met his future wife and delved into his passions: gourmet cooking and skiing.

According to Northwestern Magazine, the Psi Upsilon incident ultimately led to an increased effort at the University to

But decades after Wu left campus, Asian students continue to grapple with Greek life’s past and present practices of exclusion.

In 2023, McCormick first-year and Delta Tau Delta member Michael MinSong Kim says his pledge class reflects NU’s demographics, with about 25%-35% AAPI-identifying students in the group.

While Kim notes that he has not had issues with racial discrimination in Delt, he hopes fraternities can keep pushing the boundaries of racial or sexual diversity in Greek life.

“It’s definitely moving in the right direction,” Kim says. “But there are definitely more improvements that can be made, and I think Northwestern can definitely set a precedent for that.”

For Weinberg second-year Sanjana Rajesh, who is not involved in Greek life, personal anecdotes do not prove Greek life has fixed its problems. Despite the philanthropy these organizations do, she says Greek life still perpetuates racism and sexism.

“A couple people having good experiences does not mean that this system as a whole isn’t flawed,” she says. “And more than just flawed, it doesn’t mean that it’s not also built to be that way.”

Rajesh said the Greek life system has been historically built upon white supremacist ideas, such as classism and superficial judgment of students. She brought up Phi Gamma Delta, which was known for multiple racist incidents at NU during the 1960s including blackface, as an example.

Given fraternities’ continued presence and power on campus even after the Abolish Greek Life movement started, and the lack of repercussions for the past perpetrators, she says she finds it unlikely Greek life can reform.

“Notice how those [recent] changes don’t actually involve any fundamental restructuring of power,” Rajesh says. “It’s just piecemeal things to change the way it looks.”

From 2017-20, Sociology and Human Development and Social Policy associate professor Simone Ispa-Landa researched sororities and whether they can gain from a system that fundamentally disadvantages them, especially given their dynamic with fraternities. She said women of color would often deactivate due to how white their Greek organizations were, saying it was inherently uncomfortable to be nonwhite.

She also says for Asian sorority members, it was difficult to overcome the white, blond, blue-eyed beauty standards.

Looking back at Wu, Kim — who had heard the story before — says Wu’s removal from Psi Upsilon is a part of Asian American history.

Kim, who grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood until high school, understands Wu, who he says likely wanted to assimilate into a predominantly white institution.

“I empathize with him because you try and convince yourself that you are not different from these other people, even though other people might see you as different,” he says. “You don’t want to feel different.”