Lu-in Wang

Key Areas

Faculty appointment, promotion, and tenure • faculty guidelines • faculty collective bargaining agreement • faculty policies • faculty action processes • faculty appeals and grievances (non-represented faculty) • Faculty Handbook

Vice Provost Role

As Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Lu-in Wang is responsible for overseeing the application of faculty policies and guidelines and the collective bargaining agreement with the faculty union; this includes those related to faculty personnel actions and faculty appointments, promotions, and conferral of tenure, as well as appeals and grievances for nonrepresented faculty.

In this role, Lu-in is also responsible for maintaining the Faculty Handbook and administering the processes for faculty leaves and for the transition to retirement and emeritus/emerita status. Additionally, she advises deans and campus presidents on policies affecting faculty members. 

Lu-in also works closely with the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Leadership Development to facilitate efforts to recruit and retain a world-class faculty and to help faculty navigate opportunities and challenges as they advance their careers.

Professional Biography

Vice Provost Lu-in Wang joined the faculty of the School of Law at Pitt in 1994 and has served as law school’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. As associate dean, Wang had responsibility for managing faculty mentoring, tenure, and promotion processes; leading curriculum planning and development; supervising the law school’s Registrar; enforcing academic standards and academic integrity procedures; addressing student concerns in collaboration with the Dean of Students; and advising the Dean on various matters. Wang has received the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award and has twice received the Student Bar Association's Excellence in Teaching Award. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation.

Wang’s scholarship examines ordinary and extraordinary forms of discrimination and the connections between them. Her recent work explores the legal implications of economic and social stereotypes in the service industry, particularly with respect to discrimination in employment and against customers. Her book, Discrimination By Default: How Racism Becomes Routine (New York University Press 2006), draws on social psychology to detail three commonplace but generally unrecognized ways in which unconscious assumptions lead to discrimination in a wide range of everyday settings and how these dynamics interact to produce an invisible, self-fulfilling, and self-perpetuating prophecy of racial disparity. Wang also has written on more extreme forms of discrimination. She is the author of Hate Crimes Law (West 1994), the first legal treatise on that subject, and has published several articles that apply insights from historical, sociological, and social psychological literature to illuminate the legal issues related to bias-motivated violence. Wang's articles have appeared in journals including the Southern California Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, and the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law.

Wang has also served as a member of the faculty of the University of New Mexico School of Law. Before she began teaching, Wang practiced with firms in Chicago, Illinois, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She also served as a staff attorney for The Center for Social Gerontology, a national support center on law and aging, and as a law clerk for the late Justice Ralph J. Cappy of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.