Francis C. M. Wei

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Francis C. M. Wei (1888–1976) was a Chinese Christian educator and the first Chinese president of Huachung University. He grew up in a non-Christian family, and his father, a tea merchant from Zhuhai, sent him to a Western-style school, Boone College, for his education. In 1911 he earned a BA from Boone and was baptized into the Episcopal Church. He stayed at Boone to teach mathematics and to pursue an MA, writing a thesis on The Political Principles of Mencius. Wei then earned another MA in comparative philosophy at Harvard (1918–1919), studying under William E. Hocking, and later earned a PhD from the University of London’s School of Economics (1927–1929) with a thesis titled A Study of the Chinese Moral Tradition and Its Social Values. In 1925 he became vice president of Huachung University. After completing his PhD, he returned to Huachung and served as its first Chinese president from 1929 to 1951. He also was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School (1937) and the first Henry W. Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1945).