Wulf served as president of the National Academy of Engineering[1] from 1996 to 2007. He chaired the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council from 1992 to 1996. Prior to that, he served as Assistant Director of the US National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate from 1988-1990. During this time, he played a major role in making the NSFnet computer network (as it was known at that time) available to the public as the Internet, for which he received the ACM Policy Award in 2017.[2] He served on the Council of the ACM, on the board of directors of CRDF Global,[3] and was a reviewing editor of Science. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM. In 2007 Wulf was awarded the honor of delivering the prestigious Charles P. Steinmetz Lecture at Union College.[4] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society that same year.[5]
Wulf ended his career at the University of Virginia by resigning on Tuesday, June 19, 2012, in protest of the forced resignation of former President Teresa A. Sullivan,[6] in what he called, "the worst example of corporate governance I have ever seen.[7][8][9][10] After widespread challenges from the faculty, student body, alumni, and the national academic community; and in the face of a direct threat from the Governor of Virginia that he would replace the entire board if they did not resolve the conflict, Sullivan was unanimously rehired some two weeks later.[11]
Wulf, W. A., "Programming Without the GOTO", Proceedings of the Internationale Federation of Information Processing, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, August 1971.
Wulf, W. A., et al., "Reflections on a Systems Programming Language", Proceedings of the SIGPLAN Symposium on System Implementation Languages, Purdue University, October 1971.
McCredie, J., Wulf, W. A., "The Selection of a Computing Alternative", Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Conference, IEEE, Boston, September 1971.
Wulf, W. A., "A Case Against the GOTO", Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, ACM, Boston, August 1972.
Wulf, W. A., and Shaw, M., "Global Variables Considered Harmful", SIGPLAN Notices 8(2), February 1973.
Wulf, W. A., Shaw, M., Hilfinger, P. N., and Flon, L., Fundamental Structures of Computer Science Addison-Wesley, 1980.
Wulf, W. A., Johnson, R., Weinstock, C., Hobbs, S., and Geschke, C., The Design of an Optimizing Compiler American Elsevier Publishing Company, Inc., New York, 1975.
Shaw, M. and Wulf, W., "Tyrannical Languages Still Preempt System Design", Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Languages, April 1992.