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Kerry announced that the president of the university would be Dam Bich Thuy, the former general director of ANZ Vietnam, the national branch of the Australian bank, who had been one of the first Vietnamese students to study as a Fulbright scholar in the United States. The chairman of the board of trustees would be former Senator Bob Kerrey, who served in Vietnam as a Navy SEAL and was known in the Senate as a strong supporter of U.S.-Vietnam reconciliation. Kerrey came on stage to accept a certificate from Ho Chi Minh City officials.

In the audience, Ton Nu Thi Ninh, whose 20-year diplomatic career included a post as Vietnam's ambassador to the European Union, was aghast. On February 25, 1969, Kerrey led an operation in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong, aiming to kill local Viet Cong leaders.

His Navy team reported they had killed 21 Viet Cong, which earned Kerrey a Bronze Star; in fact, at least 20 women, children and elderly men lay dead in the village. Not a single Viet Cong fighter was killed. The deaths were unknown until 2001, when the New York Times Magazine and "60 Minutes II" published an account of the events. At the time, some, including the Vietnamese government, called for Kerrey to be charged with war crimes. He apologized, and the outcry subsided, as American commentators, including then-Senator John Kerry, largely concluded that Bob Kerrey himself was a victim of an unjust war. As a high-level Vietnamese official, Ninh had met Kerrey before and says she welcomed his involvement in education initiatives. But she was shocked that he had accepted a top leadership position at a university meant to symbolize newly warm ties between Vietnam and America.

"How can those closely involved in this choice be so insensitive?" Ninh said in an interview in January. "We set the past aside and we move forward. We want to make friends, but not everything goes."

Within days, Ninh's shock was echoed in the fiercest public discussion of the war that Vietnam has witnessed in the age of social media. A reporter who studied journalism in the United States as a Fulbright scholar wrote an article on the Vietnamese news site Zing recounting Kerrey's actions in Thanh Phong. That was followed by an avalanche of coverage and sometimes tense commentary on Facebook, which is a relatively new platform for discourse in Vietnam beyond the strictly controlled state media; some people joked that FUV should be called "unfriend university." "One need only sit for a few minutes in a café to hear competing lines of argument" on the issue, wrote Bao Ninh, a veteran and author of the novel The Sorrow of War. 

On one side of the debate were those who, like Ninh, argued that Kerrey's appointment betrayed a callous disregard for Vietnamese suffering during the war and an erasure of the memory of those who had been killed. "Please tell me the name of any prestigious university in this world, where a killer in cold blood of women and children--he admitted it and he is not charged for it--could be the president," Bao Anh Thai, a Ho Chi Minh City lawyer, wrote on Facebook. 

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