He then served as professor of philosophy and chairman of the department at the State University of New York at Oswego from 1962 to 1969.
Cua was the author of numerous scholarly works and the chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy.
The volume, the first of its kind, contains entries on major schools, thinkers, works and concepts in Chinese philosophy and is considered the most comprehensive scholarly reference book with exact information and original interpretation of Chinese philosophy and its history.
In his "Moral Vision and Tradition: Essays in Chinese Ethics" (1998), Cua offered a comprehensive philosophical study of Confucian ethics, its basic insights and its relevance to contemporary Western moral philosophy.
"Cua's total body of work on Xunzi is the deepest and richest work in English on this thinker.... Cua is one of the great senior figures in the field, and this book will be a useful reference in courses in Chinese and comparative studies," David Wong, a philosophy professor and department chair at Duke University, said in 2005.