Outrage continued to roil Emory University on Tuesday as faculty members and others sought a more-contrite response from their president, who is under fire for an alumni-magazine column in which he held up the “Three-Fifths Compromise” of the U.S. Constitution as a pragmatic model for how to reach an agreement.
The column by James W. Wagner, the president, was published in the winter issue of Emory Magazine; it focused on the importance of political compromise to ensure progress. He cited the racially charged Three-Fifths Compromise—a 1787 agreement for states to count only three-fifths of their slaves in their total population for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress—as an example of divided political leaders’ efforts to find neutral ground on an issue in order to reach a greater goal.
“As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—'to form a more perfect union'—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation,” the president wrote. “Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.”
The column was met with a wave of fury, with angry readers calling Mr. Wagner’s commentary racist and some demanding his resignation. Faculty members were also outraged, Mark A. Sanders, chairman of the university’s department of African-American studies, said on Tuesday.
Thirty-one faculty members signed a formal response to the president, in a letter that was published online by the student newspaper, The Emory Wheel. The letter, which included signatures from faculty members in the departments of history and African-American studies, says the signers believe that Mr. Wagner did not intend any harm in his analogy but that it was “an insult to the descendants of those enslaved people who are today a vital part of the Emory University community and our nation.”
The letter continued to circulate in other university departments on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders said, and has gained more support.
Apology Deemed Inadequate
Mr. Wagner issued an apology on Sunday that was nearly as long as his original column and was added to the beginning of the online version of it. But faculty members said the apology ended up confusing the president’s view.
In his apology, Mr. Wagner made it clear that he does not consider slavery “anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman” and also specified that he was not trying to say that the Three-Fifths Compromise itself was a good thing, but the president still sought to justify his use of the historic compromise as an example.
“His attempt at a correction didn’t help matters,” said Mr. Sanders, who helped draft the faculty letter. “It’s conflicted in the sense that, on the one hand, he is apologizing, but on the other, he is trying to salvage the argument. I don’t think the argument can be salvaged.”
The faculty agreed, Mr. Sanders said, that there needed to be “a substantive correction, both in terms of the historical content and the use of the analogy.”
Faculty members aren’t calling for Mr. Wagner’s resignation, nor are they calling for any one remedy, he said. The faculty’s letter intentionally makes no specific request of the president, he added, as “there are as many different opinions as there are faculty as to what should happen next.”
Mr. Sanders said that, personally, he would like to see Mr. Wagner issue a full retraction and apology. After that, Mr. Wagner should pursue conversations about compromise in a different manner, he said, as it remains an important topic for the university.
“One of the reasons this is so deflating is that we have been having ongoing conversations about how we make Emory a university that celebrates diversity, celebrates inclusiveness, and understands diversity as really being central to its educational mission,” he said. “These comments just really undermine much of those efforts.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Wagner spoke before the faculty council at its regular meeting. After reading the published faculty letter aloud, he thanked faculty members for being “firm and gracious.”
“As you and your colleagues have generously allowed, it was not my intent to offend or insult,” Mr. Wagner said, according to a transcript of his statement. “Doing so was the result of mistaken judgment and of insensitivity.”
Emory deserves better, Mr. Wagner added, saying he looks forward to the future and plans to “redouble our efforts in those programs under way to continue building the safe, respectful, inquiry-driven, ethically engaged, and diverse community toward which we aspire.”
Mr. Wagner was not made available for comment on Tuesday.
Questions About Editing
Emory Magazine plans to add a correction in print in its next issue, according to an e-mail from Nancy Seideman, the university’s executive director of media relations.
It is unclear, however, how the original analogy made it through the magazine’s editing process. Paige Parvin, the editor, declined to comment on Tuesday.
The typical editing process, Ms. Seideman said, is that Mr. Wagner sends a draft of his column, a regular feature in the magazine, to Gary S. Hauk, the vice president and deputy to the president. Mr. Hauk provides feedback and edits, and then moves the piece along to Ms. Parvin, the creative director of the Emory Creative group, and the vice president for communications and marketing.
Mr. Hauk, who did not respond to a call requesting an interview on Tuesday, told The Emory Wheel that, at the time he read the column, he didn’t foresee any potential problems with how it was written.
“As somebody who has been aware of the racial issues on our campus and in our society ... I find it distressing that I don’t have the lens to see that might be a potentially problematic way of couching the argument,” he said in an article published on Tuesday. “That’s just something I have to confess. I missed that.”
Members of Emory’s governing board, meanwhile, appear to be standing behind Mr. Wagner. “He has my 100 percent, undivided support,” Ben F. Johnson III, chairman of the Board of Trustees, was quoted as saying in an article by Salon.
