Emory president Wagner to step down

Friday’s announcement was on the day of the first meeting of the new school year for Emory’s board of trustees. Wagner said he had been contemplating his decision since June.

“The professional courtesy is to get out of Dodge for at least a year,” Wagner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “A new president when they come in, doesn’t need any shadows left of the prior president … They need to be given the freedom to set their own directions.”

By the time he leaves, Wagner will have led Emory 13 years, seeing its enrollment grow to more than 14,700 undergraduate and graduate students, and increasing the school’s national prominence. He led perhaps the state’s largest fundraising campaign, garnering $1.7 billion for Emory’s academic, patient care and social action initiatives. Wagner has also helped engineer academic partnerships with other Atlanta colleges, building a bioscience center and library center with Georgia Tech, for example, and he helped steer the institution through its response to an international Ebola outbreak last year.

Emory has long ranked among the nation’s top universities, competing with Ivy League institutions. It attracted 3,700 international students and scholars from more than 100 countries last year. And it has consistently ranked in the top 25 on U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings. With its university and health care staffs, Emory says it is the second-largest private employer in the metro Atlanta area.

“It really is the growth toward our vision, growth toward our visibility, and esteem,” Wagner said about some of Emory’s achievements during his tenure. “Emory is acknowledged among America’s leading research universities.”

Alongside these achievements, though, Wagner’s leadership has included notable controversies.

Last year the AJC reported that Emory had recorded the most sexual assaults of any college in Georgia over the previous year in 2012 and 2013. University leaders attributed the high numbers to better education and student outreach.

Emory and Wagner came under fire three years ago when the school admitted that for years it had purposely misreported data to groups that rank colleges, including U.S. News and World Report. The institution retained its high ranking the following year with corrected data.

Wagner himself was criticized a year later for an essay he wrote in which he used the three-fifths compromise over slavery as an example of how people with opposing viewpoints can work toward a common goal. The compromise counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for determining representation in Congress. Wagner apologized for his "clumsiness and insensitivity" with the slavery reference, but faced a vote of no confidence from faculty members because of the column, communication issues and cuts to some academic programs. The faculty ultimately backed Wagner and rejected the no-confidence vote.

“I’ve learned that those are the sorts of things that happen in any working relationship,” Wagner said. But the experiences did teach him something “about humility, forgiveness and asking to be forgiven and be excused.”

These controversies are important, but it’s also important to review a leader’s tenure in its entirety, said Michael Poliakoff, vice president of policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit that works with education leaders to support liberal arts education.

“It’s important not to love the forest for the trees, even if they were significant trees,” Poliakoff said. And, with the rankings inaccuracies, Emory wasn’t unique in its deception. George Washington University, he noted, suffered similar problems with its data. “Schools like Emory should not be worried about this really silly positioning game.”

Emory’s board must think expansively in its decision for its next leader, he said. “What is it the university wants? What are its strengths? What it wants to build upon.”