After five days of voting via electronic ballot last week, College faculty rejected a motion of "no confidence" in University President James W. Wagner. The final tally was released Friday night.
Stefan Lutz, the chair of the College's Governance Committee and an associate professor of chemistry, announced the results via email to College faculty. On the ballot's single question – "Should the faculty of Emory College of Arts and Sciences adopt the motion of no-confidence in President James Wagner?" – 39.8 percent, or 133 faculty members, voted in support, and 60.2 percent, or 201 members, were opposed.
Of the 530 eligible College faculty members, 334 voted, marking a 63 percent participation rate.
A vote of "no confidence," which faculty members decided to hold at a special meeting last month, would not have directly affected Wagner's employment position at the University but would have indicated that College faculty feel he is no longer fit to lead. College faculty makes up about 20 percent of the nearly 3,000 faculty members at the University.
Wagner's employment position ultimately lies in the hands of the Board of Trustees. In a statement released Friday soon after the results were announced, Chair of the Board of Trustees Ben F. Johnson III said on behalf of the Board that Wagner "remains extraordinarily well-suited to maintain Emory University's forward momentum."
Meanwhile, Wagner said in the statement that he will continue to work with Emory faculty and administrators "to carry out the mission of this great institution."
"I respect the views of all of our faculty and their right to express concern about the leadership and direction of our institution, and I take to heart the significance of this vote," Wagner said in the statement. "Faculty governance and faculty responsibility for the future of Emory University are essential."
Wagner also sent out a University-wide email yesterday morning, noting that he has heard the Emory community's concerns "in more than two-dozen meetings and uncounted telephone and email exchanges." He wrote that he is aware that these issues extend beyond his controversial Emory Magazine column, also focusing on issues such as diversity and inclusivity, shared governance and communication, support for the liberal arts and interpersonal and sexual violence on campus.
"Last week's vote indicates that some would welcome change in the president's office," he wrote in reference to the 39.8 percent who supported the motion of "no confidence." "I pledge to do my best to lead that change and to grow along with you, in order to help Emory change and grow, while making best use of our resources to serve and lead in our challenging times."
Controversy arose earlier this semester when Wagner published an article, titled "As American as ... Compromise," in the winter edition of Emory Magazine citing the Three-Fifths Compromise as an example of political compromise for the greater good. The column received local and national attention, and Wagner issued an apology soon after. Ninety percent of the apology was later removed from the magazine's website.
Faculty voted to censure Wagner over his column in February. A censure, one faculty member said, is stronger than a reprimand but not as strong as a vote of "no confidence."
In addition to the column, some College faculty members cited Wagner's role in the department changes announced last semester as a reason for their disapproval of his leadership during a special meeting last month, at which College faculty voted to hold the "no confidence" vote via electronic ballot.
Some faculty members in attendance, however, felt that such a vote would place Emory in a negative light and send the wrong message to the student body.
While faculty governance bylaws prohibit a vote to be held via electronic ballot, those in attendance voted to suspend the rules due to the limited representation of the entire faculty present.
"This is an important vote for the president," Lutz said after the results were announced Friday. "I think it shows that there are a number of faculty that are happy or satisfied with the current system, and I hope that we all as a community can come together now and try to work out our differences and move forward together."
The Emory Community Reacts
Jim Grimsley, a senior resident fellow in creative writing, said he was not surprised by the 60-40 split.
"The debate leading up to it indicated we were pretty divided on the issue," he said.
That being said, faculty supported and opposed Wagner for various reasons. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, said he voted against the "no confidence" motion because Wagner "acknowledged that he made a mistake and apologized for it."
"I think there were some people on the faculty who were determined for other reasons to embarrass him or discredit him and the College administration, and those reasons were related largely to the [department] cuts that took place in the fall," Klehr said.
Like Klehr, David Lynn, the chair of the chemistry department and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology, opposed the "no confidence" motion. He said he feels the vote itself was without merit.
"I was frankly quite disappointed in the division and the divisiveness that I saw in the faculty, and I felt like that issue of 'no confidence,' in my opinion, was unjustified," Lynn said.
Jason Francisco, an associate professor in the visual arts department, said in an interview with the Wheel that the department changes were a key reason in his supporting the "no confidence" motion.
"That President Wagner endorsed and has defended a program of curricular cuts that, in my judgment, violated Emory's bylaws in multiple ways – this is enough to warrant a vote of no-confidence," Francisco wrote.
Furthermore, an associate professor in the College who requested anonymity to protect his or her vote in fear of retribution from the administration said the decision to support the motion of "no confidence" stemmed from more than just Wagner's column.
"I think what was ... difficult to articulate in the discussions about the president's column was that the column was not just the problem," the professor said. "It really, for many faculty, has been the past five, six, seven years of President Wagner's leadership. The problem focused it or brought things to a head – that many faculty have been very unhappy with his leadership for many years."
The professor also cited Wagner's "dog-and-pony shows" as a reason for concern, "in which questions were deflected or not answered honestly."
Students, too, had mixed responses to the result of the vote. Last week, a "Keep Wagner" petition surfaced and had garnered about 870 signatures by Monday night. Goizueta Business School junior Patrick McBride, one of the signers of the petition, said he was "excited there was a possibility that we could move on from this."
But the Student Re-Visioning Committee (SRC), a group that has protested the controversial department changes since the fall, also gathered on the Quadrangle Wednesday afternoon to urge faculty to vote in support of the "no confidence" motion, wearing T-shirts with an upside-down Emory logo and the words, "Wagner, Resign / No Confidence" and handing out flyers.
While Patrick Blanchfield – an SRC member and sixth-year Ph.D. candidate who helped plan the event – said he is disappointed by the final result, he added that 40 percent is still a "decent amount of people" who disagree with his leadership.
"His credibility hinges on the claim of ethical leadership and critical engagement," Blanchfield said. "That credibility has taken an irreparable body blow. ... Wherever he goes, this will hang over him. He has lost legitimacy."
The Ballot
Lutz said that he and the Governance Committee, with the help of Emory technology officials, created the ballot using Blackboard, which contains a survey tool. GovCom, he said, worked with the Emory College office to ensure that all eligible faculty members were included on the voting roster.
In interviews with the Wheel, many faculty members said they felt that overall, the voting process went smoothly. Laura Otis, a professor in the English department and the director of English Graduate Studies, described the system as "very easy."
"From my perspective it was simple to do," she said. "It didn't take much time, and I felt like I had participated in an important process."
Klehr also said he felt that voting went well. The fact that voting lasted a week, he noted, gave everybody an opportunity to vote and ensured a larger turnout.
The associate professor who requested anonymity, though, said that he or she and a few colleagues had some trouble submitting their votes because the links on Blackboard did not appear on the screen the way they had been told they were going to.
A few faculty members also expressed some concern in interviews with the Wheel over the wording of the ballot.
Lutz specified that the ballot was worded in this way because of Robert's Rules of Order, a set of guidelines used for parliamentary procedure. The motion brought before the faculty, he said, was one specifically regarding "no confidence" in Wagner.
"When you put these questions on the ballot, you have to word it in such a way that if people vote yes, that it would be in the affirmative of the motion in the question," Lutz said. "It was a bit of an awkward thing, but that's just how Robert's Rules works."
He also noted that he first developed different versions of the question and consulted with a number of faculty representatives on GovCom from all three branches – humanities, social sciences and natural sciences – for feedback.
"[They] relatively agreed that the current wording of the vote that we ended up using was the most evenly understandable," he said, adding that he sent out the question to faculty before voting started but did receive a few emails asking for clarification.
In addition, unlike the ballot that Laney Graduate School students will vote on today, the College faculty ballot offered no option to "abstain," including only the choices of "yes" and "no."
While Lutz said an "abstain" option on the ballot was discussed, he noted that abstaining is essentially the equivalent of not voting.
"It just didn't seem to make sense because it would've created more ambiguity in the process," Lutz said. "Ultimately, we felt it was a cleaner message that we could send if we gave people the option of 'yes' and 'no.'"
Wagner wrote in his email yesterday morning that he sees this time as an opportunity to move forward and improve.
"We must move toward [the] future while holding fast to what is good about the present," Wagner wrote. "We must reaffirm our long-standing commitment to diversity, inclusivity, justice and respect."
Francisco wrote that he maintains there still is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done.
"That fully 40 percent of the voting faculty were willing to take that difficult path [of supporting 'no confidence'] signals to me that the crisis is far from over," he wrote.
In addition to the faculty vote, Laney Graduate students will cast their own votes today online from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The Graduate Student Council voted to pass a bill at a meeting last week that allowed this ballot to take place.
– By Jordan Friedman
Updated April 16 at 1:15 a.m.
