As you can probably imagine, there is no such thing as an opportune time for a good, old-fashioned, clumsy, racist gaffe. James W. Wagner, however, may have managed to pick the worst time possible.
Wagner, who is president of Emory University in metropolitan Atlanta, Ga., brought a world of hurt on himself and the institution he represents by writing a column calling for reconciliation through compromise and the hunt for common ground.
Wagner is hardly the first to advocate for compromise. As a nation, we grow ever more weary of political and financial stalemates among our leaders, who seem to find the common ground that allows even the most basic decisions to be made. They behave more like pre-schoolers than national leaders.
Unfortunately, when Wagner embarked on a hunt through history for a prime example of compromise, he came up with the three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution.
There could hardly be a worse example. It was 1787. The country was barely beyond the infant stage. Constitutional delegates from states supporting slavery wanted slaves counted as full human beings when determining Congressional representation for each state. Their opponents said that was nonsense. Why should people count as human beings who were not even eligible to vote?
The three-fifths clause struck a middle ground -- sort of. It called for each slave to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and apportionment.
Even among latter-day scholars, you will run into people who misunderstand this compromise. They criticize the clause for categorizing black people as some hybrid, science-fiction type of being, three-fifths human and two-fifths something else. But it is worse than that. Far, far worse. The clause didn’t designate slaves as three-fifths human in any meaningful kind of way. It recognized them as exactly what most people thought them to be -- zero percent human, with no rights or dignity that white men were bound to respect. The three-fifths formula was strictly a political compromise between Northern whites and Southern whites. It was a way to increase the influence of slave states. It was that and nothing more.
Not unless you count the fact that it was racist, dismissive and inhumane.
But in his column, Wagner praised the clause, even arguing that contemporary politicians could learn from it. ”Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more close together,” he said.
Really? A half-victory? For whom? And drawing the country together? Is that what the three-fifths compromise accomplished? Then what was the Civil War for, with its endless bloodshed and its cost of more than 600,000 lives? What an odd choice to declare an early victory on an issue that is still being fought over today.
Nor could the timing be much clumsier. Wagner’s column caught the public’s attention during Black History Month. The songs and speeches from January’s Martin Luther King Day were still ringing in our ears. A statue of civil rights trailblazer Rosa Parks was being unveiled in the Capitol.
And here was the president of Emory University, situated virtually in King’s backyard, arguing that this betrayal of human rights was somehow a triumph of compromise.
But in the case of Emory University, I’d like to advance a different argument. I’m going to argue that on a pass-fail scale, Emory University merits a pass.
That may strike some as odd, particularly if you grade institutions of higher education on the knowledge of their administrators. But perhaps we should be evaluating colleges and universities according to a different scale. Perhaps we should be looking at the graduates they are turning out. What do they know? What do they dare to say?
Consider how faculty and students of Emory University -- especially the university’s students -- responded. There were no knee-jerk defense mechanisms. There was no ducking of heads.
Students of Emory didn’t follow the groundswell of public outrage. They led it, not just with comments on digital social media sites but by standing up in public with marches of protest and calls for Wagner’s resignation.
In the wake of all this Wagner has publicly apologized, begging forgiveness for his “clumsiness and insensitivity.”
I’m all about forgiveness. Clumsiness and insensitivity, after all, are universal human sins.
But if there are any heroes in this mess, I think the students qualify. They held the chief administrator of the university they attend to the standards taught in their classrooms. That’s what you do when you encounter ignorance on a public scale. You answer less knowledge with more.