James W. Wagner

James W. Wagner (born 1953) is an American materials engineer. He served as the 19th president of Emory University in Georgia from 2003 to 2016 and as provost of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio from 2000 to 2003.

Biography James W. Wagner was born in Silver Spring, Maryland in 1953. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware in 1975 and an M.S. in clinical engineering in 1978 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1984, he received a PhD from Johns Hopkins in materials science and engineering.

In 2009, he became a fellow at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The essay sparked controversy on Emory's campus and attracted national and international media attention and an apology from Wagner. Per the New York Times, Wagner "acknowledged both the nation’s continuing education in race relations and his own." Leslie Harris, an Emory history professor who has worked to address issues of race at the college, countered that “he three-fifths compromise is one of the greatest failed compromises in U.S. history .... Its goal was to keep the union together, but the Civil War broke out anyway.”