To the Wagner community,
As the academic year comes to a close, a number of our faculty members are completing their final semester at Wagner College following the decommissioning of certain academic programs.
I want to acknowledge this moment directly and sincerely.
The faculty members leaving Wagner have changed lives. Through their teaching, mentorship, scholarship, artistry, and care for students, they helped shape generations of Wagner graduates. They challenged students to think critically, communicate thoughtfully, understand complexity, and engage more deeply with the world around them. Their impact on this institution and on the lives they touched is real and lasting.
The difficult decisions colleges and universities are making across the country should not be interpreted as a rejection of the value they have provided.
The humanities, arts, languages, social sciences, and other foundational disciplines remain deeply important. The challenge is that higher education is operating within rapidly changing demographic, economic, regulatory and cultural realities that are creating long term market conditions that are placing enormous pressure on institutions. Colleges that fail to adapt to those realities increasingly place their future at risk.
That reality does not lessen the pain felt by those directly impacted by these decisions. And I understand that institutional explanations do not remove personal consequences.
But I do not believe this moment represents the end of the liberal arts at Wagner College. I believe this is a retreat forced by circumstance, not a surrender of principle.
History suggests that societies eventually rediscover the need for the very things now under attack: human expression, ethical reasoning, historical understanding, culture, philosophy, language, and the arts. The need for graduates who can think, write, analyze, empathize, and lead will not disappear. The need for an educated citizenry is not lost.
I believe these are more important than ever, and I believe their need will grow. There will be a point in the future where these will once again be necessities — and higher education will once again take up this torch.
We are called to a moment of responsibility to ensure that when that day comes, Wagner College is strong enough to take up that challenge again.
And when it does, we should not have to start from scratch.
I want future generations of Wagner students and faculty to understand who carried these disciplines forward during difficult times, what they built here, and what they contributed to this institution. I want them to inherit not only programs, but memory, perspective and history.
For that reason, the college invites each departing faculty member to participate in the Wagner College Liberal Arts and Sciences Oral History Project, which is dedicated to preserving the voices and experiences of faculty whose programs are being decommissioned — and will rise again.
Through interviews, reflections and recorded conversations, overseen by Horrmann Library Director Lisa Holland, this project will create a living history of the scholars, teachers, artists, mentors and colleagues who helped define Wagner across generations. It is an opportunity to appropriately preserve these contributions for posterity and to ensure that this chapter of Wagner’s story is neither forgotten nor simplified.
To those faculty members who are leaving us: I am deeply sorry for the pain this moment brings. But do not think for a second that these decisions mean your work did not matter.
It mattered enormously.
And if Wagner is able to rise stronger in the future — if these disciplines one day return with renewed strength and purpose — it will not happen apart from your legacy. It will happen because of the foundation you helped build.
A college that adapts imperfectly still has a future. And when that future arrives, your work here will remain part of it.
To the faculty members concluding their work at Wagner: thank you.
Thank you for the students whose lives you changed.
Thank you for the standards you upheld.
Thank you for the art, scholarship, performances, writing, mentorship, and humanity you brought to this campus.
And thank you for helping build the institution Wagner has been — and still aspires to become.
With great admiration for all you have done,
Jeff