The story
Wagner College was founded in 1883 in Rochester, New York, as the Lutheran Proseminary of Rochester. Its purpose was to prepare young men for admission to Lutheran seminaries and to ensure that they were sufficiently fluent in both English and German to minister to the large German immigrant community of that day. The school's six-year curriculum (covering the high-school and junior-college years) was modeled on the German gymnasium curriculum. In 1886, the school was renamed Wagner Memorial Lutheran College, after a building in Rochester was purchased for its use by John G. Wagner in memory of his son.
In 1918, at the behest of then-college president Frederick Sutter, the college moved to the 38-acre (15 ha) former Cunard estate on Grymes Hill, Staten Island. An Italianate villa called Westwood, the Cunard mansion (c. 1851), is extant (now Cunard Hall), as is the neighboring former hotel annex that was built in 1905 (initially named North Hall, now called Reynolds House). The college soon expanded to 57 acres (23 ha) after it acquired the neighboring Jacob Vanderbilt estate in 1922. In the 1920s, the curriculum began to move toward an American-style liberal arts curriculum that was solidified when the state of New York granted the college degree-granting status in 1928. The college admitted women in 1933 and introduced graduate programs in 1951. The college expanded further when it purchased the W. G. Ward estate in 1949 (current site of Wagner College Stadium), and again in 1993, when the college acquired the adjacent property of the former Augustinian Academy, which has largely remained wooded green space and athletic fields. The campus now occupies 105 acres (42 ha) on the hill and has views of the New York Harbor, the Verrazzano Bridge, Downtown Brooklyn, and Lower Manhattan.
In April 1981, faculty members at the college went on strike, with The New York Times reporting that union recognition was the primary cause of the labor dispute. The strike was led by the Wagner College Faculty Association, a local union of the AFL-CIO-affiliated New York State United Teachers. At the time, 54 of the college's 83 full-time faculty members were part of the union. As part of the strike, they picketed outside of the entrances to the college's Grymes Hill campus. The strike lasted 20 days and ended on April 22 with the college agreeing to recognize the union.
The college further expanded in May 2026 when it purchased the former Staten Island campus of St. John's University which had been vacated in 2024, with a $35 million loan from the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York. At the same time Wagner College terminated 40 percent of the faculty and eliminated almost all liberal arts programs.
From Wikipedia’s article on Wagner College, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5