Wagner College is a private college in Staten Island, New York, United States. It was established in 1883 and, as of the 2023–2024 academic year, it enrolled approximately 1,932 students, including 1,592 undergraduates and 340 graduates. The institution is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
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History
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.
New York City Writers Conference
From 1956 through the late 1960s, Wagner College was the home of the New York City Writers Conference, which brought some of the leading lights of the literary world to campus each summer. Instructors included Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Edward Albee, Kay Boyle and Kenneth Koch. From 1961 to 1963, while English professor Willard Maas directed the conference, it served as a training ground for poets of the New York School.
Maas himself was a significant figure in the New York avant-garde world of the 1950s and 1960s; Edward Albee used Maas and his wife, experimental filmmaker Marie Menken, as the models for his lead characters in the early masterwork, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Stanley Drama Award, which began as a prize given at the conclusion of the NYC Writers Conference, has provided encouragement for several notable playwrights, including: Terrence McNally for This Side of the Door (1962), an early version of "And Things that Go Bump in the Night"; Adrienne Kennedy for Funnyhouse of a Negro (1963); Lonne Elder III for an early version of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1965), and Jonathan Larson in 1993 for an early version of Rent.
Campus
Prominent early buildings include Cunard Hall (ca. 1851); Reynolds House (1905); Kairos House (1918), a Craftsman Style cottage; and Main Hall (1930, restored 2012) and Parker Hall (1923), built in the Collegiate Gothic style. Main Hall provides classroom and office space and a theater auditorium. Parker Hall, first built as a dormitory, is used for faculty offices.
Two cottages built in the early 1920s provide administrative space for the institution's Campus Safety and Lifelong Learning offices.
Three dormitory facilities were constructed during the college's major building drive in the middle of the twentieth century: Guild Hall (1951), Parker Towers (1964) and Harbor View Hall (1969), later complemented by Foundation Hall (2010), a residence hall for upperclassmen. About two-thirds of undergraduates live on campus.
Another dormitory building, Campus Hall (1957), now provides classroom and office space.
The Horrmann Library (1961) contains over 200,000 volumes and holds the collection and personal papers of poet Edwin Markham.
The Megerle Science Building and Spiro Hall were opened in 1968, followed by the Wagner Union in 1970.
Two building projects have expanded earlier structures. In 1999, a significant expansion of the 1951 Sutter Gymnasium created the modern Spiro Sports Center. And in 2002, a pair of Prairie Style cottages constructed around 1905 were refurbished and joined by a bridge building into Pape Admissions House.
Three substantial resources on the physical history of the Wagner College campus have been published:
"Founding Faces & Places: An Illustrated History Of Wagner Memorial Lutheran College, 1869–1930," first published for Wagner College's 125th anniversary commemoration in 2008,
Rankings
In the 2025 edition of U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges, Wagner College was ranked #60 in Regional Universities North (tie) and #49 in Best Value Schools. The college's theater program was ranked #2 in The Princeton Review's 2025 rankings.
Athletics
Wagner College offers athletic scholarships and competes at the NCAA Division I level in all intercollegiate athletics. Football competes at the NCAA Division I FCS – formerly I-AA – level.
Wagner is a member of the Northeast Conference. Men's varsity intercollegiate teams are fielded in 10 sports: baseball, basketball, cross country, football, golf, lacrosse, tennis, and track & field (indoor and outdoor) and men's water polo, which was established in fall 2016. Women's varsity intercollegiate teams are fielded in 14 sports: basketball, cross country, golf, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming & diving, tennis, track & field (indoor and outdoor), and water polo, in addition to three newly added sports in fencing (2016), triathlon (2018) and field hockey, which was reinstated in 2018.
Filming location
Wagner's campus has been featured in several films, television-show episodes, and advertisements. Shoot dates (where shown) are from Wagner College location contracts on file on campus: