John Agresto is an American author, lecturer, and university administrator.
Agresto was born on January 7, 1946, at the Navy Yard Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, to John and Theresa Agresto. He was raised in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. After graduating from Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit high school, Agresto went to college in Boston.
Agresto holds undergraduate degree from Boston College and a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. He has published in the areas of politics, law, religion, literature, history, and education, and has taught at the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, Duke University and the New School University, and St. John's College in New Mexico where he also served as President from 1989 until 2000.
In the 1980s he served as associate director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, reporting to director William J. Bennett. In 1982 he joined the National Endowment for the Humanities, serving as the Endowment's assistant chairman, and last, as acting chair for 15 months between the chairmanships of Bennett and Lynne Cheney.
In 1986 Agresto was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to become Archivist of the United States. His nomination led to charges of partisanship from both the left and right, with some questioning his resistance to using race-based affirmative action in the selection of reviewers, others opposing the appointment of a political scientist to a position generally reserved for archivists or professional historians.[1] Ultimately, after declaring that he would release the Nixon tapes despite opposition from the Justice Department,[2] the White House withdrew his nomination.[3]
Soon after returning to the NEH, Agresto was elected to serve as President of St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a post he held for 11 years.
In 2002-03, he served as both professor and Lilly Senior Research Fellow at Wabash College in Indiana.
Between August 2003 and June 2004 he was asked to serve as a Coalition Provisional Authority Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Baghdad, Iraq, charged with helping to rebuild all 21 of that country's universities and technical colleges. Agresto requested $1 billion in reconstruction funds from the Bush administration but only received $8 million. In an interview with Rajiv Chandrasekaran for his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Agresto called himself a "neoconservative mugged by reality."[4] Drawing on his experiences there, Agresto wrote Mugged By Reality – The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions (Encounter, 2007).
Beginning in 2007, Agresto was asked to be a founding member of the Board of the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. He subsequently also served in various administrative/academic positions (Academic Dean, Provost, Chancellor) from 2007–08 and again in 2009-10.
In 2008-2009 he was a visiting fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. And, later (2013–14), he was named Scholar Scholar-in- Residence at Hampton-Sidney College in Virginia. Upon his retirement from AUIS, Agresto was called upon to be both Member and Chair of the New Mexico State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2010-16.) In 2017, upon the resignation of his predecessor, Agresto was appointed to serve as Probate Judge for Santa Fe County.
In addition, works by Agresto include various contributed book chapters as well as articles published in journals over the years in the fields of politics, culture, religion, and education. Many of his essays and op-eds have been carried by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.