The year is 2013, and everyone knows that slavery of any kind is a horrible institution. An institution that holds people in bondage, particularly because of their ethnicity or race, and treats them as property that can be bought, sold and exploited all the while; it directly conflicts with the egalitarian ideals upon which this country was founded and on which it has acted for more than two hundred years.

Even with the politically correct culture that surrounds every writer or speaker, such disclaimers that slavery was horrible should not be necessary when a person discusses constitutional mechanisms such as the three-fifths compromise, which apportioned seats in the U.S. House of Representatives according to population but counted people held as slaves as three-fifths of one person for this purpose.

Yet at a meeting of Emory University’s College of Arts and Sciences faculty, the president of Emory University, James W. Wagner, was censured for a column in which he pointed to the three-fifths compromise to argue that members of Congress should make compromises between their ideologies and their pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He argued that such an apparently nefarious agreement was necessary in order for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention to accomplish an even more important aim: the formation of “a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

As Wagner wrote in his column, “Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared — the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.” Indeed, few things are perfect. Even fewer are perfect at the first attempt.

The Constitution is one such imperfect work. Continual outrage about the electoral college deciding presidential elections, rather than relying on the nationwide popular vote, tells us that. Any one of the 27 amendments to the Constitution affirms that imperfection. Middle school textbooks tell of both the compromises of the Constitutional Convention and the Connecticut Compromise.

Wagner was right, and there is a clear lesson for all politicians. If the founders we all idealize and commemorate could craft a compromise to attain an important end and do so by reaffirming chattel slavery, then we today have no excuse for playing brinkmanship with the immediate and long-term future of the United States for the sake of not raising taxes by a few percentage points.

Scholars agree that slavery was important to the founders just as it was to the abolitionists and secessionists of later decades and that, without a compromise on that issue, the United States would not exist. If they could come to a constitutional compromise on such an issue for the sake of making progress on another problem, surely we can do the same. We might be unable to achieve everything we want, but the fact that “progress” will be uneven does not mean that it should be avoided.