Anthony W. Marx

Anthony W. Marx was appointed president and CEO of The New York Public Library in 2011, and has worked to expand the Library's essential role as a provider of free educational opportunities for all New Yorkers, focusing on increasing services to students, researchers, and scholars; improving educational programming in NYPL's 87 neighborhood branches; partnering with the city's Department of Education to increase public school access to critical learning materials; and expanding public access to e- books and other digital resources.

As president of Amherst College from 2003 to 2011, President, Marx – a recipient of multiple fellowships and the prize winning author of three books and various scholarly articles – passionately promoted access to higher education for lower-income students. Prior to joining Amherst, he served as professor and director of undergraduate studies of political science at Columbia University, spearheading a number of secondary school initiatives. In the 1980s Marx helped found Khanya College, a South African secondary school that prepared more than 1,000 black students for university.

A native New Yorker who frequented the Inwood Library as a child, Marx is a product of the city's public school system, attending P.S. 98 and the Bronx High School of Science. He then studied at Wesleyan and Yale, graduating magna cum laude from Yale with a BA in 1981. Receiving an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1986, Marx went on to earn MA and PhD degrees, also at Princeton, in 1987 and 1990.