In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with Tony Marx, the president and CEO of the New York Public Library, the nation’s largest library system and the world’s preeminent public research library. Marx’s reimagination of this storied institution builds on his transformative leadership in higher education when he served as president of Amherst College. A distinguished scholar and political scientist, Marx’s education — in the power of education — was forged by his experience in South Africa in the 1980s.
We begin this wide ranging conversation with Marx’s beginnings: his childhood in New York City’s Inwood neighborhood, high school at Bronx Science, the intellectual care and attention he received from professors at Wesleyan and Yale, and his early passion for political science, inspired by his involvement in the anti-apartheid movements on campus and the “excitement of being involved in something bigger than myself, and thinking about social justice at scale.”
Marx would soon move to South Africa, where he helped create Khanya College, a free, residential liberal arts college for Black South Africans to prepare them for entry and success in the country’s top universities, where they had long been excluded. Marx notes that his years in South Africa were “life changing,” allowing him to live and work with “people who were living and dying for the rights of democracy that we take for granted,” and teaching him how one year of high-quality education at Khanya could “undo” twelve years of a stunting K-12 system. “The power of the human mind, the power of education to feed the human mind, should never be underestimated,” Marx says. These lessons would define his career and life’s work.
Back in New York, Marx’s scholarship on Africa and questions of nationalism earned him tenure at Columbia, where he and his family spent thirteen fruitful years. Without extensive administrative experience or ties to Amherst, Marx was surprised to find himself a serious candidate in the presidential search of the country’s leading liberal arts college, but soon discovered that Amherst’s board was ready to lean into change from its position of strength. “When you’re at the top of the game is when you should take risk,” Marx believes. “It’s a wild way of thinking, but it’s the right way of thinking, but nobody thinks that way.” With the board’s support, Marx undertook a number of groundbreaking initiatives that would make Amherst an even stronger institution; he is best known for his efforts to increase significantly the economic diversity of the student body, improving the school’s racial diversity, and academic standing, in the process.
In 2010, the New York Public Library came calling. Marx saw in the library’s unusual combination of assets — a branch system that served millions of people in person each year (the most trusted and visited civic institution in the city) and the world’s most used public research library — a 130-year-old educational institution ripe for “innovation at scale.” Over fifteen years, Marx and his colleagues have invested significantly in the branch libraries, transmuting them into community centers, which today are, after the schools and CUNY, the city’s largest provider of educational services, all free, from early literacy and career training to English language and technology instruction. In Inwood, Marx’s childhood branch, the NYPL has partnered with various public development agencies and philanthropies to build 175 units of affordable housing atop a new library and community center, a model they are pursuing at other sites across the city. In wifi “deserts,” the team has worked with internet service providers to beam broadband from local libraries into the neighborhoods.
Technology has also been crucial to expanding global access to the research libraries, starting with vast and copyright-respecting digitization efforts. “The notion is that every book ever written should be available to anyone on the planet for free through their library — that’s the aspiration and we’re building it,” Marx proclaims. He has not shied away from the promise of artificial intelligence to support this work, if AI can be harnessed in ways consistent with the institution’s values including “privacy, veracity, and respect.”
“Even more than books, trust is our greatest asset” Marx says. He therefore holds that institutions like the New York Public Library have a role to play in shaping the responsible evolution of these new technologies, and to ensure equitable access to information and knowledge. “It all goes back to the same lesson I learned in South Africa… that the world learned in the Enlightenment,” he concludes. “We have to respect everyone. We have to be compassionate towards everyone. We have to understand that everyone has the capacity to learn, to create, to inspire, to inspire others, to have empathy, so that we can live in the world we want to live in.”
Mentioned in this episode:
- Khanya College
- Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990, (Oxford University Press, 1992)
- Making Race and Nation: a Comparison of South Africa, the United States and Brazil, (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
- Amherst College
- The New York Public Library
- Neighbors Fight Affordable Housing, But Need Libraries. Can’t We Make a Deal?, (Michael Kimmelman for the New York Times, 2024)