Lisette’s Take on Him: “He’s a former college president, the long-time president of the New York Public Library, and someone who has been committed to many causes related to greater equity, greater inclusion, and a greater sense of justice. So I'm excited to talk to someone that I can traverse so many ranges of what leadership is about today.” To hear all episodes and learn more about Lisette Nieves, visit Lisette-Nieves.com
Tony Marx has run The New York Public Library, the country’s largest public library system, for fifteen years. Prior to that he was president of Amherst College and worked in anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa in the 90s. His long career has been characterized by his ardent belief in access. At NYPL he removed late fines after discovering that the NYPL had disenfranchised thousands of patrons of color with. He also pressured book publishers to integrate libraries into their e-books distribution, and led the creation of an NYPL e-reader app (the software was open-source so other library systems could create their own apps). In 2022, NYPL launched “Books For All” in response to book bans around the country.
Lisette Nieves: Welcome, everybody. My name is Lisette Nieves, president of the Fund for the City of New York. I’m excited to be here, hosting the podcast, The Junction. And the Junction's all about what are key points of change that have happened in your life that impact your future, moments where you've taken pause, moments where you became more you?
So I'm excited, our first guest, a dear friend, a great colleague, someone I admire and respect, Dr. Tony Marx, President of the New York Public Library System. It's the largest library system in New York, as we know, and in the country, and I can't wait to start this conversation.
Tony Marx: Lisette, it's so great to be here and what an exciting podcast you're doing so, and huge admiration for the work you do at the fund and also a board member of the New York Public Library, let's get that out on the table, where you have been inspirational in our work at the library, which is the greatest library system in the country, if not the world.
Nieves: Yeah, I would say the greatest library system in the world. I don't have a problem saying that. People would ask me why and who do you have, as far as guests on your show? Why do you have them? And I wanted to say a few things about you that I think is important.
One is, obviously, the president of the New York Public Library. But you are also a college president. You're also a well-known scholar on South Africa. You're someone who has been committed to many causes related to greater equity, greater inclusion, greater sense of justice.
So I'm excited to be able to talk to someone that I can traverse so many ranges of what leadership is about today.
Marx: Well, thank you for that. It's not just leadership. I'm a New Yorker. I'm an American. We have a set of values here in this city, and I believe, still in this country. And they are all about ensuring access to opportunity for people, respecting people, understanding that our diversity is one of the great sources of strength of this city and of this country.
We are a country of immigrants, almost all of us. That's how we started. We're losing track of the core values, and I'm honored to be in a job where I get to defend those ideas, those principles, and to work with you to ensure that they continue.
Nieves: Yeah. Well, we'll have plenty to talk about, but before we go deep into any of these questions, just give us a sense of Tony: Where were you coming from, and where were you going to?
Marx: Well, my parents were both German Jews who fled the Nazis as children. My father never went to college. Worked hard, as did my mother. She was a physical therapist for kids with cerebral palsy, so learned empathy from her. 'Cause that's hard work. Grew up in New York City, Washington Heights, Inwood, went to public school, including Bronx Science, so, you know, had some great opportunities.
Nieves: Core New Yorker.
Marx: Core New Yorker. Got lucky then with college, started at Wesleyan in Connecticut. In terms of pivotal life experiences, that was one because they taught me how to think, you know. The Bronx Science did great, but I'm not sure learning to think was sort of at the top of the list.
I did learn how to do exams. They’re a great liberal arts college where the faculty really sort of focuses in on your writing and your thinking was transformative for me.
The other thing that happened when I got to college, and I ended up, for other reasons, switching and finishing at Yale, amazing combination of two, South Africa was the big topic on campus when I was in college. The Soweto uprising had happened the year before I arrived. The students were taking over campuses and college presidents' offices.
Nieves: Columbia was in the news everywhere. Yes.
Marx: And I knew nothing about this place. I literally never been there, had no connection to it. And I suppose I was looking for a cause, like 18-year-olds will do. And got into it very rapidly. Wesleyan was very open to student activism, so I found myself, as a sophomore, as a 19-year-old, chairing the trustee committee on divestment, so a committee of the board.
Nieves: Wow.
Marx: And we actually, Wesleyan divested as a result of that work that year. And, then I was hooked. Stayed on that topic when I got to Yale, less as an activist, more sort of learning.
After college, I worked for a couple years in Philadelphia with the university president of Penn. I was interested in universities. They were my first experience of sort of the bigger world outside of the world I had grown up in in Inwood. And university presidents seemed like the biggest deal in that world. And so I was sort of curious about that. And I was lucky I got the president of Penn to take me on as his intern and worked very closely with him.
Marx: Sheldon Hackney, amazing man, and amazing teacher to me. I've had a life of people who have…
Nieves: Poured into you,
Marx: Taken me on in ways that were inexplicable, but life-changing for me. And I did that for a couple years, and then I thought, ‘You know, this South Africa thing, it's still in my head.’
And it was still very much in the news, obviously, as the country was suffering under apartheid, the vast majority of people with no rights, you know, in some ways similar to the American South, you know, before civil rights.
Nieves: Mirrored very much the Jim Crow experiences. No question.
Marx: In some ways even worse, right?
Nieves: Yes, absolutely
Marx: Yes, they were the majority, and they had no rights at all. And so I thought to myself, you know, you're 23, 24. When are you gonna have an adventure, if not now?
I had another mentor who was at the Ford Foundation introduce me to the head of the leading education anti-apartheid group in South Africa. A man named John Samuel. He met me, who said to me,
“Well, look, kid, I can't pay you to come to South Africa,” like paying a white American to come to South Africa, that's crazy given the work that they had to do in South Africa.
“But if you can find your way to South Africa, I'll find a place for you to live and we'll give you some work to do, and we'll see what happens.”
So I did that, and it changed my life.
Nieves: So I'm gonna hold you right there.
Marx: Sorry.
Nieves: Because there're gonna be a few key moments that I know change your life, right. And this is a junction moment, right?
Marx: This one is probably the biggie.
Nieves: Let's talk about that. What does it mean to…when do you know it's a junction moment for you, that's that point. And how did you navigate it?
Marx: I don't think you really understand the transformative moments in your life until way after. I now look back at that and say, oh no, it all changed right there. And it affected every piece of my life, everything in my biography, now, I can point back to and say it comes from that time in South Africa.
I was 23, 24 and I dove in and you know, I would end up, I lived there on and off for two and a half, three years, in what would become the middle of a civil war in the country. This was the 1980s.
Nieves: That's right. Long before the elections, right?
Marx: Right. It was the fight to see whether apartheid would end, would give way. And it wasn't clear that it was going to. And you know, the people I worked with, they were ready to give their lives, and some of them did, for this cause, and I was in the middle of it.
I was like the only American, white American I saw. Part of it, I will confess, was the vigor of youth, the sort of like, the things I should have been scared to death of, I just like, ‘I'm in it.’ Right. ‘I'm doing it,’ right?
And it was super exciting, right? I know that sounds sort of weird 'cause it was poignant and terrible and you know, people's lives were at risk, and I had some security 'cause I was an American. I was white, you know, I'm not gonna deny that, but that sense of sort of living fully,
Nieves: Yeah.
Marx: In a political way, right?
Nieves: Well I get that, the sense of purpose is…
Marx: Purpose and I was so in it.
Nieves: You talk about it being this incredible inflection point in your life, why it matters. Right. I think this anchoring or solidifying a moral compass.
Marx: When I got there originally, before I started the dissertation and interviewing people, I spent a year working for this education group, which was amazing. So I wasn't just taking, I was giving.
And my boss, Mr. Samuel said, ‘You know, we'd love you to do some tutoring. We'd love you to help us with this or that. We're all busy doing all that. We have this idea, but none of us have any time and it probably won't work, so I don't wanna waste any of my paid staff's time.’
He handed me a file with like two pieces of paper in it, and he said,
‘Here's the idea, the great white liberal English universities are all saying they'd love to take more Black students.’ Maybe yes, maybe no. I certainly wasn't so convinced once they got to know them, but, ‘they can't find any who are qualified. 'cause apartheid has made sure through 12 years of terrible education that nobody black in South Africa was qualified for the greatest universities.’
He said, ‘We'd like to challenge this. So here's what we'd like to do. We'd like to start a one-year residential college. And, you know, select really promising students, give them the equivalent of what an Amherst or Wesleyan or you know, would give them for just a year.’
Nieves: Interesting. I didn't know this about you, Tony. I have to say that this is…
Marx: Here's the interesting part. The biggest international certifier of foreign credit is Indiana University, or was at the time. So we're gonna do the coursework through Indiana so that the universities can't challenge the quality of what we're giving, even though we will give the coursework with professors in residence, in campuses that we will build, if you can put this together.
Marx: It was an amazing idea. It was not my idea, and I spent that year talking to everyone. It was an amazing excuse to talk to everyone. Fundraising. Eventually finding staff, finding a place. Archbishop Tutu became the chair of the board. Mr. Mandela secreted out a letter from Robin Island saying, “I will be the honorary chair.”
It was wild. It was wild. And it worked. Over the course of the next 10 years, this college called Khanya, campus in Cape Town, campus in Johannesburg, with amazing African staff, right?
Nieves: Yeah. Brilliant scholars. Yes.
Marx: Those thousand students went on to those universities and to amazing careers. And it taught me that one year of quality education can undo the gravest damage that a lifetime before that of purposefully bad education can do. That taught me something about the power of the human mind, to repair and to achieve even under the worst of circumstances. And I would say that was the life-changing lesson of that first year in South Africa because everything else I have done was based on that revelation for me.
Nieves: Yeah. You, you know, it's an interesting thought because I think about these transition programs. It's making the invisible, visible, right? So some of it is the absolute transformation of maybe the competency. But some of it really,
Marx: And no appreciation, the respect, the possibility.
Nieves: Some of it is really just putting on spectacles to see talent that's out there that folks would not have seen before. Right? So it's this combination…
Marx: Didn’t want to see.
Nieves: Didn't wanna see, chose not to see. But, Tony, when we think about how that one year was so transformative, you reproduced that in some ways when you were the president of Amherst, right?
Marx: So when I got to Amherst College, a job for which I was highly not qualified, I'd never been a chair, a dean, a provost, didn't go to Amherst. I had been rejected by Amherst. Suddenly, I was the president. My first sort of administrative job after being a professor for 13 years. And thinking about these issues as a professor, but not responsible or…
Nieves: Not a seasoned administrator. We could say that. But an intellectual in the space. Yes.
Marx: And you know, I found myself at the whitest, richest college I'd ever seen. I mean, Amherst was, it was the number one-ranked college in America. It had $2 billion in the bank at the time, which was an extraordinary sum.
Nieves: And neighboring Holyoke.
Marx: Right, right.
Nieves: No, really. No. It's important because that's how I know Amherst, as a Puerto Rican. Holyoke. Right?
Marx: Right. And so Amherst was always a great place, but it was not. Yeah. diverse in a serious way, or accessible in a way to the broader population. I dug in, I found the founding charter of the college, which said we're founded to train the indigent. I was like, oh, I could work with this. I'm not a revolutionary, I'm a conservative. Let's bring us back to the roots here. And we certainly had the resources. We had a board that was very committed to not just sitting on the lead as the number one college, but seeing what more we could do, right, that would inspire them as philanthropists and as trustees and as alums.
We ended up tripling low-income enrollment, at a time when nobody else in our peer group was doing that. I mean, we said, let's use this for community college kids. There are a million of them in America.
Nieves: And you were doing this 20 years before people were talking about it.
Marx: If we go looking for them, we'll be the only ones. We'll get amazing kids. I got some pushback on that, like, ‘Community college, we’re Amherst College. What are you talking about?’ That's what we used our transfer spots for, or most of them we got the most incredible students.
Nieves: Love that. Where are we now? Right? You head the largest public library system. We are looking at book bans. You've taken a few fearless movements that then other libraries have done after, I wanna acknowledge, kind of, you know, that wonderful movement of banning overdue fines. I want you to talk about how, as an institution, the library is this kind of arbiter of equity in some ways. And how have you managed this resistance and pushback on that?
Marx: These are fundamental values. It's not about the politics of the day. It's not about some ideological argument. It's about what do we stand for? What does America stand for? We don't stand for book banning. We believe in everyone's capacity and right to choose what they want to learn about and to make judgments for themselves.
So our job is to ensure you have that right by every book being available. If books are banned, we're gonna unban them, even electronically, even elsewhere in the country. Or another thing we did, you know, you've been so important in this Lisette, we are in every neighborhood. We're the most visited institution in every neighborhood.
We're free, we're respected. But for a hundred years or more, we were relatively passive. ‘Come in, do what you want,’ was great and still is great. Essential. There's no place else in the South Bronx or wherever like that. But we said, if we have the trust of the people, how else can we use that trust to help serve the people more?
Marx: So we've transformed what our branches mean. From the passive essential spaces in every neighborhood to also now proactive education centers. We've created close to 2 million education spots in our branches annually from preschool, to after-school, to homework help, to college guidance. Not a lot of advising going on…
Nieves: The largest English language training.
Marx: We're the largest English language training. We are committed to the immigrant community. We're the place where everyone comes first. No questions. No papers, no nothing. All of that is, you know, is getting a little trickier, not just a little, getting trickier for people. People are being intimidated, people are scared.
We're also the largest free computer skills training. We're going to become the largest A.I. training, because this is what the people need to meet their capacities, to fulfill their capacities, to go beyond, you know, what they've dreamed of. We are in the dream fulfillment business based on learning. right?
Marx: We're not in everything. We don't feed people, even though they're hungry, but we feed their minds. Right.
Nieves: Yeah. And I think you're also in the survival and safety business. And I say that…
Marx: People come into the branches for heating and air conditioning ‘cause they can't afford wifi.
Nieves: Or wifi.
Marx: Yeah. There are like a million New Yorkers, maybe a million and half, who don't have broadband at home.
Nieves: There you go.
Marx: They come to the library and now we're figuring out how to beam broadband from the libraries into the neighborhoods to create free broadband for anyone, which should be a right for anyone, right?
And makes it accessible. This isn't out of our wheelhouse. Only if you have digital access, can you get full access to what we provide. So much of our books, so much of our programs are now online. If you don't have broadband, you can't use the library fully. So we have to get at that. We should do what we can and what we have to.
And in these circumstances, that's getting harder because of book bans, because of ICE agents patrolling outside our branches. They haven't come in yet.
Nieves: I was gonna ask you, have they come in?
Marx: That day may happen. I talked to our patrons, some of them are intimidated, understandably. They're being brave in continuing to come and get what they need. So we have to provide that for them. That's our responsibility.
We don't get almost any federal funding. Our funding, 60% is from the city. We've had our hard moments with the city,
Nieves: Yes, you have.
Marx: But we have always gotten what we needed or even increases. We get wonderful funding from the state of New York. We depend upon the kindness of friends and strangers.
Nieves: Absolutely.
Marx: Our donors, our trustees. You know, my mother who before she passed, was giving $40 a month, or $40 a year, sorry.
Nieves: Thanks, mom. That's right. That's good.
Marx: But uh, and the citizens do that and that's amazing, right? We have to use those resources to meet what the public needs. And I love the fact that we don't choose who gets… it's not a selective college. It's everyone. It's everyone in the poorest neighborhoods. It's everyone of every race. It's the Nobel Laureates.
Nieves: Oh yes.
Marx: It's the illiterate. It's everyone. That's amazing. Nobody else does that.
Nieves: Outside, Tony as a person, how are you navigating this moment? Are you experiencing a personal juncture right now? And how, how are you moving?
Marx: I think we all are, I mean , we’re all living through it, right? When this latest phase started, I was a complete news junkie, nonstop.
Nieves: The Trump administration.
Marx: And it was, you know, I felt bizarrely responsible for everything sort of scary, 'cause I've been an administrator for so long, I sort of feel responsible for things. It's a little wacky. It was not doing good things to me, right? It did not make me feel good. And I took a break and I said, ‘Okay, I need to rethink.’ I can't ignore what's going on. I can't be oblivious to it. I'm just not built that way and I don't think that's responsible. But I can't be ingesting it nonstop in a way that makes me feel, you know, like all my gut,
Nieves: You're gonna combust. Right.
Marx: Right. ‘I'm gonna, I'm gonna blow up.’ So I've learned to measure it better. I still read the news. I'm still amazed and horrified by things I read.
One of the things that connects my past to this moment, I was a scholar of anti-apartheid, of the resistance to dictatorship. I studied Latin American dictatorships to understand why democracy ended. It never occurred to me, never, in those days, that what I was fascinated by would, and horrified by, but fascinated and learning about would,
Nieves: Would feel so close.
Marx: Would feel so close. It never occurred to me. Now the questions of, you know, will the guardrails of democracy remain? Will they do the job we need them to do? Are people learning enough to be the informed citizens that we need them to be? It never occurred to me that I would feel on point for those questions in the country I love.
I'm an American, through and through. My parents were immigrants. Everything I've achieved is because of the amazing, great country that I have lived in.
Marx: It's why I came back from South Africa and didn't end up living there. I knew fundamentally I would always be an American, not a South African. And it's sort of a weird thing, but I'm like, I gotta be in the place that I am from and feel a responsibility for.
I think we all have a responsibility for making sure that this country we love lives up to our aspirations, our ideals, what we need it to do, not just for ourselves, but for all of us together, ‘'cause that's where the strength of this country comes from.
Nieves: Well, I feel like that's gonna be what this means going forward. So. Thank you. Thank you for spending time with me.
Marx: Thank you for the work you do. Thank you for helping to spread the word. Thank you for inspiring me, and I know everyone else at the library, in what you do. And, we will all get through this and continue to build.
Nieves: Absolutely. There is no other option.
Marx: There is no other option.
Nieves: Thank you for spending time with us today. I hope that you feel that your soul's been fed a little bit more today. I have a task for you. Think deeper about a moment you're in. Are you at that junction? Where do you need to push yourself? What could you have learned from Tony today to help you navigate that junction moment? Tune in next time.
Credits: Thank you for listening!
At The Junction, we reflect on the moments that make us — with today’s most impactful leaders. The show was created and hosted by me, Lisette Nieves, and produced by LWC Studios.
This show is available everywhere you listen to podcasts, and on YouTube. I encourage you to share video and audio episodes by linking to them on social media, websites, and by sharing them in your online affinity groups. Our executive editor is Juleyka Lantigua. Michelle Baker is our senior producer. Alyson Rich and Cesar Ventura provided administrative support. CDM Studios is our live recording location. Our theme song is “La Juntura Cultural,” arranged by Randy Seriguchi, Jr. and D'Artanian Woodard, produced by Randy Seriguchi, Jr., and recorded by Farmacy Studio.
For more information and episode transcripts, visit Lisette-Nieves.com. If you’d like to reach out, please email us at Hello@LWCStudios.com.