The Education of Tony Marx
By JACOB
BERNSTEIN
EVERYWHERE Tony Marx goes, he does a lot of smiling and nodding. As the
president of the New York Public Library (a
job he took over in July 2011, after eight years as the president of Amherst),
it is his job to smile and nod at big-name writers around whom the library
plans events.
It is his job to smile and nod at the business leaders who serve on his
board. It is his job to smile and nod at heads of foundation boards, at members
of the City Council and officials in the Bloomberg administration, whom he
lobbies for money and patronage, since the library (like most publicly financed
institutions) has been subject to brutal budget cuts over the last four years.
Anyway, smiling and nodding are certainly what he was doing on an early
September evening at a cocktail party for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic
Art at the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, working the room,
introducing himself to anyone and everyone, offering tours, giving pats on the
back and providing reassurances to people who appeared to be slightly wary of
him.
Mr. Marx has had to reassure a lot of people of late.
Last November, right on the eve of the annual Library Lions dinner, he was arrested in Harlem at 2 p.m. on a Sunday after he sideswiped a parked truck with a
library-owned vehicle. Mr. Marx then failed a Breathalyzer test, which
determined that he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.19, more than twice the legal
limit of 0.08. (Mr. Marx pleaded guilty to charges of driving while intoxicated
and was ordered to pay a $500 fine, give up his license for six months and
attend counseling.)
Hello, New York!
The arrest was, of course, big news in the tabloids, and for a while it
appeared as if Mr. Marx’s tenure as the library’s president might be
short-lived. But despite having what several board members described as
“intense conversations” about his future, they ultimately decided not to fire
him. Recently, in an interview in his office, he declined to discuss the
incident except to say, “It was a stupid mistake and it won’t happen again.”
In April, Mr. Marx was again in the news, this time when a host of
big-name writers and scholars, including Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and
Jonathan Lethem, took a stand against the board of trustees’ plan to move off
site millions of rare books in the 42nd Street flagship (because of budget
cuts, they explained), while plans were being completed to spend around $350
million to have the space there spruced up by the star-architect Norman Foster.
Opposition also came in a 5,300-word cover story in The Nation, then a two-part
series in the literary journal N+1.
Resistance to the plan crystallized with an Op-Ed article for The New York Times written by Edmund Morris, and headlined
“Sacking a Palace of Culture.” In it, Mr. Morris, a biographer of Teddy
Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, referred to himself as “a habitué of all of that
great institution’s research facilities” and explained that “it was with a
surge of emotion, therefore, that I read newspaper reports about the
determination of Anthony W. Marx, the president of the library, to spend $300
million to transform the main building, long devoted to reference, into what
sounds like a palace of presentism.”
No matter that the plan was under way well before Mr. Marx had assumed
the presidency of the library; he was now the public face of a dispute that
seemed poised to divide the city’s cultural and business communities.
Yet on this recent Wednesday evening, you would not have thought Mr.
Marx was a man under siege. In fact, there seemed to be something of a spring
in his step. He posed for photos with foundation staff members, joked with Nan
Keohane, the former president of Wellesley, and chatted with a historian named
Susan Zuccotti, who had done her dissertation at the library and took the
opportunity to let Mr. Marx know that she was “very concerned” about the plan.
Very concerned indeed.
“My big problem is,” she said, “not so much now, but I had three kids.
If I’d had to wait three or four or five days to get a book, it would be very
difficult — — ”
Mr. Marx, holding a glass of Diet Coke and listening politely, took this
is as a moment to make a gentle interruption. The library had hoped, Mr. Marx
told her, to “encourage people to order in advance. That doesn’t work. So I
believe the board will vote next week to change the plan so that basically all
the books on site are going to stay on site.”
“Well, that is fantastic!” Ms. Zuccotti said. “That’s fantastic news.”
Mr. Marx smiled and nodded.
ON paper, Anthony W. Marx, 53, would seem like an ideal candidate to run
the nation’s largest public library system. Like many of his predecessors, most
notably the near-legendary Vartan Gregorian, he was a well-regarded academic.
And at Amherst, he proved himself not only a popular leader, but also an
effective fund-raiser who in 2009 presided over what the college heralded as
the largest unrestricted cash gift ever made to a liberal arts college ($100 million),
a skill that would be crucial for anyone taking on the perennially
cash-strapped library.
But there was more.
Mr. Marx grew up using his own branch of the library in Inwood, where
his parents were anything but rich. His mother was a physical therapist and his
father (whose education stopped at high school) worked at a steel trading
company.
At Yale, which Mr. Marx transferred to after two years at Wesleyan, he
studied political science and did his senior thesis on Plato’s Academy, using
it to discuss the role of education in society.
He went to graduate school at Princeton and studied with Albert
Hirschman, the father of development economics. Mr. Marx also ventured to South
Africa, spending 3 ½ years, on and off, working for a nongovernmental organization
that set up a school for black students whose education had been stymied by
apartheid.
Shortly after getting his Ph.D., Mr. Marx joined the political science
department of Columbia University in 1990, and met his future wife, the
sociology professor Karen Barkey, whom he married two years later. (The couple
have two children and now live near Columbia in faculty housing.)
In 2003, he was hired as the president of Amherst, a school that was
known for being politically left-leaning, but conservative when it came to
getting anything done in the way of reform. A particular focus for Mr. Marx was
diversifying the student body, bringing in not only more minorities, but also
international students, veterans and the middle-aged.
It wasn’t always a seamless process, and some professors complained that
Mr. Marx was arrogant and talked too much about democracy when his management
style was fairly autocratic.
“Faculty members wanted to be consulted more,” said Amrita Basu, a
professor of political science and women’s and gender studies there. “They felt
Tony was trying to change too much too quickly.”
But the board of the New York Public Library, which heard a fair amount
about these skirmishes, thought that if anything, this made him more qualified
for the job, not less.
Said Joshua Steiner, a former chief of staff in the Treasury Department
under Bill Clinton and a vice chairman of the board of trustees at the library,
“If you look at Tony’s experience in a complex environment pushing through
meaningful change, that to my mind was a clear and important indicator of his
willingness to think deeply about issues and to believe strongly in the
importance of change.”
And by the time Mr. Marx left Amherst, it was being heralded as a beacon
of change, offering a higher percentage of its student body financial aid than
almost any other liberal arts college in America.
IN 1981, the New York Public Library, broke and facing a slew of
terrible options, hired Mr. Gregorian, an Armenian academic and an expert in
Asian studies, to help rescue the place.
“When I accepted the presidency, someone told me to see a psychiatrist,”
he recalled in a recent interview. “Because we were bankrupt.”
At his first meeting, the agenda was how to shut down the branches, sell
off the collections and charge the public admission at the central library.
It was time for a savior, and one arrived in the form of Brooke Astor,
the socialite and philanthropist, then in her late 70s, but still a formidable
force on the city’s social scene, which she would remain almost until her death
at 105 in 2007.
Mrs. Astor had recently been sidelined at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and was looking for something to do. “They’d invoked a clause making her an
emeritus and she didn’t feel very emeritus at all,” said the journalist Meryl
Gordon, who wrote the biography “Mrs. Astor Regrets.”
So Mrs. Astor called Mr. Gregorian, and they joined forces with Richard
Salomon and Andrew Heiskell (a former chief executive of Time Inc.) to begin a
huge fund-raising effort. Soon enough, in came big donors like the real estate
developer Marshall Rose, and the heiress Celeste Bartos. The library began
holding increasingly high-profile readings with authors and started giving
galas like the library Lions dinner, which had its first event later that year.
Tables cost $10,000 each, and the guest list (much of which came from
Mrs. Astor’s formidable Rolodex) rivaled any state dinner. Look over there:
it’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis! And a hop, skip and a jump away, Norman Mailer
and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Not to mention countless other Social X-rays, who,
to quote Ms. Gordon, “realized that if they donated to the library, they’d get
invited to dinner.”
In short order, junkies disappeared from the steps of the central
library, the facade was cleaned up and scores of curators were hired. Services
at the branches around the city improved considerably.
The library was a hot institution, one that bestowed upon its
benefactors a decided social cachet — something that future presidents would
come to rely on. (On Oct. 22, as a fund-raiser for the library, the board will
stage a reading of works by Nora Ephron, this reporter’s mother.)
In 1989, after Mr. Gregorian left to become the president of Brown
University (he’s now the president of the Carnegie Corporation), the
organization was taken over by the Rev. Timothy S. Healy, a Jesuit priest and
former president of Georgetown University, who three years into the job died of
a heart attack. As his successor, the board tapped Paul LeClerc, a Voltaire
scholar with prodigious fund-raising skills.
Over the next few years, the library raised $100 million in donations to
open the Science and Business Library at 34th Street and Madison Avenue. In
2001, the organization completed a $38 million renovation of the performing
arts library at Lincoln Center.
But with the financial crisis of 2008 came severe budget cuts from the
city. The science library and the mid-Manhattan branch (on 39th Street) fell
into disrepair. The size of the research staff declined by almost 30 percent.
Meanwhile, the main branch at 42nd and Fifth was being closed down with
increasing frequency for corporate events — a necessary fund-raising move but
one that rankled staff members, some of whom complained that a monument to
intellectual life was turning into a nightclub.
Even a $100 million gift from the financier Stephen Schwarzman,
earmarked for the upgrade of the central building, did little to quell a sense
among the rank and file that the library board was perhaps more interested in
the building’s housing than the books inside it.
What to make of Kanye West’s appearance at a Paper Magazine gala
celebrating the magazine’s 25th anniversary? Or the fact that at a 2011 Thom
Browne fashion show, in the Edna Barnes Salomon Room, there were models kneeling
before a makeshift altar as Gregorian chants blared? An indication that the
library was successfully moving into the 21st century, or proof that it had
totally, completely, lost its way?
“We began to say that it was going to be Cipriani Fifth Avenue,”
recalled one recently retired senior administrator, who asked to remain
anonymous because of a separation agreement he signed with the library.
“I’d be in the elevator and there’d be a blond girl in a little black
dress who worked in development escorting people around and saying, ‘You have
to mention in your release that this is in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building.’
I can’t tell you how many times we dismantled really serious pieces of
equipment that cost us millions of dollars to acquire so that we could have a
free rein for, oh, runway shows during the February and September fashion
weeks.”
“We have existential questions to ask,” Mr. Marx was saying as a
spokeswoman hovered nearby. “How do we build and deploy our staff to meet the
educational needs of this city? How do we ensure that we are providing ideas
and information to New Yorkers and to the world at a moment when that is all
becoming digital while preserving our great book collection?”
He was sitting in his office at the central library, and if it sounded a
bit like a script he had delivered before, well, that’s probably because Mr.
Marx was reading from a page of notes he had come prepared with.
“So I had a lot to learn and we have big decisions to make,” he
continued, in a conversation that went on for more than an hour. “And that
generated considerable debate, as it should, as we try to make the smartest
decisions we can going forward.”
Eventually, Mr. Marx got up from the table and embarked on a tour of the
library, going first to the rooms that the library plans to renovate. “This
should be filled with library users,” he said entering one such room, which had
a view of Bryant Park and was being used for storage. “I’m going to start to
reopen these rooms. Because there is no reason they shouldn’t be filled with
people doing library work.”
He walked into the Rose Main Reading Room, pausing to give a pat on the
back to the security guard.
“Literally every seat is filled. Every seat is filled, and everyone
practically has a computer in front of them,” he pointed out, adding that some
of those computers belonged to the library.
“And you walk up and down and you see that relatively few people are
using our books. Right? Which raises an interesting question. Why are they
here? Well, partly they’re here for computers and Wi-Fi, but mostly they’re
here because it’s an unbelievably inspiring space. And because people actually
want to work in inspiring spaces together, not at home alone. And that’s not
going to change.”
This went on for a while, his voice trailing off, as Mr. Marx walked the
reporter out of the room, giving the security guard another fraternal pat as
the two went by.
CALL up people who work with Mr. Marx, and some of the things you will
hear repeatedly are that he’s a “little slick,” that the volume is always “on
high,” and that he continues to speak to groups of adults the way he might have
spoken to his students at Amherst or Columbia.
But Jide Zeitlin, a former board chairman at Amherst who helped recruit
Mr. Marx to the college and who has now been friends with him for roughly a
decade, said that this was slightly unfair.
“There are some people who pull it off really effortlessly, so that it
looks like they aren’t really trying,” Mr. Zeitlin said. “It’s like the duck,
smooth on the surface and paddling like mad underneath. Personality-wise,
that’s not Tony. He is at times too transparent, so what you see is what you
get. But I’d argue it’s honesty. ... He cares about what he’s doing.”
Others caution that he deserves time and the benefit of the doubt as he
grows into his new position.
“Tony’s a good scholar,” Mr. Gregorian said. “He has democratic
principles and he’s learning about bureaucracy and the various constituencies
of the library. I’m confident he’ll do his best.”
And increasingly, members of the board — among them Louise Grunwald,
Gayfryd Steinberg and Marshall Rose — seem to be moving into his corner. A
couple of weeks back, at a board meeting where Mr. Marx revealed an $8
million pledge from the trustee Abby Milstein and her husband, Howard, to keep
the bulk of the books on site, the
board announced that the library had raised $98 million in charitable
contributions in the last fiscal year, a result of 329 meetings Mr. Marx had
with potential donors and a record for the most money raised in a single fiscal
year.
Annette de la Renta was there smiling brightly. Nearby were David
Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, and Ms. Grunwald. Before the meeting
started, Mr. Marx greeted a group of scholars who sat anxiously in the front
row and Mr. Schwarzman, to whom he gave a big pat on the back.
When it came time for him to speak, Mr. Marx thanked people on the
board, whose work had made it possible for him to raise so much money. Then he
thanked the scholars, whose protestations led the board to roll back part of
the central library plan.
“We’re really grateful to everyone who contributed, even loudly at
times,” he said. “That’s how I think democracy should work. It’s certainly how
I think publicly supported institutions should work.”
Said Mr. Rose afterward: “I’ve lived through four presidents, and he has
a real ability to know when he’s wrong and to see when things can be improved.
I think he’s doing great.”
Mr. Steiner concurred: “I don’t think that the first year has been
perfect or that everything has been seamless, but I do feel, and I think the
vast majority of trustees agree, that we’ve made meaningful progress. And that
while there were moments of discomfort, we would happily trade off that
discomfort for the progress we’ve made. That reflects the trustees and the
staff and Tony’s work.”
That work also includes an ambitious plan, announced by Mr. Marx and
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in late September, to turn every public school
student into a member of the New York Public Library.
The way the program will work, said Mr. Marx, is that “over the course
of three years, every school in New York will end up with computers and its
library connected to a circulating system that combines the Brooklyn, Queens
and New York Public Library, which in total have 17 million circulating items.
Students and teachers can order online whatever books they need, for whatever
research they’re doing at that point, and we will deliver to them the books
that they need.”
Scholars continue to be skeptical about parts of the central library
plan, but Mr. Marx has clearly ingratiated himself to them somewhat in recent
weeks.
“I think he has politician written all over him,” said Annalyn Swan, who
in 2005 won the Pulitzer Prize (with Mark Stevens) for “De Kooning: An American
Master” and has been one of the most vociferous critics of the central library
plan. “But there are better politicians and worse politicians, and he seems to
be a better politician.”
As the dispute over the central library plan dies down, Mr. Marx is
choosing to see the sunny side of things. “The good news,” he said after
leaving the Doris Duke Foundation event, walking toward the nearby Time Warner
Center, “is that people are talking about the library. What they want it to be
and what they don’t want it to be, rather than taking it for granted and
letting it sink. Right?”
At which point he walked into another lobby, got on another elevator, on
his way to another cocktail party, another Diet Coke, and more smiling and
nodding.
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