Marx GS '90 appointed new president of Amherst College

Amherst College announced Friday that Anthony Marx GS '90 will serve as its 18th president.

Marx, a politics professor at Columbia University, also devotes much of his time outside the lecture hall to community service. He said he hopes that in a period of global conflict and economic difficulty to prepare students "for their lives, not just their livelihoods."

"The nation's most prestigious academic institutions have a social responsibility to address the decay of those below us," Marx said in an interview yesterday.

Current Amherst president Tom Gerety announced his resignation last May, and after nearly a year of searching, Amherst decided on the 44-year-old scholar who has also founded a secondary school in South Africa and a program near Columbia to improve the quality of high school teachers.

"I think they were looking for someone with scholarly credentials to lead the faculty in the formation of future curriculum," Marx said, "someone who could provide vision for further engagement for the college in society at large."

Marx said his graduate years at the Wilson School would help him lead the all-undergraduate school.

"Much of what I have become as a scholar is built on the base of my Princeton graduate work," said Marx, a Yale University undergraduate alum. "I was inspired by the quality of undergraduate education, which is not always the case at a major research university."

While acknowledging Amherst's current exceptional academics, Marx said one of his key goals is improving interdisciplinary studies.

Marx is a scholar who works at "the intersection of three strong interests: the social role of education, contemporary world politics, and the workings of history," said Amos Hostetter, chair of the presidential search committee, as well as chair of its board of trustees, in a press release.

Marx has written three books and 12 scholarly articles, mainly focusing on the political struggles in South Africa. His second book, "Making Race and Nation: Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil," was the co-winner of the 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award for the best book on cultural and ethnic pluralism from the American Political Science Association. It also captured the 2000 Barrington Moore Prize for the best comparative-historical sociology book in the preceding three years.