Paul LeClerc became President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Public Library on December 1, 1993. Founded in 1895, The New York Public Library, with four research libraries and 87 branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, serves a more varied set of constituencies and has a broader mission than any library in the country. Dr. LeClerc, who from 1988 to 1993 was President of Hunter College, the largest public institution of higher education in New York City, is a scholar of eighteenth-century French literature, especially the French author Voltaire, and the author or co-editor of five scholarly volumes on writers of the French Enlightenment. His contributions to French culture have earned him the Order of the Academic Palms (Officier) and the French Legion of Honor (Chevalier), and he has received numerous honorary doctorates including those from the University of Paris III-La Nouvelle Sorbonne and Oxford University. Dr. LeClerc is presently a Trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, the National Book Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

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