Paul LeClerc, president and chief executive officer of the New York Public Library and a former professor at Union, will give the keynote address at Founders Day Thursday, Feb. 21 at 12:45 p.m. in Memorial Chapel.
LeClerc will receive the inaugural John Bigelow Medal, established by President Stephen C. Ainlay to recognize friends of the College who have contributed to the advancement of humanity.
Bigelow, of Union’s Class of 1835, was an author, publisher, lawyer and statesman who was instrumental in the formation of the New York Public Library. Schaffer Library is exhibiting selections from Bigelow's personal library, which was donated to the College and housed in Special Collections.
LeClerc has been with the New York Public Library since 1993. He was a professor of French at Union from 1966 through 1979 and chair of Modern Languages from 1971 through 1977. From 1988 to 1993, he was president of Hunter College in New York City.
He is a scholar of 18th-century French literature 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 from other institutions including the University of Paris III-La Nouvelle Sorbonne and Oxford University. He is a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, and a director of the National Book Foundation and the American Academy in Rome.
He received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Union in 1997.
Also at Founders Day, the Gideon Hawley Teacher Recognition Award will go to Mark C. Litton, an English teacher at Miramonte High School in Orinda, Calif. Litton was nominated by Thanh-Mai Bui-Duy ’11. The award is named for the 1809 graduate of Union who was New York state’s first superintendent of public education. It is awarded to secondary school teachers who have had a continuing influence on the academic life of Union students.
Founders Day commemorates the 213th anniversary of the granting of the College’s charter from the New York State Board of Regents.