Leonard Lief, who died Monday at 83, was the founding president of Herbert H. Lehman College and for more than two decades shepherded and expanded the City University of New York campus in the Bronx.

In 1968, Lief was named president of what had formerly been the “uptown” branch of Hunter College. An English professor with a specialty in Shakespeare, he had been provost of the college.

As president of the new Lehman College, Lief oversaw the implementation of its master plan, often praised for its mixture of Gothic and traditional architecture. In 1981, he unveiled a $50 million performing arts center that includes a 2,300-seat auditorium. He saw the college as an important cultural center for the Bronx, which experienced some of its worst years of blight during his tenure.

“It just amazes me,” he told the New York Times in 1981. “This is a borough of 1.4 million people — it’s bigger than many states — and people just throw up their hands and say it’s finished.”

His optimism was especially notable in light of what the college had been through the decade before — a municipal fiscal crisis that meant severe belt-tightening, and rising tuition costs that were a pretext for student riots. On one occasion in 1970, Lief and other administration officials were trapped in their offices while rampaging students barricaded the outer doors and pillaged the cafeteria. Nobody was injured.

In 1977, a group of Jewish students occupied his office to protest the denial of tenure to a professor of Judaic studies. Lief happened to be out of the country, and the incident ended peaceably.

By the time he retired in 1990, Lief had expanded Lehman’s offerings to include 62 bachelor’s degree programs and 29 master’s programs. It also offered the CUNY doctoral program in plant sciences in a joint program with the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx.

A Manhattan native, Lief attended schools in Brooklyn and served as an infantry scout in Europe during World War II. He returned to New York University on the G. I. Bill, then attended Columbia University for his master’s degree, and Syracuse University, where he received a Ph.D. in English in 1953. He joined Hunter as an instructor in 1955. He published three English textbooks, “American Colloquy” (1963), “Story and Critic” (1963), and “Modern Age: Literature” (1967).

Lief moved to the Bronx campus in 1963. He liked to tell the story of how, in 1966, as chairman of the Bronx campus’s English department, he was asked to be provost and replied, “What’s a provost?”

He donated his book collection to the college’s library, which was named in his honor.

Leonard Lief
Born June 14, 1924, in Manhattan; died July 30 at his home in New Rochelle of the effects of Parkinson’s disease; survived by his daughter, Madelon, two stepchildren, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.