Victor Navasky '54 Publisher Emeritus of The Nation
to Present McCabe Lecture at Swarthmore College

by Anita Pace
10/22/2009

Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus and former editorial director of The Nation, will present the annual Thomas B. McCabe Lecture at Swarthmore College on Mon., Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. in Science Center 101. The talk, "The Art of Controversy or Why One Caricature May Be Worth 10,000 Words," is free and open to the public.

Navasky is the George Delacorte Professor of Magazine Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he directs the Delacorte Center of Magazines and chairs the Columbia Journalism Review. Prior to joining The Nation  in 1978, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine and wrote In Cold Print, a monthly column about the publishing business for the Times Book Review. He is the author of Kennedy Justice (1977), National Book Award-winning, Naming Names (1980), and A Matter of Opinion (2005), which was awarded the 2005 George Polk Book Award.

He is co-author of The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (1984), Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won The War In Iraq (2008), and Starr's Last Tape (1999), a one-act play performed at the Berkshire Theater Festival. He was founding editor and publisher of Monocle, a leisurely quarterly of political satire and social criticism that appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Navasky also served as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum. Navasky has taught at Swarthmore College, Wesleyan University, and was Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Victor Navasky graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 1954 and received an LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1959. The McCabe Memorial Fund honors Swarthmore benefactor Thomas B. McCabe, Class of 1915, and funds the lectureship to bring individuals with distinguished careers to campus.