BY ANNA ZALOKOSTAS

In print | November 29, 2007

And so the epic tale begins: when my editor first proposed that I write an article catching up with old Editor-in-Chiefs of The Phoenix, I was at first amused. Oh Tiffany, I thought, of course you want to know what former editors of the paper are doing now. We’d all like to have some sort of reassurance that our degrees are not entirely useless, that they’ll be somewhat marketable, that we won’t all come to inhabit so many cardboard boxes in New York that we’ll have our own borough.

After feeling like a child, trying to be as small and non-intrusive as possible as I wrote to important people with fancy jobs, quite a few things caught my attention. First, most alumni I contacted actually responded — yes, even the ones with Wikipedia entries (the true test of success). Second, everyone who got back to me was so eager to help me out that they apologized for taking more than a day to respond and took the time to give me any information I needed, inviting me to call them at their homes or offices. Swarthmore must have meant a lot to them if they were so keen to talk to a 19-year-old college student. Most importantly, I’ve learned that what they’ve been telling us all along is true, that major declaration forms and the specifics of what you do at Swarthmore aren’t quite `as important as the totality of your four years of education, that humanities majors are not destined to live in homes of cardboard and that what you study here in no way determines what you do once you leave.

Jed Rakoff ’64: Editor-in-chief of the Phoenix in the spring of 1962, Rakoff graduated as an English Literature major. After Swarthmore, he first went on to be a federal prosecutor, then a criminal defense lawyer and finally (for the past 11 years), a federal judge in New York. When he was editor, The Phoenix came out twice a week. “There was no alternative source of campus news, so all of us on the paper took ourselves very seriously, since we were, after all, the Paper of Record. This was just one of the delusions of youth, but the discipline necessary to meet a deadline was very good training, for Swarthmore and for life. I was only a sophomore at the time, and I think under my editorship the paper descended to a level of ‘sophomoric-ism’ that has not been equaled since. On the other hand, we won a national award as the best small-college newspaper in the country, which only goes to show that if you narrow a sample sufficiently, anything is possible,” Rakoff said. Though his most famous decision as a judge has been declaring the death penalty illegal (a decision which was reversed, but which he strongly believes will ultimately become “the law of the land”), he says that the decisions that most reminded him of his days with The Phoenix were the ones he made over the course of the last three years. These decisions required the Department of Defense to disclose information about the identities, processing and treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Victor Navasky ’54: After serving as Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix and majoring in Political Science, Navasky was drafted and edited the 53rd Infantry News for the 53rd Infantry Regiment in Alaska. He went on to Yale Law School, where he founded and edited Monocle, a magazine he called “a leisurely quarterly of political satire,” meaning it came out twice a year. After trying for to turn Monocle into a business (it lasted until the mid-60s), Navasky took up freelancing for a bit before going on to work for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, in which he wrote a column called “In Cold Print” for the New York Times Book Review.

Since then, he has written a number of books, including “Kennedy Justice” about Robert Kennedy’s Attorney Generalship, “Naming Names” about the Hollywood blacklist and winner of the National Book Award in 1982 and “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,” which Navasky describes as “a sort of Guinness Book of World Records of experts who have been wrong in every field,” adding that he and co-author Christopher Cerf “have just completed a new edition called Mission Accomplished: The Experts Speak on How We Won the War in Iraq.”

He is best known, of course, for his involvement with The Nation — In 1978, Navasky became Editor-in-Chief of The Nation, moving on to become its publisher and editorial director in 1995 and its publisher emeritus in 2005. He is also a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Carolyn McConnell ’93: Immediately after Swarthmore, where she majored in Philosophy, McConnell worked as a reporter for the Hudson Reporter in Hoboken.

“I ran into people like Jimmy ‘the Rat’ DeFino and the mayor of West New York, who ran the town as his personal fiefdom until the law caught up with him. My favorite stories were about nature reclaiming the toxic waste dumps of Liberty State Park and a vegetable garden atop the Lincoln Tunnel — pitiful signs I was way out of my element and needed to head back West, to places that weren’t entirely paved over,” said McConnell. She didn’t make it back West permanently for a while, however, taking a detour and spending her twenties in graduate school.

In 2001, however, she finally landed in Seattle, where she began working as senior editor of YES! Magazine, a non-profit, ad-free magazine that covers topics ranging from social justice, to environmental sustainability to alternative economics to peace. McConnell commutes to work by ferry with views of orca whales and the Olympic Mountains. Currently, she is writing and copy editing for the Seattle Metropolitan Magazine. McConnell is much more pleased with her surroundings out West than she was with the polluted, industrialized city of Hoboken, New Jersey.

“I can see the Olympic Mountains from the office windows and the Cascade Mountains from my home windows, so I’m much happier here than in Hoboken,” she said. She offered the following advice to Swarthmore students: “The world is a cold, hard place, especially after Swarthmore. Don’t underestimate how difficult it can be to take on a challenging job in a very foreign place – Yes, Hoboken was very foreign to me. Consider place when you make after-Swarthmore career plans.”

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