VICTOR T. LE VINE

Abstract

Victor T. Le Vine, professor emeritus of political science, analyst, and commentator, died on May 7, 2010, after a brief illness. Le Vine, an only son, was born in Berlin in 1928. His family fled Nazi Germany and lived in France until they immigrated to the United States in 1938. A polyglot, fluent in French, German, and Russian, he was a rigorous researcher, a dedicated teacher, and an encyclopedic repository of classical works in politics, history, literature, and music. He mentored hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students in his 47 years as an academic and was known for using his multilingual skills and photographic memory to make every class lecture come alive—at times accompanying them with his vivid newspaper clippings that he collected from his travels. In his classroom, the politics of the postcolonial world were peppered with vignettes of his experiences as a participant observer in the heyday of Africa's decolonization. He shared with his students the emergence of the political systems of diverse countries such as Benin, Cameroon, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Eritrea, Ghana, France, Israel, the PRC, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Zaire (DRC).