Pitt’s imperfect but still best choice for college

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about something with which I disagreed. A friend of mine,… A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about something with which I disagreed. A friend of mine, Brandon, came up to me and said that he really liked it. But he had a question for me, also.

“How come every time I read you, you’re calling someone an asshole?”

What Brandon so eloquently pointed out was that I’ve never written something nice. Well, not never. But ever since I became an editor — I believe it was during the Coolidge administration — I haven’t written many columns or really much at all. I’ve written only when I’ve been profoundly moved to, which usually happens when something pisses me off to the point where I feel people should care what I think.

The upshot of this, I realize, is that there are probably some people out there who think I hate Pitt and am one of those scotch-drinking, chain-smoking cynical journalists, which everyone swears exist.

So here’s a story I haven’t told before:

Since I was 13, I knew I was going to school in New York City.

Columbia was obviously the dream school, but if not there then NYU, and if not there then anywhere else in the City that would take me. But damn it, I was going to be in the Big Apple for college.

I didn’t feel like going to my sixth period government class one day early senior year of high school, so I skipped it. To come up with a reasonable excuse, I figured I’d apply somewhere online as an added safety school. Pittsburgh was nice; I used to live there, so why not?

The acceptance letter came — It said “Congratulations!” on the front, so tons of suspense there — and sat on my counter for a few months. After all, keep the eyes on the prize, so they say. At some point, my parents made me fill out some paperwork for a scholarship, and I wound up coming out to visit Pitt.

What I saw was a school with some grit. It was serious about academics, but didn’t take itself too seriously. The students were actually from different areas, and every single one of them had something to offer. Coming from a prep school where everyone had book smarts and no one had lived anywhere outside of a suburb, it was dizzying.

Columbia had just as many different ethnicities represented. But if I closed my eyes, they were the same people I’d gone to school with for four years. It was the first time I experienced the difference between tokenism and actual diversity. I sat in on a class there, and the professor looked and asked us what we were doing there. We eagerly explained we were prospective students.

“Oh,” he said. “Don’t come here.”

By the time Columbia sent me the acceptance letter I’d waited six years for, I didn’t care.

Every day since then, I have been more sure that my decision was right, that I have gotten a better education for less money, and been around more incredible people than even mighty New York’s neoclassical halls could offer.

Criticism is born of respect. I expect a lot of Pitt because I love it and have for four years. I love it enough that I have allowed it to sadden me. There were times when Pitt seemed fixated on being a cross between Yale and Augusta National: We changed the name on the jerseys to “Pittsburgh;” we engaged in institutionalized homophobia; we allowed goons on our sports teams; and then there was that time our Board of Trustees president said that education was “our third priority, behind research and scholarship.”

But Pitt still had a little bit of that grit that so impressed me to begin with. And every time it seemed I was destined to be stuck in the ivy-coated pretension I had sought so hard to avoid, something turned me around. We became the first in the state to stop the homophobic practices, we used money to hire more professors, and, thanks to a particularly gritty alum, we’re back to “Pitt.”

My favorite Onion headline of all time is: “College Student Marvels at What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been.” Well, my trip hasn’t been all that long or particularly strange. I’ve tried for two years to run a reasonably good newspaper that people of all demographics can rely on to be fair, accurate and interesting, even if they only want to do the crossword when they pick it up.

The real success, as many people far smarter than me have said far better than I’m about to, is that along the way I’ve seen people change the way things work around them. Some of these people I’ve been fortunate enough to work with, and some of them I’ve had to admire from afar. But they’ve all kept me believing that no institution is beyond hope, so long as there are good people behind it.

At this point in the farewell column, it’d be tempting to say that, tomorrow, I’ll just be another person working to make Pitt better. But the truth is that that’s all I’ve been for the past four years, anyway.

Greg Heller-LaBelle officially became Editor in Chief of The Pitt News at Hemingway’s Cafe in April 2003. Today, at 12:01 p.m., he returns there to attain the rank of reader of The Pitt News. Stop by and congratulate him, berate him or buy him a beer.