To Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, the greatest compliment is "you made me think" or "you made me consider a different view."

However, much of the e-mail response to columns is not in that vein, he told journalism students and faculty Oct. 5 at the School. Many readers simply label him for his views. Rarely does he get an e-mail that articulates the person's reasons for disagreeing with his column.

Since 1997, he has tried to write his syndicated column about what people talk about at the dinner table or in line at the grocery store. Often those topics concern race, sports, gender or war, he said.

During the lunch hour question and answer session in the Journalism Resource Room, Pitts said, "we are definitely getting meaner as a country. People who were hateful in the 1960s and ‘70s now feel safe to be public about their hate,” he said. "They do not have the decency to feel shame. They put their names on their e-mails now." 

Pitts said he writes on both ideological sides because "neither side has a monopoly on morality or truth." He aims the column at an "audience that is intellectually honest enough to grapple with facts," he said.

He does take "a mental health break" from certain topics when responses to a column are too painful, he said. An example was a reader's response to a column on a teenager who was killed by guards in a boot camp where he was incarcerated for stealing a relative's car. The young man was an A student. A reader said the guards did society a favor.

"I don't want to think a person like that exists," Pitts said.

Asked what young people should learn in college, he said, each student should know that "your path is your own." He knew at age 5 that he wanted to be a writer. He was published at age 14 and was first paid for writing about music when he was 18. 

"Never be comfortable or complacent as a writer," he advised students. "You have to be hungry for a story. I'm my toughest editor. I'm never content. Excellence is not a destination, it's a journey."

"Objectivity is fiction. A journalist should strive for fairness," he said. 

Commended for his column about a writer who plagiarized his columns, Pitts said, "Having your work plagiarized is like having your house broken into." 

In the afternoon, the columnist spoke to Professor Barbara Barnett's J101 Media and Society class of 450 students.

At the Lied Center that evening, Pitts drew an overflow crowd to hear him speak on "Civil Liberties After 9/11." He criticized the willingness of Americans to accept restrictions on their civil liberties because of fear engendered by the war on terror. It is time to "grow a spine," to safeguard rather than surrender rights, he said.

Pitts' visit to KU was sponsored by the Dole Institute of Politics, the School of Journalism and the Department of English. 

By Mary Wallace, Assistant to the Dean