Jim Pitts works with his fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi, to inspire and engage young black males to value education and avoid trouble.   Photo: Urban News
Jim Pitts works with his fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi, to inspire and engage young black males to value education and avoid trouble. Photo: Urban News
By Moe White

Jim Pitts was almost a basketball star. Already more than 6′ tall, he was growing up on Chicago’s West Side in the shadow of John Marshall High School, the reigning national champs in the game at the time. The school’s athletic director, Boscoe Levine, had worked with one of Jim’s brothers and wanted Jim to play at Marshall; when Jim, a 13-year-old student at the highly competitive University of Chicago Laboratory School, learned that there were college scholarships available, a light went on in his head.

“I thought, ‘I read very well; I can handle school very well. School is fun—I can learn to play basketball, and someone will pay for my college education!’”

Jim’s parents had moved from rural Louisiana during the Great Migration of the 1920s; they saw education as the tool that makes the difference between liberation and bondage. Early on, his brilliant oldest brother had inspired their parents to think of college as a natural extension of high school.

At 12, Jim, the youngest brother of four, with both academic and sports talents, was accepted by the Lab School—at $800 a year, an expensive proposition for his father. But when he told his father he wanted to leave the Lab School after one year, “He talked to me like someone who was much more mature than I was, and he persuaded me to stay for another year. He gave me the responsibility for my choice.”

So he stayed a second year at the Lab School and then moved to John Marshall, where he excelled at both academics and basketball. And, in 1961, he enrolled at Northwestern with a basketball scholarship.

He was thinking about law school, inspired in part by Thurgood Marshall and the increasing turmoil caused by the civil rights movement. Political Science was said to be good preparation for law, so that became his major.

But he didn’t get to play his game at first; he’d hurt his knee freshman year, and it took a while to recover. And when he did start playing, the game, in a sense, corrupted him.

“I was dutiful in my studies but not working very hard. I set a goal of making two Bs and two Cs each semester. With so many medical trips needed for knee rehabilitation, I dropped one of my courses, and that semester I got one B and two Cs. I was offended by myself!”

So Jim reset his goals to achieve a 2.5 average, and after a while he was earning As, a few Bs, and no Cs.

After earning his BA in Political Science, Jim sought a recommendation to graduate school—and was invited to work on a Master’s in Sociology at Northwestern, with a job as a Teaching Assistant. Another light bulb went off.

“It was the first time I was aware of scholarships for other disciplines than sports! I could get a paycheck, get my tuition paid, and all I had to do was study.”

Jim earned his master’s, then a doctorate, married Sharon—a teacher herself—and they had their first child (and six years later, their second). Once he earned tenure at Northwestern, he stayed teaching at his alma mater for 14 years. But tenure and advancement demanded publishing and prominence for professors, and as a teacher and a father, he wanted his sons to attend schools where teachers cared more about teaching than careerism.

So for the middle part of his career he focused on academic management, beginning as Academic Dean at Ohio Wesleyan University and ending up at UNC Asheville, where he became Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in 1996.

After five years or so, when Chancellor Patsy Reed retired and the new chancellor arrived, Jim came full circle: he returned to teaching until his retirement in 2008. And—like the teachers he wanted for his own sons, he reflects now that teaching was the favorite part of his entire professional life: at the outset, building his academic career and experience at Northwestern, and at the end, coming to UNC Asheville.

In retirement, education is still as great a part of Jim Pitts’s life as ever, through the three organizations he spends the most time with.

NAMI – Jim works closely with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a grass-roots organization that engages families, reaches out to educate and interact with medical professionals, and advocates to the public and legislatures on behalf of those with mental illnesses.

“For most people, involvement in NAMI starts with the recognition that there is mental illness in one’s family. Life selects you for involvement. As educators, Sharon and I have always spent our time scanning experience for the meaning of life; involvement with the group enables us to become constructively engaged in our own family’s situation and to advocate with our extended families.”

ABIPA – Jim was just elected president of the board of ABIPA, which works to improve healthcare outcomes for people of color and low-income residents. Along with community outreach, ABIPA teaches healthcare professionals that many of the problems of lower-income people can be overcome only by developing relationships and clear communication between the two groups.

Teaching with the Boulé – He also works with his fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi, in Asheville Middle School, working to inspire and engage young black males to value education and avoid trouble. The group works to convince the boys that if they don’t work at education, there’s not much future for them in the United States.

“America has lots of riches, but lots of pitfalls, too, and lots of people who could care less if someone else should sink or swim. I can’t presume that these 12- or 13-year-old black boys already appreciate the power of education. I have to try to persuade them that they have more ability and more potential than they realize.”

“Education is about their survival. I only hope that some of them are willing to believe us.”

Trading basketball for academia, and exchanging hoop dreams for a lifelong career in education has, apparently, been a good choice for Jim Pitts—and for all those who have been and continue to be blessed by his love for teaching.