Mark Pastin (A&S ’70) in his home office.
Mark Pastin (A&S ’70) admits that the memory of his years at Pitt is a bit foggy and selective of the good times. Interestingly, several of them involve campus police and the Cathedral of Learning lawn long after dark.
“My friends and I used to play a thing we called moon glow frisbee with a luminous disk,” Pastin recalled. “We kept getting chased out by campus police. What I really remember is the comradery of it.”
He also remembers living in the Towers dorms that they called “Ajax, Bab-o, and Comet” (three popular cleaning products of the time) rather than just A, B, and C.
Litchfield Towers A, B, and C still house students, though they no longer carry the nicknames given in the 1960s.
“I came back to campus years later for a conference and they put us up in those rooms,” he said. “I chuckled thinking ‘how did we live in one half of one of these rooms?’”
As an undergrad, Pastin received support from the Anna Randolph Darlington Gillespie and David Lindsay Gillespie Fund, which had just been created by a gift from the Gillespies’ estate. That fund has supported hundreds of students in the 50 years since its inception and it still benefits students today.
After graduating from Pitt with a degree in philosophy, Pastin went on to Harvard where he earned his PhD in just three years, compared to a more common timeframe of four or more years. He imposed that arduous schedule on himself for two reasons—the war in Vietnam was in full swing and he worried he was going to get drafted, and he only had three years’ worth of fellowships and grants before he would have to start taking loans to pay his expenses.
“It was a heck of a push,” Pastin said. “But it seemed manageable at the time. You are able to endure a lot more uncertainty at a young age than you are as you go on in life.”
Now, nearly 50 years later, Pastin wants to take away some of the anxiety faced by graduate students. This summer, he updated his estate plan to include a gift to Pitt to create the Mark J. Pastin Endowed Fellowship, which will provide support for graduate students enrolled in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences pursuing a PhD in the humanities.
“I looked at where I could make a critical difference,” Pastin said. “I recognized how much thanks I owed to the University for my undergraduate years as far as preparing me for my future, so supporting a PhD candidate at Pitt was the answer to where I could make the biggest impact.”
Throughout his career, Pastin took on big issues in ways that are felt across the country even now.
“I recognized how much thanks I owed to Pitt for my undergraduate years as far as preparing me for my future.”
- Mark Pastin
While working in business ethics at Arizona State University, Pastin formed a small nonprofit called the Council of Ethical Organizations. The idea was to help individual companies and industries increase their effectiveness by integrating ethics and legal compliance in their processes and culture. He launched the organization just about the same time as the country was reading headlines about the federal government paying defense contractors $640 for toilet seats and $435 for a “multi-directional, inertially enhanced impact generator,” more commonly known as a hammer.
“It prompted many contractors to develop a reputation for the highest integrity,” Pastin said. “We trained and educated the contractors and created codes of conduct. It is now a remarkably clean industry.”
A few years later, the Council was working with the financial services industry and then the health care industry.
“The health care ethics and compliance issues are the most interesting because they continuously evolve,” he said. “Right now, we are working on fraud in health care payment and billing, the relationship between quality of care and ethical conduct, and ethics in the medical professions.”
Pastin says he could retire, but he loves the work too much to step aside and he feels as though he is making a difference both today and for the future. Similarly, he knows his gift to Pitt will help researchers and professors for generations to come.
“I think it’s very hard for students to get through their PhD studies now, especially in research-oriented fields where they are not going on to high paying jobs, but their skills are sorely needed,” Pastin said. “It is not easy and I’m happy I can help.”