itch Weiss never was that excited about school. He preferred hanging out with friends and checking out the hottest grafitti in the New York City subways. But when he enrolled in Lehman College, the now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist found the faculty support and academic foundation that he needed to speed him on his way to a successful journalistic career.

“I wasn’t a great student in high school,” says Weiss, a writer for the Toledo Blade. “I was more into hanging out than I was into going to school.”

He recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” which exposed a U.S. government cover-up of Vietnam war crimes committed by the US military group Tiger Force.

He always knew that he wanted to be a writer, but it wasn’t until he entered Lehman that he began to seriously nurture that dream. “Lehman gave me a great foundation,” says Weiss, who obtained his master’s in Journalism from Northwestern after graduating from Lehman in 1981. “The thing that really benefited me was the fact that the teachers were accessible and the classes were small. It was a world-class faculty.”

Like many Lehman students, Weiss worked while going to school in order to help pay his tuition. He grew up in a working class family in the Parkside Houses in the Bronx where education was very important. He says that the one-on-one attention he got from his Lehman professors really helped him to stay on track with his educational goals. “If I didn’t have teachers up there who were interested in me, maybe I would have fallen through the cracks,” says Weiss, whose brother and sister also graduated from Lehman. He tries to give that same kind of personalized attention to the students he teaches at the University of Toledo. “It seemed that the teachers at Lehman were more interested in connecting with the students. That was really helpful.”

Weiss is currently taking a few months off to work on a book based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning article. The book, Tiger Force (Little, Brown and Company) is scheduled for release in the spring of 2005.