Gaston, Patricia Weems

Patricia E. (Weems) Gaston joined the University of Kansas after a long, stellar career at The Washington Post, where she was an editor who worked on several desks including National, Foreign and Editorial. Before going to the Post in 1997, Gaston worked at the Dallas Morning News, where she was an assistant foreign editor and was co-editor of the 1994 international reporting Pulitzer Prize-winning series on violence against women. But it was the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle where Gaston began her work in journalism in 1981.

For Gaston, returning to KU in 2018 was returning home – she is a member of a Kansas City, Kan., legacy family that has been attending the University since the 1920s when her uncles Percy M. Caruthers and Bertram Caruthers Sr. came to Mount Oread. Her dad’s sister, Christine Weems Northern, was the first Black graduate of the School of Nursing.

Gaston knew as a child that she was going to KU, and would study journalism, even though her parents didn’t understand the business and thought accounting would be a better way for her to take care of herself. She liked writing more than math. She graduated from the William Allen White School of Journalism in 1981; she also has a master’s degree in sports management from The George Washington University. 

Her father Charles Weems will tell you today that he has learned to never doubt his five children, and that when they tell you they are going to do something, they do.

In 2013, she was a Leadership Institute Fellow with the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy program. She also worked as a kitchen, case management and advocacy volunteer at Miriam's Kitchen in Washington, D.C., and served on the agency's Volunteer Advocacy Advisory Committee. She also served two, two-year terms as the co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force of the American Association of University Women. 

Gaston returned to Kansas as the Lacy C. Haynes Professor as it gives her an opportunity to be the mentor to today’s students that she had in former Associate Dean Susanne Shaw and the late Professor Samuel L. Adams. She left her two grown children – Erin, a special education teacher; and Jonathan, who owns a mobile car-detailing business -- in the Washington, D.C. area but she is now able to attend to her aging parents. 

While at KU, she has advised the staff of the student-led University Daily Kansan, led the school's search for the Knight Chair in Audience and Community Engagement for News, serves as a mentor in the Rising Scholars Program, is a member of the William Allen White Foundation, the University's Committee on Faculty Rights, Privileges & Responsibilities, the school's Curriculum and Grievance committees and the William Allen White National Citation Award Nomination Working Group. She has served on the Faculty Senate, including as member of the executive committee. 

She is currently working with two KU colleagues on a series of webinars on disinformation and misinformation to address the ways in which systems perpetuate the spread of both, especially as they stem from dominant narratives in American society. These ongoing events, which uplift research and a culture of responsive care, work to connect teachers, students, scholars, and leaders with the tools to better help us navigate these perilous times.

Gaston has also written several columns for the Kansas Reflector as well as The Washington Post. And she has been a media critic for KCUR’s Up to Date.

Her first column in the Reflector, How it feels to come home to Kansas after decades away, puts everything in perspective: I am not going to lie — I miss the Washington, D.C., area where I made my home for 21 years, my two grown children, my work at The Washington Post, my friends, church and all of the cultural and sports amenities that a heart can desire. But the chance to train the next generation of journalists called me back to Kansas and made my see my home state with new wonder. You can go home again.