Editor’s Note: Since WSN is NYU’s independent student newspaper, we usually only publish content from current students. However, one former NYU student and recent graduate reached out to us with a story so impressive that we felt it needed to be shared.

It took me 54 years to graduate from NYU.

But, the wait to take part in the ceremonial presentation of my degree in journalism I was denied in 1962 made it more meaningful.

I was the star from another generation granted priority status when the time came to walk across the stage of the Madison Square Garden Theater to officially receive my degree. I had enjoyed my time as a reporter who covered governors and presidents and saw the world for more than 30 years. I had taught journalism for 18 years, hopefully contributing to the lives of my students.

Now, I was in another zone. I was literally a senior with a career behind me standing alongside ambitious, graduating business majors about to go out into the real world.

But at the same time, the euphoria was fraught with regret.

My late wife, Marcia, who had to endure my junior and senior years, and my parents — both deceased — were not on hand to see the special event. On the other hand, two of my three sons, Neil and Glen; my nine-year-old granddaughter, Jenna; the new woman in my life, Kathy Porter; and my sister-in-law, Pat, were given priority seating for the ceremonies. They got to see Dad, Grandpa Dan and Dan, wearing the violet NYU cap and gown, shake hands with Geeta Menon, the dean of the undergraduate college at NYU Stern School of Business, who introduced me separately before the 2016 graduating class.

My old employer, The Star-Ledger, found the story so compelling, I was featured in a nationally-distributed video that followed me from the time I donned the cap and gown until I crossed the stage beaming.

The day I enjoyed my 15 minutes happened after I told my story — and the reason I refused to have anything to do with NYU all those years — to Dave Vogelsang, executive director of the Student Resource Center; Peter Henry, dean of the Stern School; and Sarah Marchitto, executive director of Alumni Services, who negotiated on my behalf.

I did receive my degree and diploma in the mail in 1962. But all these years I felt cheated. I could not join my class for the ceremony that should have been the culmination of four years of study; countless hours spent working part-time to earn enough for tuition, books and other expenses at the late Gimbels Department Store; selling Fuller Brush brooms, vacuum cleaners, magazines, office equipment and even insecticides; and summers in the Catskill mountains as a busboy and waiter with a tray on my shoulder for 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

Three weeks before the scheduled graduation, however, I was told I wasn’t graduating with my class because a mistake had been made on my transcript. The explanation was that when I changed my major from foreign trade to journalism in my junior year, I had been given credit for the wrong elective. The news was delivered as matter-of-fact as if I was being told a textbook had been changed for a course.

But it was devastating because it meant that at the end of my senior year, I only had 126 credits. That cost me a job with the federal government, because despite my score on the FS exam, I did not have the required degree.

I was seething. I stood in the middle of Washington Place, where the bursar was located, and vowed I would never have anything to do with NYU, ever, after I was told I could make up the deficit by going to summer school — six more weeks of classes, which did not enthrall me. The alternative was a nine-day, three-credit course in American Literature.

That also stunk. I accepted the reality that I had no other choice, even if the first day of class, June 4, 1962, was the Monday after my marriage. So, there was no honeymoon. I spent nine to 12 every day for two weeks in class. And countless hours at the table in our three-quarter-room Brooklyn Heights apartment — so small it only had half a bathtub — reading up to 300 pages a night of the works of American writers ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Henry David Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edgar Allen Poe.  

And to pay the $45-per-credit rate for the three-credit course, I had to borrow $45 because at the time I only had $90 to my name.

For my wife and I, whatever romantic interlude we had was a weekend at Lake George in a cabin that we found so great that we returned to the same resort for some 20 years, raising our three boys, the ASPCA rescue mutt, See More and two Labrador Retrievers, Dexter and Monte.

I had vowed never to have anything to with the university that punctured the dream that I saw in the new graduates I shared the stage with that day. But in October, Kathy saw an invitation to an Alumni and Parents Day, and she told me I had to go so I could make my case for graduating.

“What could I lose?’’ was my attitude.

Then, I met Vogelsang, who became my surrogate, and Peter Henry, who gave me his email address on the back of the lunch menu and told me to get in touch with him. Things dragged on until the first week of May when Marchitto — who was my negotiator — told me that I was going to be part of the commencement program on May 20.

“I am so excited to see this happen,’’ Vogelsang said, congratulating me for my persistence.

And now I can say I am an NYU graduate, a grateful one proud to be an NYU alumnus.

Email Dan Weissman at [email protected].