Editors Note: Professor Ehrlich's column is the fourth installment of ExtraCurricular, an occasional series of commentary by Dartmouth professors. Each column approaches a topic of the authors choice, highlighting issues of faculty interest and opening them up to response from our readers.
I've talked to so many students confused about what they really wanted to do, I thought I'd lay out a bit of my own convoluted twists and turns through academia and life.
During my first five years, when my father was in the Army overseas, I learned piano from my aunt, painted paper dolls with the girls next door and took tap-dancing lessons around the block. Just as I was about to move to ballet, my father returned from the war. He tried hard to accept this very different little boy, but after a few months of quiet stoicism, he stopped my dance lessons and enrolled me as a boxing student with the New Jersey middle-weight champion. Because of my dance background, I could move quickly and duck successfully, but I never wanted to hit anyone. That presented problems. As my ill-fated boxing career drew thankfully to a close, I moved on to football for the next 10 years at a boys' school. I was also in preparation for a medical career like my father's, and during the summer months, I'd work in his hospital's pathology lab, analyzing blood and urine. I did like looking through the microscope and drawing the cells, especially the sperm cells.
At 18 I began pre-med study at Cornell, but after taking Cornell's equivalent of Chem 5, I switched to government so that "I'd be prepared for law school." My mother was disappointed, but she consoled herself with the thought that with law I could be president! I ended up specializing in Asian foreign relations. I graduated in '63 and got a Fulbright to India to study Indian political philosophy, planning on a career with the State Department. Within a few months in India, I again changed my study, to Indian aesthetics, then to my own sculpture and playwriting. While I was in India, JFK was shot; I concluded that government work might be bad for my health. After a few months studying sumi-e in Japan, I returned to Berkeley for graduate work in drama and sculpture. After finishing at Berkeley, I went on to Columbia to study film, hoping to find a way to integrate all the arts I had been developing. I left Columbia in '68 to paint, compose music and dance along with my little kinetic sculptures.
To support myself, I taught college courses in the psychology of creativity and worked as an art therapist with recovering alcoholics in New York and with troubled teens in Austria. In '73, on a train in Salzburg, I found Marcela, a beautiful Czech lady, oddly sitting in my reserved seat.
I kept drawing at every chance I could get, and as I was once doing one drawing after another in a pad of tracing paper, I realized that each successive drawing was only slightly different from the last. When I returned to the United States, I pulled out the camera and shot a couple of frames on each drawing. When I got the film back from the lab, everything was so smooth and dreamlike that animation gradually took over everything I did.
So did the Czech lady, after I got her out of my reserved seat. In '75, Marcela came to New York. We got married and a year later moved to the Vermont mountains where I taught animation at the University of Vermont and we ran a home bakery that specialized in apple strudel and financial disaster. I returned to psychology and medicine in '79 to write a book on bowel movements (shouldn't they be as fluid as animation?!), and I began leading children's animation workshops around the world. The foreign relations came back with my work for ASIFA, the International Animation Association, and in '91 I returned to dance, performing in front of "Dance of Nature." The boxing came back, too, but that's for another story.
I've been teaching at Dartmouth for 15 years now, and I've found the students bright, serious, well-rounded and vigorously competitive while still being very caring of each other -- the rarest of qualities that never ceases to move me. On leave term last spring, I worked with college students at the Beijing Film Academy in making Olympics PSAs for Chinese TV, and any success I had there was directly related to what I've learned about teaching from my Dartmouth students. In the summer of 2006, over 40 years after I had cut loose my notion of working for the State Department, they suddenly asked me to do an animation workshop in war-torn southern Serbia on the border with Kosovo. There were three groups of children, Serb, Albanian and Roma, each with their own school and language, and each alienated from the others. My task was to get them -- and their parents -- to become friends through creating animation together. Now, a year later, the kids are all still good friends, and when I read their letters and emails, I feel that little workshop was as important as anything I've done.
Moral: Not to worry. What comes around, comes around.
