Glick found that the toughest game in Carlisle on a Friday afternoon was in the Kline Center against Dickinson professors.

A Triple-A Doc Ira Glick ’57 makes things click in an array of pursuits By Sherri Kimmel

Before a camera, under a basket or behind a lectern. Those are three likely places to find globe-trotting Stanford University Medical School professor of psychiatry Ira Glick ’57. Enjoying a plate of peach pancakes and the vintage Coca-Cola décor of Fay’s Country Kitchen on Hanover Street recently, Glick explains that his life has been devoted to a trio of A’s—the arts, athletics and academics.

“The arts have been an important part of my life,” he explains during a break in his schedule as a Metzger-Conway Fellow. “It’s a direct spin-off of what I did here. Dickinson expanded my horizons and, for that, I am eternally grateful. I took some liberal-arts courses in college, and a little something sunk in.

“The thing I’d like to be remembered for is my interest in the arts,” he adds. “I have a decent collection of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and textiles that I have picked up all over the world.”

In the exclusive Seacliff section of San Francisco, the house he shares with wife Juannie Eng and children Brandon, 12, and Olivia, 8, has lots of wall space for lots of art. Chinese calligraphy is juxtaposed with American graffiti pieces. A 300-pound stone sculpture that he acquired during a lecture tour of Japan dominates the living room.

Glick began collecting art right after finishing his medical-school residency at Hillside Hospital in New York, kicking off with a Picasso lithograph. He’s since traveled around meeting contemporary artists and buying their work.

While his wife is an accomplished painter, Glick, in the last few years, has begun to pursue his own art form. “I always had the desire to do art. I was not good enough to be a painter, but I thought I could do photography. I try to see what is hidden, so I thought I would use that peculiarity. You need to use what talent you have.”

Glick, whose specialty is night photography, has sold some of his work, been part of six group shows in San Francisco and nationally, and published in three national magazines. His photos often feature local monuments like the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Bay piers.

When not behind the camera, he can be found in front of it, as an actor in cameo roles. He’s had lines in Frankie and Johnny, Exit to Eden and The Princess Diaries, all directed by his life-long friend, Garry Marshall. The two met during Glick’s summer breaks from Dickinson, when he worked as head waiter at a summer camp in the Catskills. Marshall was the bellhop, LBJ biographer Robert Caro bunked next to Glick, James Caan was the waterfront counselor, and Marvin Hamlisch was the music counselor.

While Glick says it’s fun to team up with his old friend and “play Hollywood for the day,” he limits his roles because “there’s too much standing around.”

Standing is something that the power forward for an over-50 men’s basketball team does infrequently.

“The other theme, besides the arts, that I’ve had running through my life is basketball. I’ve managed to keep playing no matter what stage of my career I’m in.”

Glick played in high school and at Dickinson and just kept going, on to national and international competition. “As a senior player I’ve outlasted my contemporaries and never been seriously hurt,” he says. “I haven’t gotten any better over the years, but I haven’t gotten any worse. Of course, some of my Dickinson classmates would say I couldn’t get worse,” he adds with a laugh.

Currently, he plays on teams based in Dallas and Phoenix and was on the Maccabi Senior Team for the Pan Am Games in 1991. He plays casually all over the world with men four decades his junior. Wherever he visits, he inquires where he can find a game. During his recent visit to Dickinson that game was with a group of professors who play over their lunch hour. He also played in the alumni basketball game the following day.

“Playing basketball is a wonderful way to get to know people,” he notes. When Glick was in China lecturing, “I played basketball every single day. For me, basketball is the ballet of sports. It gives me a sense of mastery—that I’m still alive and in control of my body.”

Students in classes such as Gender and Health, Neurobiology, The Pathological Brain and Cross-cultural Psychology benefited from Glick’s visit.

He’s also firmly in control of his career as an academician, author and clinician. He’s taught at the Medical College of Georgia, the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, the Cornell University Medical College and, since 1993, the Stanford School of Medicine. He teaches psychopharmacology to residents and does research on the use of antipsychotic medications on patients with schizophrenia.

Glick spends about 10 percent of his time lecturing around the world, usually to physicians. Two years ago he did 24 talks in 20 days in Australia, and in March he spent a week holding forth at medical schools and conferences in Japan about new drug treatments for schizophrenics. His next big assignment will start this summer—traveling across India speaking to physicians as a Fulbright fellow.

His professional prowess has been noted by the American Family Therapy Academy, which presented him the 2003 Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research award, and by the American Psychiatric Association, which has given him separate awards for his teaching, research and efforts in rehabilitation of chronic psychiatric patients.

Dickinson students also benefited from his expertise when Glick visited as a Metzger-Conway Fellow, a Clarke Center-sponsored short residency program. He met with them in classes and spoke to a capacity crowd in Memorial Hall in late January about how psychiatry has changed over the years and how the family has changed as a result of societal change. His main theme was “Everything changes; embrace change and adapt to it.”

Besides being a doctor interested in how drugs can improve brain function, Glick is a psychotherapist with patients, several in faraway places. “Some are in New York, while two are in Tokyo, two in Hawaii and one in Thailand,” he says. Phone, fax and e-mail make trans-continental maintenance treatment possible. In times of acute crisis he refers them to colleagues near their homes.

Glick is sought out globally, because “There are not a lot of people around the world who know the ins and outs of combining drug therapy and psychotherapy and are interested in doing it. I like the combining of treatments, looking at the whole person. I’m interested in outcomes. How did it turn out years later?”

Glick, picking at the pancakes on his plate at Fay’s, also thinks about how his life has turned out, years after Dickinson. It’s not just the science courses the chemistry major and biology minor recalls. It’s also the public-speaking course that helped him succeed in that unforeseen aspect of his career—his lecturing.

But most of all, he cherishes the world-literature course he took with Professor Amos Horlacher.
“ He opened up the world to me, and that is probably why I have been a world traveler, trying to experience what’s out there.” •