FULL-TIME STUDENT, GRADUATE, RETIREE TURNS 78 MONDAY
‘I have taken more than 200 courses’
Brian Phillips
News Editor
Some students come to UC for a couple years. Others get bachelor’s degrees and stick around for graduate work.
Ramnarayan “Ed” Lachman, however refuses to leave.
Lachman, who turns 78
Monday, is enrolled in six classes.
He first came to UC in 1957.
He started here as an employee, but he already had medical training and theology school under his belt at the time.
“I’ve always taken courses,” said Lachman, who is presently taking Psychopharmacology 793 at the main campus, two computer classes, journalism, painting, and art history courses at Raymond Walters College.
“I’m taking [Intro to Internet 091] for the third time now,” he said, “because each time I take it I learn something new.”
Learning something new, it seems, has always interested Lachman.
“He’s obviously a guy who’s dedicated to life-long learning,” said John Brolley, program director of religious studies, who taught Lachman in “four or five” religion classes from 2001 to 2003.
Lachman’s frequent comments in class, while sometimes distracting, added a lot to the classes, Brolley said.
“I’d rather have a student that I have to ask to calm down… than have a student I have to pull discussion out of,” Broley said.
But Lachman isn’t the type to calm down. He started his secondary education 50 years ago and has kept studying – primarily religion (at the Athenaeum-Mount Saint Mary Seminary) and medicine – ever since.
Born in the British colony of Guyana in South America, Lachman trained as a World War II medic in 1945, but a higher calling encouraged him to become a Lutheran evangelist in 1947.
Lachman preached and taught religion for about 10 years, and then returned to medicine.
He traveled to the United States in 1957 to study at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science and also started working in the crossmatch lab at the UC Blood Transfusion Service.
“I was the first East Indian hired by Dr. Paul I. Hoxworth,” Lachman said, referring to the man for whom the center is now named: www.hoxworth.org
Lachman passed his national board exam to become a licensed embalmer in 1960, but kept working as a phlebotomist, or drawer of donors’ blood.
The decision to draw blood wasn’t difficult, he said.
“I know how to exsanguinate a person,” he said, describing the mortician’s process of removing all of a person’s blood. “Taking one pint of blood is nothing!”
Lachman graduated from UC with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology in 1967 and kept taking courses at UC and elsewhere.
“I went to the Cincinnati Bible College for a year to study piano, organ, voice, conducting, theory and composition,” he said.
Why didn’t he go to UC’s music school?
“It’s tough to get into CCM,” he said. Additionally, he was upset the conservatory got rid of its sacred music program.
“Nobody wanted to study Gregorian chants in the ’60s, I guess,” he said.
While continuing to take classes, Lachman also kept drawing donors’ blood at the Hoxworth Blood Center.
It gave him an opportunity to discuss religion.
“While they’re there bleeding for five minutes, I have a captive audience.” Lachman said with a laugh.
He handed out business cards to donors describing his fusion theology of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and holistic medicine.
Lachman retired from Hoxworth in 2001, but keeps “preaching, teaching and healing,” based on Saint Matthew, Chapter 4:23 www.ramlachman.org
He was ordained a priest in the Old Catholic Church (which is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church) in 1999, (www.oldcatholic.com) but said his practices of transcendental meditation and apitherapy (the theraputic use of bee products, including stings), www.apitherapy.org,
don’t conflict with Christianity.
“I’m a controversial fellow because I have a rare theology,” he said. The religious studies program’s director, Brolley, can attest to that.
“Ed shattered anybody’s stereotype of anybody,” Brolley said,
Brolley said that Lachman fits no stereotype – he isn’t the typical nontraditional student, Indian-American or priest.
“He doesn’t feel he needs to match up to anyone’s preconceived notion of a priest,” Brolley also said. “He’s quick with a joke – many of which were off-color.”
Lachman acknowledges there have been problems in some classes.
“[Professors] said the students complained about me,” Lachman said. “[Professors] don’t like me to throw light on anything.”
But Lachman, who said he has taken more than 200 courses since high school, said he doesn’t plan to stop soon. He has said, however, that he might stop after his “golden birthday jubilee.”
“In 2026, I might stop.”
Web-posted 5/23/2004 5:56:52 PM
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“He’s obviously a
guy who’s
dedicated to
life-long
THE learning.”
NEWS RECORD Professor John Brolley.
http://www.newsrecord.uc.edu 05-24-04
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