Art professor Ashmann continues
to beat illness, set new goals

by Mark McGowan

Type Jon Ashmann's name into Google, and the top result is a 2002 piece about the NIU art professor's struggle with a rare and insidious disease.

The story from NIU's faculty-staff newsletter details Ashmann's struggle to fight back from Pan Vasculitis, Polyarteritis Nodosaa, a multi-system disorder that has caused extreme pain in his hands and feet and has diminished his vision sharply.

As the article reveals, he won some personal victories despite prolonged symptoms.

“I'm still alive,” Ashmann says with genuine pride three years later. “I still suffer poor vision and a lot of pain – that hasn't really changed – but a lot has happened since then.”

Ashmann continues to teach full-time in the NIU School of Art, and has visited 45 countries since the original story was published. He directs a three-week design and architecture program in Italy each summer, and will travel to Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, this December to work with 15 graduate students of interior architecture.

With his foreign expeditions reaching 75 nations, he is three-quarters of the way to his goal of 100, and the man who once wondered if he was about to die now dreams about what he'll do in retirement.

Unbelievably, the obstacle to his accomplishments has become a lack of time in a busy schedule rather than a lack of health.

Yet the old Web link still gave pause to Hridayesh P. Deshpande, director of a new art school in Pune, India, who stumbled across it recently while negotiating to bring Ashmann to his country for lectures to students and faculty and program reviews.

Deshpande read of the gangrene, the hemorrhages, the temporary blindness, the wheelchair, the chemotherapy. He asked Ashmann: Is this you?

“Yes,” Ashmann replied, “but I think you will be amazed when you see me.”

Amazed they were. Ashmann will return to Creative-i College of Creative Arts in July, and hopes to make annual trips back.

And though the unaware here and overseas never would guess what corners of hell the professor has visited in recent years, he wants them to know – and he has advice from his unwanted journeys.

He is quick to laugh and, outwardly, seems as hearty as anyone his age.

He is able to talk calmly about MRSA, a critical foot infection that landed him back in the hospital and unfortunately removed him from the task of caring for his dying father, and how he was released just long enough to attend his father's funeral.

He continues to drive himself to work from the suburbs – during the worst times, his six-hour round trip involved riding the train and grabbing a lift from a colleague – and is cautious when he travels abroad.

“When I got sick in '98, I was at the peak of my professional ability to do all this travel, and I didn't want to let it go,” he admits. “I really have to have adequate rest, but somehow I've been able to manage. I can have really down periods, and I can suffer from infections, but I still seem to have good energy.”

Work, he says, “keeps my mind off the pain. It doesn't make the pain disappear. It just pushes it back.”

Because he included work among his goals, he was sure he would teach again.

“Success is made by establishing goals. If you set goals, you can reach them. If you don't set goals, you're never going to be able to get anywhere,” he says. “The most fantastic thing, particularly in design, is the opportunity to work with young creative people. There's nothing better than that. I always see education as an experimental process – you're always trying to teach better, or get things across in a different way – and I see the classroom as a laboratory.”

Ashmann's other goals include writing books, one on his theories of design and one on his struggle, and introducing the rest of the world to his fellow Americans by sharing what's he learned through all this travels and presenting an exhibition of his travel photography.

“There are so many different ways of doing things. As Americans, we always think our way is the best. I've seen proof that isn't true,” he says. “When I take students abroad, they remember things they learn easier than in the classroom because it's immediate. Memory is really enhanced by the travel. Students' recall of information is better when it's embedded in experience.”

11-7-05