Much of Ernie Harburg's own professional work stems from his attempts to deal with his feelings towards father, Yip. Ernie's doctoral dissertation focused on the effects of anger suppression on the mental health of 200 undergraduates. He remembers that his first wife, Torry Pedsen-Harburg, jokingly told him that the dissertation was really about himself.

Ernie was on the U-M faculty from 1964 to 1970. He helped to establish a graduate research methods course at the School of Nursing, and then left teaching to become a U-M-affiliated researcher.

Harburg's inquiry into the effects of controlling anger piqued an interest in blood pressure and alcoholic consumption, two results of many persons' attempts to control anger. In the early 1970s, he helped design a test for hypertension and studied its treatment in the state of Michigan. He is also on a research team that is in its third decade of a longitudinal study of alcohol consumption in the Tecumseh, Michigan, public school system. Currently, he is analyzing data from a U-M study that focused on alcohol use on campus.

Harburg disputes the current notion that alcoholism is a disease with biochemical origins. He prefers to use the term "heavy drinking with problems" rather than "alcoholism," because, he says, "there's no real consensus about what alcoholism is." Teaching people how to drink responsibly, rather than investigating the ideas of chemical dependency is the key to reducing problem drinking, Harburg argues.

He likens some current approaches to campus drinking to the Prohibition era: "We have a 1920s situation--90 percent drink and it's illegal." An effective approach to the problem, he says, lies in part in a transfer of both attention and funds to prevention.

"We're devoting too much of our resources to people who are out of control," he says. "If we could take 100 percent of our funds that we use to look at heavy drinking, and put 50 percent of' them into prevention, we could cut the problem of drinking. We should give consistent messages to the new generation that both drinking and not drinking are OK.

"There's a growing small splinter of reaction against the dominant establishment," he adds. He's very excited about a new group called Moderation Management, which teaches, unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, that problem drinkers can control their alcohol consumption.

Today, Harburg spends one week a month in Ann Arbor, working on his research, attending to business at the Del Rio and the Earle restaurants in which he is a partner, and "renewing my soul." He lives in New York's Greenwich Village the other three weeks.