Wm. Theodore de Bary papers, 1934-2017, bulk 1960-2005

William Theodore "Ted" de Bary (August 9, 1919, The Bronx, New York – July 14, 2017, Tappan, New Jersey) was a pioneering scholar and educator of Asian humanities. Growing up in Leonia, New York, de Bary entered Columbia University as an undergraduate in 1937. In 1941, de Bary began graduate studies in Chinese at Harvard University. The following year he was recruited by the U.S. Navy to undergo intensive training in Japanese and serve as an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. He achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander and worked briefly for the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1946. His experiences in East Asia during the war persuaded him of the importance of continuing to learn from East Asian cultures. In 1947, de Bary left the military and returned to Columbia for graduate study in Chinese, and received an M.A. in Japanese studies in 1948. In 1949, de Bary was a Fulbright fellow at Beijing University. Together with his close friend Donald Keene, he studied under Ryusaku Tsunoda at Columbia. De Bary gained his PhD in 1953 with a dissertation titled "A Plan for the Prince: the Ming-I Tai-Fang Lu of Huang Tsung-His," and began teaching at Columbia immediately afterwards.

During his decades-long professorship, de Bary essentially established the field of Neo-Confucian Studies with such books as Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970) and the Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (1975). He was also President of the Association of Asian Studies from 1969 to 1970. At Columbia, De Bary chaired the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture between 1960 and 1966. He was active in faculty intervention during the protests of 1968, and served as the Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost from 1971 to 1978. He played a part in reshaping the Core Curriculum of Columbia College to include Great Books and classes devoted to non-Western civilizations. De Bary was also known for rarely missing a Columbia Lions football game.

As a recognized educator, de Bary has won Columbia's Great Teacher Award in 1969, its Lionel Trilling Book Award in 1983, the Mark Van Doren Award for Great Teaching in 1987, the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement. De Bary served as the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and continued teaching until several months before his death in 2017 at the age of 97.