William Theodore de Bary (born 1919) is an East Asian studies expert at Columbia University, with the title John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University and Provost Emeritus.
de Bary graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1941, where he was a student in the first iteration of Columbia's famed Literature Humanities course. He then briefly took up graduate studies at Harvard before the US entered the Second World War. de Bary left the academy to serve in American military intelligence in the Pacific Theatre. Upon his return, he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he earned his PhD.
He has edited numerous books of original source material relating to East Asian (primarily Japanese and Chinese) literature, history, and culture, as well as making the case, in his book Nobility and Civility, for the universality of Asian values. He is recognized as essentially creating the field of Neo-Confucian studies.
Additionally, de Bary was active in faculty intervention during the Columbia University protests of 1968 and served as the university's provost from 1971 to 1978. He has attempted to reshape the Core Curriculum of Columbia College to include Great Books classes devoted to non-Western civilizations. de Bary is additionally famous for rarely missing a Columbia Lions football game since he began teaching at the university in 1953. A recognized educator, he won Columbia's Great Teacher Award in 1969, its Lionel Trilling Book Award in 1983 and its Mark Van Doren Award for Great Teaching in 1987. In 2010 he received the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement.
Now the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and still teaching, de Bary lives in Rockland County, New York.
(Source: Library of Congress Online Catalog)