Ted Baehr '69

"Education comes of course from the Latin “to lead out of darkness” into the light of the truth, which is exactly what the original Comparative Literature Department did."
In the 1960’s, inspired by Professor Scott Craig and Professor John Rassias, I signed on for a relatively new honors major entitled Comparative Literature, with the purpose of concentrating on contemporary French, German and American poetry. Besides the opportunity of studying at Cambridge University, University of Munich and the University of Bordeaux and Toulouse in Pau, I had a wonderful opportunity at Dartmouth to study the notion of genre and to devise a three-dimensional system of genre classification that was commended by the Educational Testing Service.

This training in Comparative Literature has informed most of what I have done in my life, including financing feature films, heading up the TV Center at CUNY, Chairing of the Institute for the Study of Media at the "Center for the Arts, Religion and Education” of the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California at Berkeley, and, and most of all, publishing MOVIEGUIDE® Magazine, https://www.movieguide.org/, where the depth and breadth of the knowledge of Comparative Literature has been a great blessing when combined with the serious study of the theology of aesthetics. Therefore, I would like to thank everyone in Comparative Literature, especially the small group of originators whose clarity and vision helped educate all of us in a more profound way.