Word: fairbanks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perhaps not inappropriate that when it came time to write this article Fairbank was in Europe and could not be reached for an interview. The following is a profile of the China specialist seen through the eyes of his friends and colleagues. Diane Sherlock...
...tiny white community among Asians, had never understood. The second reason was that the scholars had been in the Far East, as it was then called, during the war, either in Japan for the American occupation or even, in rare cases, in China. The third reason was John King Fairbank...
...Before Fairbank there was a darkness about Asia. Every course ended in 1793 with the death of the emperor Ch'ien-lung. Everything else was journalism," says Theodore H. White '38, the author of The Making of the President books and Thunder Out of China, who was Fairbank's first undergraduate tutee. Fairbank, who is retiring this year as Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History after 41 years on the Faculty, led the way out of that darkness, making modern China part of the American intellectual world. With a single-minded devotion that America's China missionaries would have envied...
...Fairbank's success far outshines that of America's China missionaries (the number of Chinese Christian converts was always embarrassingly small) then it may perhaps be attributed to Faribank's capacity to understand his pupils, a capacity that the missionaries lacked. It is not only because Fairbank's books are so widely read that David E. Kelley, a current graduate student in East Asian studies, says of the professor, "It's hard to see where his personal perspective ends and his influence on others begins." And James C. Thomson Jr., curator of the Nieman Foundation who wrote his doctoral dissertation...
Thomson's experience just after receiving his Ph.D. is an example of the empathy of his mentor. Having gone to work for the State Department in 1960, Thomson recalls he soon received "several nibbles" from Harvard and Yale to join the faculties there. But when he consulted Fairbank about the offers, Thomson says his teacher's reaction was only lukewarm. Thomson took this hesitancy as a cue: Fairbank felt his student should first complete his stint in government. But when Harvard's History Department approached Thomson again in 1966, Fairbank was there with open arms. "He felt it was time...