2005: Fall New Baird Book

Can any sense be made out of the teaching of English at Amherst College? Or: Did anyone know what he was doing? Or: Can anyone now think of anything remotely interesting to say about what our predecessors spent their lives doing?”

So asked Theodore Baird, the late Samuel Williston Professor of English, Emeritus, in a 1980 note to himself. The legendary professor, who taught at Am-herst from 1927 until his retirement in 1969, confronts these questions in English at Amherst: A History, published this fall by Amherst College Press.

Edited and with an introduction by William H. Pritchard ’53, Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, the new book has two sections. The first, “Reflections on Amherst and English 1,” is the transcript of a “self-interview” Baird conducted in 1978, in response to a request from the college’s former director of public affairs, Horace “Bud” Hewlett ’36. “In these pages,” Pritchard writes in his introduction, “one can see the emeritus professor warming to the task of making a story of his coming to Amherst in 1927, of the sort of English Department he found there, and of what he went on to do with it in his subsequent 43 years of teaching. Evident is the wicked humor that students and colleagues of Baird can testify to and that one strove not to be on the receiving end of.”

The book’s second section, “The History,” is a previously unpublished document that Baird worked on intermittently through the 1980s. Here, he recalls his predecessors in the English Department and at Amherst—Erskine, Woodberry, Genung, Meiklejohn and Frost, among others—and attempts, in closing, to make sense of his own role in the teaching of English at the college.

Published with support from Gorham Cross ’52, English at Amherst: A History is available from Amherst College Press for $25. For more information, call (413) 542-2321 or e-mail info@amherst.edu.