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Endowed Professorships

FEBRUARY 1973 FRED BERTHOLD JR. '45, R.B.G.
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Endowed Professorships
FEBRUARY 1973 FRED BERTHOLD JR. '45, R.B.G.

Preston Kelsey Professor of Religion

Just ten years ago, FRED BERTHOLD JR. '45, the Preston Kelsey Professor of Religion at Dartmouth, was one of five university teachers selected from across the country to receive the first Harbison Awards for distinguished teaching given by the Danforth Foundation.

Evidence that an additional decade of teaching has not dimmed that rare quality essential to great teaching—of being able to reach and draw out the best in young minds—is found in the recent edition of the Dartmouth Course Guide.

Written by a current undergraduate who had taken his courses and also had reference to a student poll evaluating faculty, the Course Guide item on Professor Berthold describes him as "an infinitely rational human being" who is "a believer in the faith about which he teaches."

"His belief, too, is profound," the student editor notes. "It has to be to withstand the rigorous attack inquiring minds subject it to. Some people teach about life. Others live it. Fred Berthold does both. You only go around once in life—grab for all the gusto you can get."

For Professor Berthold, teaching religion to young people brought up in an essentially secular society is a continually challenging and rewarding experience.

"One of the big personal projects in that period of life in which young people come to college," he says, "is to formulate some notion of ultimate, intrinsic values, of some overarching value system that would provide guidelines as to priorities for a meaningful life."

In this context, he sees the study of religion as being at the vortex of personal growth, even for students who may themselves have rejected formal religious affiliation or even belief.

"Even if students are suspicious of the answers to basic questions given by traditional religion," he says, "the study of the traditional religions deals with the kind of bedrock questions about which young people are deeply concerned. It also gives them an opportunity to wrestle with those questions in some coherent way."

Thus, although his teaching is rooted in a deepseated religious faith, Professor Berthold sees his own function as one of "providing information, not of conversion—of making young people aware of some of the alternative ways of thinking about life and its meaning."

As a teacher, Professor Berthold is keenly aware from his own remembered undergraduate experience at Dartmouth of the anguish young people so often undergo in college as their youthful views are bombarded and they seek to come to terms with the self and its meaning.

A native of Webster Grove, Mo., he came to Dartmouth in 1940 with strong fundamentalist concepts that were soon shattered. Yet, under the tutelage of faculty like Francis W. Gramlich, now the Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, and the late Philip Wheelwright, professor of philosophy for many years, he emerged from the experience with important insights.

He learned, for instance, what he believes to be the critical importance of intellectual skepticism, and even criticism, to the continuing relevance of religious thought. He also began to focus in on what has become the core of his own belief that not only has withstood the year-after-year confrontations of youthful suspicions and apprehensions, tough questions and brave doubts, but has given his teaching the direction and confidence his students feel and to which they respond.

"For myself," he explains in his cluttered study on the top floor of Thornton Hall, "I have a simple, basic conviction that there is a fundamental value that dignifies human life, that is worthy of commitment and is not just arbitrary, but is imbedded in the nature of things.

"It is also important to me in thinking about religion to understand that God is ultimately a mystery, that one ought never to pretend to have a final doctrine of God that is completely clear and demonstrable. Thus, I think criticism of religious thought is valid as a way of assuring that religion speaks to each age in the light of contemporary knowledge and insights."

At Dartmouth, Professor Berthold majored in psychology and was graduated summa cum laude and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a bachelor of divinity degree from the Chicago Theological Seminary at the University of Chicago in 1947, when he already began developing his theory of values for his dissertation. And his doctoral dissertation on "Problems of Anxiety," for which he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1954, became the springboard for his book The Fear of God (1957) dealing with the meaning of religious anxiety.

He began his academic career teaching philosophy at Utica College, Syracuse University, in 1948, and a year later returned to Dartmouth as an instructor in philosophy. In 1950 he was named an instructor of religion becoming also chairman of what then was a one-man department. He has since seen the department grow steadily in student enrollment until now it contains seven or eight faculty.

He became founding dean of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation in 1957 and guided that remarkable agency's initial development for five years before returning to full-time teaching and research. A year later, in 1963, he was honored for his excellence in teaching by the Danforth Foundation, and, under the terms of the award, was enabled to spend a year of study at Harvard University.

In 1971 Professor Berthold was appointed the first holder of the Preston Kelsey Professorship, established as part of a trust during the lifetime of the late Preston H. Kelsey '25, a prominent West Coast insurance executive, to strengthen further the teaching of religion at Dartmouth. And last summer, he was a member of the Alumni College faculty.,

He holds honorary degrees from Middlebury College (1959), Concord College in West Virginia (1960), and the University of Vermont (1964). A minister since 1949, he and his wife, the former Laura B. McKusick from Minneapolis, were both ordained in the United Church of Christ. For several years after the Bertholds came to Dartmouth, Mrs. Berthold was the minister of the Plainfield, N. H., Community Baptist Church. They and their four children live across the river in Norwich, Vt.