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AROUND THE QUADSSpivak Named University ProfessorBy Alex Sachare ’71 
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gave a spirited defense of the relevance of the humanities in the spring University Lecture in Low Rotunda on March 21. Photo: Michael Dames  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, has been named a University Professor. Sprivak brings to 12 the number of faculty who hold the Unviersity’s highest faculty rank, which allows them to teach beyond their department. She is the third woman to hold the rank of University Professor. “Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, at the most creative levels, and a life of civic engagement — including in her native India — embodies Columbia’s mission of teaching, scholarship and service to the broader world community,” said President Lee C. Bollinger, in announcing the appointment. “Through her new role as University Professor, I hope and expect more students will be able to experience her imaginative mind and spirit.” Current University Professors are Eric R. Kandel, T.D. Lee, R. Kent Greenawalt, Ronald C.D. Breslow, Simon Schama, Richard Axel ’67, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Wayne A. Hendrickson, Robert A. Mundell, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Rosalind E. Krauss. Past University Professors have included Jacques Barzun ’27, Meyer Schapiro ’24 and Lionel Trilling ’25. Spivak delivered the spring University Lecture in Low Rotunda on March 21. In introducing her, Provost Alan Brinkley said, “Few scholars can be said to have changed the landscape of their chosen field, but Gayatri Spivak certainly is one of them. There is a core of morality in her work that transcends cultures … some more imperatives that transcend culture and demand action.” The topic of Spivak’s University Lecture was “Thinking about the Humanities,” and she defended the relevance of the humanities in education because they teach people how to think. “The humanities exercise the mind just as the workout exercises the body,” she said. “The humanities train the imagination and teach us how to think fully. The humanities can train for a better world.” Spivak received her B.A. in English from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1959, her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell in 1967 and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto and the University of London, as well as many additional honors. She has been teaching at Columbia since 1991. Her fields of academic inquiry include feminism, Marxism, deconstruction and globalization. The focus of Spivak’s work has been on the use of education in the humanities as the most effective weapon to combat the legacy of imperialism. A committed activist as well as a renowned scholar, Spivak contributes her time and efforts to the international women’s movement, the struggle for ecological justice and rural literacy in India. Having enrolled in undergraduate Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin courses, Spivak is described as embodying an attitude of lifelong learning.
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