Alan Brinkley and I are very pleased to announce the appointment of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak--Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society--as University Professor, the institution's highest faculty rank. This appointment--approved by the Trustees at their March meeting, and effective on July 1--recognizes exceptional scholarly merit and distinguished service to Columbia.

It is fitting that Professor Spivak will now serve the University as a whole rather than a specific faculty or department. Not only does her world-renowned scholarship--grounded in deconstructivist literary theory--range widely from critiques of post-colonial discourse to feminism, Marxism, and globalization; her lifelong search for fresh insights and understanding has transcended the traditional boundaries of discipline while retaining the fire for new knowledge that is the hallmark of a great intellect. Ever mindful of language's importance to breaking down divisive cultural barriers, she has even enrolled in undergraduate Arabic, Cantonese, and Mandarin courses while teaching her regular courses here.

Professor 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. Through her new role as University Professor, I hope and expect more students will be able to experience her imaginative mind and spirit.

It is especially appropriate, therefore, that Professor Spivak will deliver the University Lecture, "Thinking about the Humanities," on Wednesday evening, March 21, in Low Memorial Library Rotunda. We hope you will join us in congratulating Professor Spivak on her appointment to this signal honor at Columbia.

Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a self-proclaimed crusader for "international feminism," supports the notion that suicide bombings and mass murders carried out against Israelis and Americans are justifiable - on grounds that Israel and the U.S. purportedly practice state terrorism against weaker peoples in the Middle East. She deems such slaughters the understandable actions of desperate, demoralized populations.

For example, in June 2002, speaking at Leeds University, Spivak said, "Suicide bombing - and the planes of 9/11 were living bombs - is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing oneself as other, in the process killing others....Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning...you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees [sic] in suicide bombing....It is a response...to the state terrorism practiced outside of its own ambit by the United States, and in the Palestinian case additionally to an absolute failure of [Israeli] hospitality."