Dear President Naylor:
I am writing to you about your decision to integrate Comparative Literature into a larger school of Language and Literature and to take away the possibility of the Comparative Literature Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. Your university was kind enough to award me an honorary doctorate in 2000 and I therefore write with the added concern of an alumna.
There is no need to remind you of the extraordinary record of Comparative Literature at Toronto. I will simply speak to the absolute need to train students of the quality associated with Toronto precisely in Comparative Literature, especially as it is beginning to integrate areas of the world emphasized by the ongoing process of globalization.
Rightly or wrongly, we in the United States associate Canada, especially eastern Canada, and perhaps particularly the University of Toronto, as the custodian of the more humane virtues associated with a democratic polity. In this mission, deep language learning in a mode of diversity is a crucial requirement. The practice of reading literary texts in original languages establishes the affinity between peoples through the depth of imaginative training and an other-directed reading practice--an inhabiting of other worlds and cultures--that fuels the ethical capacity of the humanities. It is my experience, after forty-five years of full-time university teaching, that this training will not be rigorous if it doesn’t come through the doctoral process that a university such as yours provides. National language training, and/or heritage language training simply is not a substitute. Comparativism is not merely the learning of many languages, but training in an approach or in approaches that lead us to the perception of a just world.
This kind of training will never generate income for the university directly. Think of it as epistemological and ethical health care for the society at large. We have come to expect fully prepared global citizens and leaders from you. Indeed, rather than close operations, your university should find ways of making Comparative Literature a more attractive choice for interested students so that the number of such persons in society increases significantly.
I write this letter in confidence and hope and look forward to a positive response.
Sincerely yours,
--
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
University Professor in the Humanities
Columbia University
