KOLKATA: Eminent scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said her teachers at the erstwhile Presidency College helped her to "elaborate" on what she read, rather than "merely apply" or "follow" them. She was addressing Monday morning's session, titled 'Global Education Summit: The Future of Languages', chaired by Swapan Chakravorty, Presidency University's Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore Distinguished Chair in the Humanities.Speaking on 'What Is It to be a University', Spivak referred to the "brilliant teachers" from her alma mater who taught them to read John Henry Newman's essay titled 'The Idea of a University. I. What Is a University?' Stressing on the importance of learning how to teach humanities, she said: "When you kill the humanities, you kill the culture.... They should not be taught as if they are elite people reading Baudelaire. Humanities are imaginative activism. I am not a good teacher. I speak with envy when I say this."Speaking about global higher education, the professor of humanities at Columbia University said one needs to "move around" to "earn different perspectives through field working" and take the trouble to imbibe "imaginative flexibility".When a student of life sciences asked her if she thought that transgressing their academics positions/privileges can help them break the shackles elite enclaves create, she said: "I don't think one should transgress too soon because then we lose the privilege of the enclave." When another undergraduate student pointed out his helplessness at not finding space within the structure to think out of the box since the market determines the kind of education that is being received, she said: "We need to insert ourselves in places where people will listen to us. Take advantage of this very privileged institution to go outside of it."In the third session of the morning titled 'Remembering Mahasweta Devi', organized in collaboration with Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, Spivak recalled how close she was once to the author before growing apart. Yet, a month before the author's death, she had visited her, didn't utter her name but placed her face close to her to see if "anything" was left. It had taken just a minute or more for the author to say: "Gayatri". "I realised something was still left. Whatever her actual declared politics, whatever her feudality of sentiments might have been, I believe this woman was capable of producing something which creates a future."

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