ISSUE XI : Note from the Editors
By Sean Jacobs and Niyati Pendekanti
Image by Indrani Pendekanti, Niyati’s mom.
The 2025/2026 academic year, which just came to an end, was both our final one at The New School: Niyati graduated with her MA, and Sean, took voluntary severance after sixteen years as a professor, including ten years as a tenured professor. It is no overstatement that the last while was marked by tumult and change for GPIA, its faculty and students, and this magazine.
First, we learned last October that PhD programs at TNS would be suspended. A number of GPIA faculty teach in the Public and Urban Policy PhD program, supervise students and some of our students have gone on to complete PhDs there. The PhD director is Michael Cohen, also the founder of GPIA. Then, shortly after, we learned that GPIA would be “indefinitely discontinued” and would cease to exist after Spring 2027. Following that, the university offered early retirements and voluntary severance packages to faculty and staff. Faculty could choose to leave on January 2 or June 1. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (retiring) and Sean chose to leave on June 1. Staff weren’t so lucky. Phil Akre, our longtime administrator and associate director, was told to leave on March 1. He had wanted to stay through the summer.
On March 10, 2026, Phil passed away unexpectedly at his home in New Jersey. To describe just how deeply this loss is being felt within our community would be nearly impossible, and to speak of just how loved Phil was, and always will be, even more so. The week before he died, GPIA held a celebration for Phil where Niyati said, among others, about him: Phil is one of the most genuine people you could ever meet, and his zest for life was infectious. He had a bottomless pit of stories and loves nothing more than having an audience to regale them upon. His presence brought color to the seventh floor at 72 Fifth Avenue, where GPIA was located, to the program and everyone’s lives.
In mid-April, GPIA held a public memorial for Phil. As many referred to him at that memorial, he was truly and genuinely the heart of the program, and his warmth and kindness touched every single person, especially students, who passed through these doors.
But Phil’s death also symbolized the end of an era.
By the time you read this, Niyati would have graduated, one degree smarter (she hopes) and a whole lot richer, in learnings, perspective, friendship, and quintessential (read crazy) New York experiences.
She cannot overstate the importance of a program like GPIA, even if we weren’t living in the times we’re living in, but especially so given that we are.
When Sean brought Niyati on board as the Managing Editor in August 2025, the objective was to incorporate more student input in the editorial process and empower students. We think we succeeded in that direction. We have published eleven issues in total, including this one, roughly once a month since we relaunched The New Context in Spring 2025 when school was in session. We have given the magazine a design facelift (thanks to Nirkhunan Kuppuram, a Parsons design management student who did media work for GPIA), recovered the magazine's archive, reached out to non-GPIA students and visiting faculty in the department to contribute, and even convinced some of our skeptical faculty to write for the magazine. We are proud of what we have achieved. We are also happy the magazine has its own domain and will live on on the internet once we have both departed The New School.
As for Sean, he felt it was the right time to leave. More recently, The New School resembled too much of a Hunger Games atmosphere, and he has other projects he wants to pursue. Over the next year, he’ll be a visiting fellow at New York University’s Urban Democracy Lab and an affiliate faculty member with the School of International Studies at the University of Washington. At the latter, he will be linked to the Global Sports Lab, which, given his growing interests in sports-and-politics history, is a perfect place to land; he left Africa Is a Country, which he founded in 2009, as editor in 2023. He is also planning to establish more permanent associations in South Africa, but is not in a hurry. For the foreseeable future, he will be working on two book projects (a personal history of his family’s entanglements with slavery, colonialism, and apartheid in South Africa and another on the jazz master, Abdullah Ibrahim), along with some shorter and longer-form writing in ideas and opinion magazines and on his new public intellectual sports project, Eleven Named People.
Finally, we want to shout out all the contributions to this revamped version of The New Context, to Nina Khrushcheva for the original idea, and to the group of students who were more closely involved in making the magazine work, especially Nirkhunan, Ingrid Nielsen, Olivia Ellis, Trevor Pimentel, Ivan Pech, Mara Levi, Nikki Veltkamp, Monise Valente da Silva, Griffith Swidler, and many more.