Ege Yumuşak
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, Tarpley Hitt
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,”...
A Post-Political Fantasy
Ege Yumuşak
“To the extent that the Academe remembers its ancient origins, it must know that it was founded by the polis’s most determined and most influential opponent,” Hannah Arendt wrote, referring to Plato, in “Truth and Politics.” Originally appearing in the pages of The New Yorker in 1967, the essay was perhaps one of the most-assigned texts in university classrooms at the height of liberal panic over the so-called post-truth age. ...
#MeToo’s Strike Test | The Harvard Graduate Student Union and the Limits of "Time’s Up" Organizing
Ege Yumuşak
A Zoom handshake made it official: last Monday, Harvard University and its student workers’ union agreed on a year-long contract after two years of negotiations and one strike. This week, our 4,500 rank-and-file members—doctoral, masters, and J.D. students, as well as several hundred undergraduate course assistants—will vote to ratify the contract. As a member of the union bargaining committee, I watched as Harvard slow-rolled the negotiation process over the course...
