Making Space for New Voices | Bonus Release

Andrea Simakis: In November, the American electoral map shifted on its axis as Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. The transformation was especially historic in Ohio, where voters chose Dr. Amy Acton as their governor, making her the first woman ever elected to the state's highest office and the first Democrat to win the seat in 20 years.

Voters also broke a longstanding Republican supermajority in the Ohio House. Those results bring us back to a question that reaches beyond any single candidate or party. Who gets invited into leadership? Whose experience counts? And what becomes possible when a new voice enters an established institution?

In this bonus release of Running to the Noise, we're revisiting conversations with two Oberlin alumni, Ben Wittes and Ali Najmi, to explore what making space can look like. Maybe it's a place to gather, encouragement to pursue an unlikely ambition, or an opportunity someone never imagined was open to them.

We begin with Ali Najmi, whose experience at Oberlin offers a very literal example of making space. As a student, he helped secure a place for his community to gather and began learning how to speak up on its behalf. That experience of representing a community soon took another form. As a class trustee, Ali had an opportunity to bring a recent graduate's perspective into decisions about Oberlin's future.

Carmen Twillie Ambar: I'm wondering, when you think about your Oberlin experience, is there any things that you were involved in while you were here that you can directly link to your organizing and campaign work? Anything that happened while you were here at Oberlin that you could say, "Well, man, that's a few little breadcrumbs away from where I ultimately ended up"?

Ali Najmi: I was very involved in religious life at the college, but I was a president of the Muslim Students Association at Oberlin, which wasn't the biggest group.

But one of the things I did accomplish was getting that permanent prayer space in Wilder.

Carmen: Yes, yes. The prayer room space.

Ali: It's a prayer space for the Muslim students. And if you're an observant Muslim, you have five prayers a day. To do them in congregation is better.

You know, we wanted to have a space, particularly in the religious wing of Wilder where the other groups are, and we were able to convince the administration at that time to give us this permanent prayer space, which is a small room, but it's big enough to hold a couple of us and to pray together, to worship together, and to make our mark in the religious wing.

Carmen: Excellent.

Ali: That was all me. During my tenure, you know, I was organizing and representing this community, even at Oberlin. That was my first part of sort of being a leader of a community in that sense.

Carmen: I guess I wanted to go back to some of your early times because I know you ran for public office, and I'm wondering what you learned from that experience and anything you would want us to know about what it means to kind of have feet on the ground running a campaign.

Ali: You know, the first election I ever ran was an election for class trustee of Oberlin College.

Carmen: It's true. I didn't know it was your first election, but I knew you were a class trustee.

So just for the audience, you know, one of the distinctive things about Oberlin is we have what we call class trustees, and it's a way for the institution to really tap into very recent graduates. And they're an important part of how we think about the sort of leadership of the college with these young trustees.

Ali, you were a class trustee, what, in like 2006 or so?

Ali: Right. 2006 through '09. Yep.

Carmen: For your term. Yep. And so that was your first campaign. What'd you learn from that?

Ali: My first campaign, and there was a decisive win, and it actually was a...

Carmen: Ah, I love it.

Ali: And I saw it as an opportunity to really learn something.

And you know what? The network that I made on the board of trustees is one that I've carried over with me through my political work and my first campaign. A lot of the bigger donors were Oberlin trustees.

Carmen: I bet.

Ali: And so I'm thankful to the Oberlin network.

But to answer your main question, you know, when I ran for City Council in 2015, I had already been organizing.

I went through law school straight after Oberlin in New York. When I graduated, I worked in the City Council for two years. Then I left the City Council to start my own law practice because I wanted to be my own boss, and I wanted to do community organizing as much as I wanted to, and I knew I wanted to be in politics at that time.

To be completely candid with you, I was like a full-time political candidate moonlighting as an attorney. And I did that for, like, you know, a couple years.

I didn't know when the seat was gonna open up, right? What I wanted most out of my life at that moment was to be in elected office.

Now my priorities have completely changed, but at that time, that's what I wanted for myself the most.

I had the bug.

Andrea: Years later, as chair of New York City's Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, Ali found himself helping open doors for others.

The challenge was to encourage qualified lawyers with different experiences to consider a role they had assumed was beyond their reach.

That brings us to another question: whose experience counts?

Carmen: I'm wondering, because I guess I had understood that this particular advisory group had kind of been defunct or hadn't been working effectively.

Was Z's desire to bring it back fundamentally about diversity, the backgrounds of people, and making sure that the people who are in these judgeships didn't just come from a corporate background or some of these typical backgrounds? Was that the main impetus?

Ali: So it was active. It's always been active.

It was active under Mayor Adams as well. But I think what we are doing is we're looking for different types of lawyers to apply and to consider a judicial appointment.

Historically, you could say that a lot of prosecutors and court attorneys have come out of this committee.

Carmen: Yeah. That makes sense to me.

The lawyer in me, that makes sense, that it'd be a lot of prosecutors, and that would be the crowd that would think this was the right next step for them.

Ali: And certainly we need to have a diverse judiciary that does include people who are former prosecutors, right?

What's new about this committee is that we're going out of our way to seek people who are from these different groups of lawyers and have different backgrounds, and letting them know that your background, working at a legal services organization, defending parents in family court, that is something that we value.

And I can tell you this: lawyers who work in this background reached out saying, "Thank you, because we've never heard that before. We never thought that we could become a judge. We never thought that our application would even be considered."

Carmen: That makes sense to me because sometimes you just think that there's only a particular path.

And what's powerful about what you're doing is that if you open up that door, even when, you know, Z's time is done, if that door gets open, maybe it always stays open.

Because some of this is also about raising your hand and saying, "I want to be a part of it."

I think there's a cadre of Obies around working with Zohran. And you, I think Christine Clark is there. She's the chair of the Commission on Human Rights.

I'm wondering what you would describe as the way you run to the noise.

Ali: Public service is about running to people's problems. You are running right into them. You're not running away from them.

When people are in need, you gotta run right to them.

You gotta say, you know, you're here to help them. You're here to serve the public.

You're running to the noise. In that way, you're running to help people.

There is some noise you gotta tune out.

Carmen: I'm gonna take that lesson right there, bro. Some noise you gotta tune out, but go ahead.

Ali: The noise that you gotta tune out is the parts where people are expressing disbelief in you.

My message to all the students: you gotta believe in yourself.

That's the one thing that I think I have in common with the mayor and people who've done something exceptional, is we have believed in ourselves when many other people didn't believe in us.

Andrea: Oberlin alumnus and Lawfare editor Ben Wittes built a career examining the law without a law degree, drawing instead on skills he developed studying English.

Carmen: I'm wondering now, in retrospect, do you think that you are better served by not having a law degree in the way you approach your work?

Is it better served by not having that grounding or maybe that albatross? I don't know which way to describe it.

Ben Wittes: So I'm gonna give you a completely honest answer, which is that there are people who do what I do who have law degrees. There are people who do what I do who don't have law degrees.

I think at the point at which you've been doing it for 20 or 30 years, your educational background is not the most important thing.

The most important thing in my experience is related to that English major.

Do you know how to read a poem? Do you know how to do a deep read of something? Do you come out of one of those traditions that actually takes a text and mines it for meaning?

And that can be, you know, the sort of Jesuitical canon law debates. You know, people who grow up in Orthodox Jewish environments are really, really good at this often.

And people who are English majors, there's something not very different about the problem of reading a sonnet and the problem of reading a statute.

Carmen: Oh my gosh. Okay. So, you know, you're making the liberal arts college president, like, die with joy here.

Ben: I do it on purpose, but it happens to be true.

Carmen: I love it because, you know, we talk a lot here at Oberlin about the ability to analyze complexity.

How do you take complex things and break them down into their component parts and come out with a new and enhanced thinking, this ability to think in complex ways, to have cultural competencies?

All these things that we talk about in the liberal arts you have demonstrated in your career, and we count it as one of our great successes.

Andrea: And finally, making space for a voice can also mean reconsidering where and how we're willing to use our own.

Ben described how his concerns about democracy and his connection to Ukraine pushed him beyond his traditional role as a scholar and into a more public form of participation.

Ben: For many years, I was the model think tank scholar in Washington.

I did not register to vote on the basis of a party in Washington because even though not being registered as a Democrat effectively deprives you of the right to vote, I didn't wanna be associated with, to have a political valence.

I've never given a political contribution. I religiously stayed away from demonstrations.

And my job was to give nonpartisan expertise and guidance to administrations and members of Congress and other policymakers irrespective of party.

And I took that, I still take that, very seriously.

And then one day it stopped working for me.

For two reasons.

One was the whole premise of that way of being was that there were two great political movements in this country, one of the center-right, one of the center-left.

Both were gonna be in power at different times. Both were recognizably democratic actors in the small-d sense, and both would need assistance.

And so my job was to be the assistance.

And yeah, some, I would agree with one politician more than others about all kinds of things, but I just don't believe that anymore.

Now, there is one movement in the country that is solidly democratic, the pro-democracy movement. And it, by the way, includes conservatives and includes liberals.

And there's another movement that is, frankly, authoritarian. And I never signed up to be nonpartisan between authoritarianism and democracy.

That was not the game.

Like, I have a big range my tent covers...

Carmen: Yeah, you have a huge tent.

Ben: But authoritarianism isn't...

And so once it occurred to me that that was the environment that we were living in, and that was in 2016, 2017, it started really breaking down my sense that I wasn't allowed to be politically involved.

And so the second thing that happened was that Russia invaded Ukraine.

And in a way, that is an entirely different conversation.

I came to care about that very deeply, partly because I mentor a bunch of Ukrainians ranging from teenagers to young adults and activists, and I've spent a lot of time with the Ukrainian community.

And one day I was going by the Russian Embassy, which is just a prominent building on Wisconsin Avenue.

And I was driving by it and I saw it, and it's big and looks like a movie screen.

And I tweeted that somebody needed to project a Ukrainian flag on that building, and it got a lot of retweets, and everybody seemed to think it was a good idea, and nobody did it.

A few weeks later, it just occurred to me, if someone was gonna do this, it was gonna be me.

So I did, and I have been ever since then doing projection operations in support of mostly Ukraine in different parts of Washington and in 11 capitals around the world where there are Russian embassies that I don't think I'm gonna get arrested for projecting on, although I've gotten close a few times.

And done some other projection operations as well, including trying to get people to vote.

Including some non-projection operations involving things like planting sunflowers, which are a Ukrainian symbol, in front of Russian embassies. Things to taunt.

And I have been increasingly doing stuff that is not directed at the Russian Embassy, but is directed at the U.S. government about Ukraine, since our policy has changed so much.

I feel like my fundamental run-to-the-noise instinct is, back when I was an Oberlin student, the idea of not getting involved would've been unthinkable to me.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Ben: And then I let myself be convinced, by the way Washington worked for many years, that it was better for me to make a point of being uninvolved.

And I have learned to unlearn that.

If people want to think less of my think tank scholarship for that, that's fine. They're entitled to do that.

But I am not interested in pretending anymore.

Not that I was pretending, but I'm not interested in not being involved in both the domestic and international struggles of democratic polities against authoritarianism.

Carmen: And if we take your admonition to be the truth, which I agree that it is, this is what is going to be required.

Ben: If I didn't think so, I would be doing something else.