by Ady Barkan
A day or two later about fifteen of us gathered on the sunny steps leading up to Low Library and marched into the lobby with our hand-painted banners and a few hundred flyers. In two hours the university was going to host one of its highest-profile events of the year, a panel discussion featuring Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and a couple other famous economists about globalization and inequality. It was the perfect place to highlight the ways in which Columbia was profiting off of exploitation in poor countries. We expected a confrontation with campus security upon arrival. But after we plopped down on the floor, nothing happened. It took about half an hour before a security guard calmly walked over and asked us how we were doing. Thirty minutes before the event began, an administrator told us we were welcome to stay there and hand out our flyers to all of the event attendees, but he asked that we clear a path so people could enter safely. We counted this as a win. Two hours later, with the event over and the building ready to shut down, the university provost came by and asked us to go home. “The president and I will meet with you tomorrow,” he said, “but only if you leave now. You can always come back again if you’re not happy.” We hadn’t planned properly and had no food on hand. Rather than spend an unpleasant night on the floor, we decided to go back to our dorm rooms and prepare for the negotiations.
The next day, we returned to Low Library and were escorted to a conference room on the second floor where the university president and provost sat with twenty of us around a big table. President Bollinger recapitulated our argument to us, appearing to be rehearsing the lines he would use with his trustees and other stakeholders: Columbia had made a commitment to ensure that its apparel was not manufactured in sweatshops, but that policy was being ignored by the university’s licensees; therefore Columbia needed to join the enforcement program for which we students were campaigning. I was eager to declare victory and accept the draft statement that Bollinger handed out. Sim, more careful than I was, insisted that a few more details be included. We left the meeting beaming, surprised that our activism had been so successful.
It was in this brief springtime campaign that I had my first real confrontation with power and saw how fragile it could sometimes be—how tigers are sometimes made of paper and jaws are sometimes made of glass. I also started to learn something about myself: that I had a knack for creative campaign tactics and for moving people into direct action. It would be years before I learned how to be a good listener—to other people’s words and to their sentiments—but I never forgot Davida’s intervention.
That senior year was also witness to a second, more consequential moment in my life. The first week of fall semester, I sat in the back of a small seminar room with two of my best friends, Carlo and Jeremy. We were taking the last of our required “core curriculum” courses: Western music appreciation. As we waited for the class to begin, in walked Rachael Scarborough King, a friendly acquaintance of mine from the student newspaper. She had a calm confidence and beautiful long red hair. Although there were many empty seats in the classroom, Rachael came over and sat in the seat to my left. I glanced at Carlo, in the seat to my right. He raised his eyebrow and cocked his head an inch to the side. Oh yeah, he said telepathically. Oh yeah.
For our first date, Rachael and I watched the Red Sox take on the Yankees in the American League Championship Series from her dorm room. Then I took her to my favorite restaurant: a hole-in-the-wall taqueria where the final bill for a party of two was always under $20, including Negra Modelos. Jeremy, Carlo, and Simeon had been skeptical of the plan. Rachael was a classy girl, they said. But I arrogantly told them that if she was too good for our favorite joint, then I was probably too good for her. It turned out we were perfect for each other.
Rachael and I had first met back in 2004, at the end of sophomore year, at the Columbia Daily Spectator, where I was an op-ed columnist and she had recently been appointed editor of the opinion page. She came in with a mandate to reinvigorate the page by expanding the diversity of voices and topics that it covered, and also by eliminating some of its repetitive and banal writers. In particular, that meant reducing the number of Jewish men opining self-confidently about Israel and the Middle East. She fired half of the columnists but kept me on because I had proposed to use my column to cover political developments on campus, not merely across the world. We developed a cordial and mellow working relationship, interacting briefly every two weeks when she edited my column.
I spent that summer interning on the editorial board of the Miami Herald. It was my first time earning a steady paycheck and paying rent—for a furnished Miami Beach studio with a view of the Atlantic from my bed, no less. I spent the days selecting which letters to the editor would be published and writing two-hundred-word editorials about state and national politics. I spent the lonely evenings frying pork chops, wandering past the nightclubs, and wondering if I had made a mistake by breaking up with my high school girlfriend. When a friend from work invited me back to the apartment she shared with her husband, I was grateful for their company—and their marijuana. The neon lights and Art Deco hotels had never been so beautiful.
Back on campus in September, with the presidential election imminent, Carlo, Simeon, Jeremy, and I joined a group of politically active artists and took a road trip to Ohio to register voters. Standing on the Columbus sidewalks, trying to stop the young students passing by and ask them if they were registered, I was clearly in my element: I regularly collected about twice as many voter registration cards as the others. Carlo and I returned to Ohio for Election Day weekend, when we tried desperately to get out enough voters to unseat George W. Bush. On election night we went to sleep without a final result, but were staring down what looked like an imposing vote deficit. In the morning, sitting in the back of a van headed for New York City, we listened dejectedly as John Kerry gave his concession speech. We were facing another terrible four years.
That spring, after just barely failing to get an internship with the Washington Post editorial board, I began to think that perhaps I would rather participate in the nation’s politics than comment on them. Writing op-eds was fun but insufficiently impactful. America wasn’t lacking in Ivy League–educated liberals spouting off critiques of Bush; it was lacking the institutions and individuals who would build the power we needed to defeat him. I came back for my senior year ready to apply for law school, eager to build a career of doing, not just talking.
Within a few weeks of our first date, I already felt like Rachael and I had settled into a long-term relationship. Senior year was a vivid, consequential season of transition. My law school acceptances rolled in before Christmas, including in the form of a flattering phone call from Harvard dean Elena Kagan. When Rachael applied for a Fulbright fellowship to study literature in the Dominican Republic, I told her I would defer law school and come with her for the year; she was dejected when her application was denied, but my gesture had made my intentions clear.
She then applied for forty journalism jobs around the country and ended up with a three-month gig in Anniston, Alabama, a town best known as the site where a Freedom Rider bus had been burned by segregationists. I was also ready to begin my career: antsy after sixteen straight years of school, enraged by the Bush administration and the Iraq War, which was killing one hundred Americans and thousands of Iraqis every month, and feeling secure with my acceptance to Yale Law School in my back pocket, I decided to go work on an election campaign to help Democrats take back the House of Representatives.
On the day of our graduation, the New York skies opened up and drenched us in warm rain. Alongside Rachael, Simeon, Carlo, Jeremy, and a couple dozen of our fellow lefties, I turned my back on our war-mongering graduation speaker—who was giving an I-haven’t-yet-declared-my-candidacy-for-president campaign speech—and proudly sported my bright orange umbrella and lapel button that read “McCain does not speak for me.”
Rachael and I packed up her station wagon and drove down the Blue Ridge Mountains toward Alabama. We were starting
a new phase of our lives—together.
But first we had to be apart. After dropping Rachael off in Anniston, I headed north for Cincinnati, where I had landed a job as the communications director for a long-shot congressional race. My boss was a hippie doctor named Victoria Wells Wulsin, running in one of Ohio’s reddest districts against a Cruella de Vil incumbent, known in D.C. as “Mean” Jean Schmidt. We started the general election campaign with almost no staff and even less experience, but by the fall we had a sizable budget and an army of outraged volunteers. I loved the fast pace and the adrenaline highs, but I also had little perspective and zero equanimity. “Shoot me in the fucking head,” I regularly exclaimed to my office mates, in response to challenges both large and small.
I had a naive misconception about the importance of policy proposals in congressional races, so I spent an inordinate amount of time writing up detailed papers and press releases about what Vic would do when she got to Congress. But I got other things right, including writing and producing some top-notch television and radio ads that we blasted throughout the suburban and exurban counties east of Cincinnati. None of the pundits had given us a snowball’s chance of winning, but as Election Day approached, all the polls showed us tied. We ended up losing by less than 0.5 percent; the national Republican Party had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a race that should have been easy for them, so I felt we had done our part to help Democrats win back the House.
In January, I joined Rachael in the town of Bend, Oregon, nestled in the high desert, surrounded by majestic mountains and infused with the aroma of sagebrush. Our cozy, recently renovated one-bedroom apartment sat forty feet from the sparkling, powerful Deschutes River. And it cost $650 a month. She had gotten a job at the local paper, and I was along for the ride, biding my time until law school started in the fall. Most days I slept until noon and then got high with my neighbor, who gigged as a ski instructor and parks department groundskeeper. Eventually I found work as a short-order cook at a local bar and grill; I lasted two weeks before I was fired for incompetence. (That shit is hard.)
I was much better suited for my next job, as a waiter at a big new corporate steak house that opened in the redevelopment district. The middle-aged ladies loved me, and I regularly came home with a hundred dollars in my pocket after a short shift. (In Oregon, unlike in most states, tips came on top of a full minimum wage, rather than replacing it.) One late night, over drinks with the other servers, I said that the job made me feel icky: although I was never sexually harassed like most waitresses were, I was still always pretending to be nice just for the tips. A bespectacled sommelier named Ron told me I should shift my perspective: I was there to help my guests have an enjoyable evening, and there didn’t need to be anything fake or icky about it. It was a lesson for me not only about taking pride in my work and finding meaning in the moment but also, more important, about seeing the full humanity of everyone who I interacted with. Beginning at first contact, Ron was saying, I could work to form genuine relationships, no matter how brief.
As fall and my first semester at law school approached, Rachael began looking for work on the East Coast. We were excited when she found a job listing from the New Haven Register. I still remember vividly the bright morning when she ran into the bedroom, jumped onto the bed, and woke me up with an ecstatic kiss. She had gotten the job, and we could move to Connecticut together.
After a lazy summer of mountain hikes and river floats, and an impressive appearance by Rachael on Jeopardy!, we resold our furniture on Craigslist, jammed every inch of her station wagon with our belongings, and drove back east.
Although the students at Yale Law School had all excelled in college and arrived with impressive résumés, and although perhaps 80 percent considered themselves Democrats, we were at the school for an array of different reasons. The majority of students intended to build careers as highly paid attorneys in the country’s fanciest law firms. A significant minority hoped to become academics. And then another small minority, myself included, hoped to use our law degrees in pursuit of social justice.
This last group of students congregated in the basement of the building in what was called “clinic.” The law school offered a series of different, small, hands-on seminars in which we were able to practice law under the supervision of clinical professors. We represented real clients with real problems and gained practical experience in the work of lawyering, and we also built relationships and community with like-minded lefty students.
One clinic had a reputation for being more exciting, more impactful, and dramatically more demanding than all the others. It was called the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC). It took on a variety of impressive cases, from defending immigrants from deportation to helping low-wage restaurant workers recover unpaid wages. It also had a series of legislative advocacy cases representing organizations that were trying to change government policies, including, for example, helping the National Domestic Workers Alliance pass a law in New York State guaranteeing minimum wage and working conditions for the overwhelmingly black and brown nannies, housekeepers, and health aides who had been excluded from labor protections for nearly a century.
Even though I was vying for a spot in clinic rather than a prestigious summer internship at a fancy law firm, I still thought I needed the best. I applied to join WIRAC my first year, fairly confident I would impress the professor, but I ended up ninth on the waiting list and never got in. I settled for joining the landlord-tenant clinic, where I had the opportunity to represent a resident of public housing who was being evicted. Under the supervision of a kind, meticulous, and brilliant professor who had been teaching in the law school’s clinic since the 1970s, I learned to use creative and technical legal arguments to keep my client in her apartment. She had had a very difficult life and I was glad to help her. But I also saw the ways in which her self-interest, and my work, may not have been in the public interest: she was living in a three-bedroom apartment by herself, and the public housing agency wanted to move her to a smaller place to allow a different family to have her apartment. She was waiting to regain custody of her children and argued that she would need the big apartment when they returned. But neither my professor nor I had any confidence that she would be getting her kids back anytime soon, so we were ambivalent about the situation. Nevertheless, we were her lawyers, and she wanted to stay in her apartment. So we made it happen.
The next year I applied for the elite WIRAC clinic again, optimistic that my experience in the landlord-tenant clinic and my new acquaintance with WIRAC’s professor—who had encouraged me to apply this year—would gain me admission. So, when I logged into the class schedule website and saw that I was first on the waiting list rather than admitted, my belly ached with disappointment. Surrounded by brilliant classmates, I was no longer able to excel; in fact, I wasn’t even able to pursue the career opportunities that I wanted to. I picked up the phone and called Simeon. For the first time in years, I told him, I felt like I was failing.
Then I jogged the one mile from my apartment to the law school to confront the WIRAC professor. Mike Wishnie was a legend among lefty law students. As a clinic student himself years earlier, he had sued the Clinton administration all the way up to the Supreme Court and won a ruling protecting the rights of Haitian refugees to settle in Florida. He had gone on to clerk at the Supreme Court. And he was now building the most interesting clinical practice in the country, defending the rights of Muslims persecuted by the Bush White House, among many other cutting-edge cases.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to promise that you would be admitted to the clinic, only that I was excited for you to apply.” He told me that he and the other professors had had to make some very difficult decisions about which students to admit but that he was unable to increase the class size by even one more student. There was still a chance, however, that I could get in if just one student decided not to take the class. I left, dejected and sure that no one would pass
up such an opportunity.
But, to my great joy, one student did indeed opt to drop out, deciding that thirty hours a week was just too much to devote to a single class.
I threw myself into the work with gusto. Within a few weeks I was negotiating a settlement agreement with an assistant U.S. attorney regarding a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that the clinic had filed a couple of years earlier against the Department of Homeland Security. All there was left for us to do was agree on how much the U.S. government should pay us in attorneys’ fees. It was the perfect assignment for me: I could combine my stereotypically Israeli love of souk negotiating with my hatred of the U.S. immigrant-incarceration system to try to extract as much money as possible to help fund the law school’s clinic. What could be more fun? I proposed to Mike that our opening bid be about $100,000, but he said that was extravagant; we started at $60,000, settled at $46,000, and moved on to other work.
For the next year and a half I focused my clinic work on a wage-and-hour case representing ten Chinese immigrant cooks who had been mistreated by their employer in central Connecticut. Like tens of thousands of other immigrant restaurant workers on the East Coast, they were paid less than minimum wage (and no overtime) for long, grueling hours. We were suing the restaurant in an attempt to get the workers back some of the money they were owed. Representing these workers was a crash course in civil litigation. I learned much more in a week about discovery and motion practice and many other elements of the American federal litigation system than I had all semester in my course on civil procedure. Working with my two clinic partners, under the supervision of a gentle and methodical activist professor named Muneer Ahmad, I deposed the restaurant’s owner. We drafted hundreds of interrogatories, demanding information on how much our clients had been paid and whether the restaurant had kept any records of the hours they had worked. Most challenging of all, we spent late nights in the clinic working to answer the interrogatories that the restaurant’s lawyer had sent to our clients.