Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. Any grammatical errors should be attributed to The Record editors and not to the candidates.
What made the two of you decide to run for student government?
Mussab: I really value going places and trying to leave them better than when I found them. When I first ran in Jersey City, I was driven by the idea of improving the community and trying to leave an impact there. It’s the same idea here. I wanted to leave a legacy—one where I could be really proud of the fact that we were able to make some positive changes and advocate on behalf of students.
Joan and I actually didn’t know each other before coming together for this ticket a couple of weeks ago. Both of us were operating in in different spaces: She was very involved with the government here and I was involved with my election and what was happening back in my hometown, and I think we really came together because we just saw that we had very similar ideas when it came to the vision of what student government could be at Harvard Law School. It’s a ticket that came together for a genuine purpose; it’s not like we were friends and said,“Hey, want to run together?” Instead, we realized that we both really care about student government, and we wanted to work together and unite our unique experiences.
Let’s talk about what you hope to achieve. What do you think are the biggest areas that need improvement at HLS and what are the biggest barriers to change at HLS? And then what are your plans for overcoming those obstacles and improving the areas that need change?
Joan: There are so many things that need to be changed. I think the biggest issue at HLS right now is our inability to rally people together for a cause. As an example, Mussab and I want to make 3L free for those going into public interest. That had been discussed at some point in the past, but it was ultimately scrapped when the recession hit and money got tight. If we had a bunch of people come together to push for this, we would have been able to bring that back by now. That issue and its history really emphasizes the importance of creating community between 1Ls, 2Ls, 3Ls, transfers, SJDs and LLMs.
Another important issue is the creation of spaces for people to come together and form coalitions, for people to be able to tap into the community—to create space for them to get to better know each other and get things done.
We also need better advising around course selection. Academic advising is virtually nonexistent at HLS after 1L year. It’s so common for someone to go into 2L year with three blackletter classes and four clinical credits, not knowing that that is far too much. HLS should put a better system in place for people to have appointed advisors. If it’s faculty, that’s fine. Or there could be people who are going to be specifically hired to advise students on what the typical courseload could look like at HLS, or what the experience could look like. I think if we’re able to formalize these processes more, students would be a lot more confident about decisions that they’re making, instead of just shooting in the dark or relying on the BSAs, who, although they are experienced, have been here only a year longer than the 1Ls that they’re trying to advise, and who are also trying to figure things out at the same time.
Mussab: Joan and I have also been discussing the information asymmetry at this school. There are some people who know about certain things that are happening, but there are a lot of people who just aren’t aware about what’s happening at this institution as a whole. This was mentioned at the debate—the idea of leverage between the institution and the students. The leverage that the institution has comes from the fact that, as students, we’re only on campus for three years. And in terms of advocacy, we probably don’t start being advocates until our second year, so they really know they could just lead us on for two years. What’s missing on our side in terms of leverage is the connection with the student body: How do we actually keep people informed about the things that are going on? That’s a big lift.
So, I hear what you’re saying about formalizing advising. As far as creating community and facilitating connections between students, are there concrete ideas you have for ways to implement that as well?
Joan: The first example that comes to mind is my experience with the JD-LLM buddy program, which a lot of students don’t know about. It’s such a great initiative, but there are students who don’t even know about it—they never saw the email and didn’t sign up. My LLM buddy and I actively text all the time. It just so happens that we met over coffee, we talked, we got along great, and we kept in touch. But imagine if, at the start of the semester, DOS threw an event for JD-LLM pairs to meet and have coffee in a particular space. There would be no more heavy lifting for students to reach out to this other person to try to create that first connection.
Another solution would be to make student government more visible. Section reps, for example, really have the power to get things done for their section—many students aren’t aware of that. Mussab and I have also talked about how it would be very helpful, for example, if there were weekly student government office hours.
Ultimately, we think that if we’re able to streamline the process and create more opportunities for people to come together, a more cohesive community would be created. And this would be especially helpful for LLMs and transfers, whose time at HLS is shorter. It can be super difficult for them to feel like they’re part of the HLS community.
That sort of answers another question I had: because so many issues important to students (like SPIF, the summer contribution, mental health) are ongoing issues that change rapidly throughout the year, what are some of the ways that, if elected, you plan to build communication with the student body to hear their concerns? You mentioned office hours; is there anything else on that topic that you’ve been thinking about?
Joan: I want to reference a town hall that we held last year. We had a good turnout—we collected so much information and it was a good indicator of the climate and sentiments on campus.
Normally, when someone has an issue, their first instinct is to text their friend to see if they know the answer to that question—but chances are, their friend does not know. But if you knew that the issue was something you could raise either during student government office hours or at a town hall, that would make a difference. If we could have town halls more often, it’d be a great opportunity for students to tell us about the issues they’re facing, and for us to get people working on it.
Mussab: It’s striking to me that student government doesn’t currently have a physical space. So, right now, if you wanted to access your student government, the only way to do that is to actively go out and find out who is on student government, find their emails, and reach out to them directly. Having a physical space on campus would be so impactful. There’s no way for a student to actually be able to access information if they don’t know who to contact. It’s like HLS is this web of all these different resources that you kind of have to know—it’s like if you know, you know, and if you don’t know, you’re just out of the loop. So for student government to have something at the Hark Box—or even just having a table at WCC—would be a good start.
So, another thing that you’ve touched on a little bit already: you’ve both worked in other student organizations and held leadership positions in student orgs and beyond. How do you see that leadership experience informing your approach to student government, and what important lessons have you learned from that that you plan to take with you?
Joan: If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past year sitting every week with DOS to talk about issues—it’s the importance of institutional memory. We’ve said this before and I cannot emphasize this enough: the administration is literally counting on students leaving after X number of months.
That’s why it’s so important to figure out a way to pass down information. For example, if we find a way to amass the collective information we have on SPIF and summer contribution campaigns—all the numbers, screenshots, articles—and put it in a document and pass it along to the next person, then the next student leaders will have something to build on. Otherwise, DOS is going to pretend that they’ve never heard these concerns before. For my part, I’ve been trying to counteract that by taking notes every week when we meet with DOS. If something doesn’t seem right, I can refer back to my notes to try to figure out what they said at what point, and how it doesn’t match what they’re currently saying.
Mussab: In my previous role, I learned how to create leverage. I’ve been in a role that is similar to that of DOS’ current position. More specifically, students would come to me with demands and part of my role was deferring those demands and thinking about how, as an institution, you can satisfy a student in the short term, while not necessarily achieving their objectives in the long term.
In other words, I’m very aware of the playbook and the tactics that DOS uses. I also understand the tactics and the playbooks that we can use to be as effective as possible. As an institution, the biggest thing that HLS values is its reputation. So, in specific instances where they are sacrificing their reputation and sort of going against their word, we will have the ability to leverage the media and say, look, as the representatives of the student body, we need to have a discourse around what’s happening, around the promises that you’ve made, and the reason that things aren’t going the way that you said.
This is why the new email policy frustrates me—the fact that we have to get emails approved by DOS means that there are emails that we want to send out, that we can’t send out. It almost feels like there’s a level of censorship. [Editors’ note: Dean Ball has recently instituted a policy under which student government representatives must clear their school-wide communications with his office before sending the emails out.] That’s why it’s also especially important for us to have other means of communicating with the student body, but again, that also requires a student body to know who we are. All these things tie into each other. The awareness piece, the advocacy piece, and the social piece: they all come together in creating a student body that’s active, aware, and actively fighting for things that they want.
Lastly, is there any other part of your platform that you wanted to expand upon or anything else that you want students to know when considering voting for you?
Mussab: The biggest thing would be to visit our website: movinghlsforward.com.
We also want to emphasize that when we’re asking students for their vote, we’re not just asking them to click a button one time and to just forget about student government. We’re asking them to actively get involved. The things that we want to accomplish will only be possible if students are involved and are actively a part of the advocacy process. In the virtual world, it was so easy for people who were in power to disregard or not acknowledge the interests of students—particularly because it’s so easy to ignore people when they’re on a screen. You see 50 people on a Zoom screen and it doesn’t really mean much. But when there’s 50 or 100 people in an in-person meeting or event about something that they really care about, that’s how you put real pressure on these institutions. So we’re not just asking for students to vote, we’re asking them to give us their vote and to recognize that what that vote means is they also would like to be part of this movement that we’re trying to create.
Joan: I think about all the things that this current government leadership came in with and all that they wanted to do, but it was just so hard getting people involved. As Mussab was saying, it’s not just one and done and forget about it—it’s about actively working to create the HLS that we want to see. It’s the collective goal. We’re only here to streamline things and to serve as a conduit when necessary, but ultimately, it’ll take a lot more people than just me and Mussab to reach our goals.