In his book, The Art of Negotiation, Michael Wheeler notes that successful negotiators expect the unexpected. To practice thinking on your feet and adapting to volatile circumstances, he recommends negotiators-in-training to try improv (or to train as a jazz musician).
Taking a cue from Wheeler, our new Conflict Prevention & Resolution course is trying to break the mold of a traditional skills course by pushing the boundaries of what we can do in a traditional classroom setting: From eating natto* to speed dating, from doing improv sketches and conducting peacemaking circles to holding happy (office) hours, we are trying everything (some conventional and some very unconventional).
* a not so subtle nod to the now cancelled “International Business Law” course (for the students to experience cultural relativism and understanding what “fit for human consumption” means in the context of a contractual agreement).
Not only are we trying to mix different activities into our classrooms, but we are integrating findings from cognitive neuroscience, organizational psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and much more to get to the root of our conflicts and how we can prevent/resolve them better. In this sense, much of what we are trying to do is to encourage students to figure out how they can get out of an adversarial situation, rather than escalating the conflict. This has - thus far - proven to be a rather difficult task given that for many law school students, the term “thinking like a lawyer” has become synonomous with “winning an argument at all costs” and uttering phrases like “Then I’ll see you in court!” (so escalating, rather than de-escalating).
The core aim of our CPR course is to help our students reduce the frequency, duration, and the intensity of their conflicts (or that of others). In doing so, we’re tackling questions like what do we want, what do we value, what do we (not) know. As a result, some of the students have noted that this course feels a bit like “therapy” or “counseling”. In addition to various introspective exercises, we also engage the students to tackle substantive issues with topics such as smashing the patriarchy, law and ethics (or the lack thereof), and learning about on-going atrocities taking place around the world (last week, we went in-depth with the conflict in Sudan).
While we also practice traditional negotiation, mediation, arbitration and litigation (i.e. moot court), we ultimately want our students to develop skills to get themselves and others out of conflict. The primary aim of this course thus embodies Seneca’s idea of non scholae sed vitae (we do not learn for school, but for life). It doesn’t matter if the students can pretend to resolve a mock-conflict inside of a classroom, if they cannot do so in real life, so we must train them accordingly.
“At the end of the day, I want to work for a university that I would feel happy sending my kids to. I think UM is pretty great, but I think there is always room for improvement (even when faced with budget cuts). ”
As this is our first run, there are many (and I do mean many) administrative and substantive hiccups. From figuring out whether we allow students to pick their own teams for the dispute resolution exercises to sorting out how to integrate GenAI into our tasks meaningfully, the list of challenges that we (especially our hard-working tutors have to cope with) are long and cumbersome. Yet, through inclusive decision-making and collective problem solving (together with the students), we are practicing what we preach and resolving various grievances in a constructive and meaningful manner. At least most of the time...