Mediation Seminar
I’m in this seminar this term that has turned out to be quite interesting. It’s not at all what I thought it was going to be—I signed up for it because it’s called Advanced Negotiation Theory and I have apparently developed the habit of blindly signing up for anything with the word “negotiation” in the title without a second thought. Well, it turns out there was a colon in the course title, and the actual name is Advanced Negotiation Theory: Mediating Values-Based Disputes. It’s a course on mediation, not negotiation. This is actually a happy accident for me because I’ve been trying to take a mediation course for two years now but they’ve never worked into my schedule. I do feel a little foolish for not actually reading the title of a course I signed up for, but that’s the type of thing my family loves to poke fun at me for: “You couldn’t read the title? You do go to Harvard, right?” Eh, if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past two years here, it’s that going to Harvard does not really stop people from pushing as hard as they can against doors that are clearly marked “Pull.” Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re not an idiot sometimes, too.
Anyway, the class is fascinating. The professor, Larry Susskind, is one of the most noted mediators around. He’s actually from MIT, but we’ve been borrowing him here at HLS for a while now. He’s using the twelve of us in the class to help him explore some new theories he has for the field of mediation, which is pretty exciting.
One article I just read for this class refutes the standard idea that mediation works better for some types of conflict than others and suggests that it’s not topics that are more or less conducive to mediation, it’s specific people. In other words, if Joe is a hot mess and has a hard time self-reflecting, seeing things objectively, or separating the outcome of a dispute from his own sense of self-worth, it doesn’t matter how good we make the mediation system, it’s not going to work for him. If Sally can do all of those things, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fence line dispute with her neighbor or a massive coal miner’s strike she’s a part of, she will be amenable to mediation.
Isn’t that interesting? I have to say, I’m kind of sold on the idea. It makes sense with my own experiences with people. Some people are open to reason. Others seem to have their heads stuck up their own . . . well, let’s just say that if they were the ones pushing on a pull door and you tried to help them, they’d argue that they know what they’re doing and then just keep on pushing.
- Erin
