BOB BORDONE: OK, I am on a timer.
Thank you, Martha.
This feels like pressure.
This is not going to be a Ted Talk.
So-- but I'm honored to be here and share with you a little bit
of some of my thinking around, actually, law school education.
And some, I think, needs and changes
that have happened over the past decade,
and that I think are happening now that are important.
I'm going to use a tool that we use in our program.
It's a tool called the circle chart.
Comes from a pretty famous book called Getting to Yes.
And the way this tool works is we
begin by kind of looking at some challenge or perceived
felt problem in the world, and then ask
the question of why are we experiencing this problem.
So what might be some possible diagnoses, some reasons,
why this condition in the world exists.
And then we kind of focus on a particular diagnosis
and try to offer some kind of prescription for it.
How might we address the challenge.
And then the last quadrant really
looks at kind of specific action steps.
So looking at a broad prescription, what might we do?
And I want to kind of start in the early 2000s
and suggest that there was a perceived
problem that we were hearing about law school education.
And that problem being--
we were hearing from law firms, and from judges,
and from companies, and from NGOs that, in many respects,
law school wasn't adequately preparing
students for the world, for legal practice.
There was a sense that legal education was out of touch
in some way.
And that was felt-- for example, I did a program for some years
with some federal judges where a common complaint was--
your graduates are smart, and able, and not very good
writers, and not really good at doing research, and kind
of a little bit out of touch.
And so there are many possible diagnoses for this.
One possible diagnosis is really related
to the curriculum in some way.
That the curriculum at law schools
changes at a somewhat glacial pace, and that perhaps
law school curriculums were kind of behind.
And I think Harvard Law School in the early 2000s, perhaps
more than almost any law school, really sought to address that,
and addressed it in a number of different ways.
Broadly speaking, I want to suggest
one was heavy investment in clinicals and experiential
education.
And going beyond just clinicals for provision of legal services
to the poor, but also policy-oriented clinics,
advocacy-oriented clinics across the whole spectrum
of legal practice.
And then secondly, we were a real leader,
and thanks in large part to the dean,
in establishing a problem solving workshop--
a workshop that would really help students
think across disciplines.
There's so much interdisciplinary work that
informs the practice of law.
And that this would really invite students
to bring a full set of skills--
the kinds of skills they really need as lawyers--
to the table.
And you know, I would posit, probably
suffering from self-serving bias,
that the state of legal education here at HLS
is vastly different than it was in 2000 and 2001.
And vastly better, vastly improved, because
of these huge investments.
And so, I've been thinking a lot about where are we now.
I want to argue that in the at least past five years,
and maybe even in a particular way in the past two years,
that if we look at what are the current kind of conditions,
I would suggest that there are kind of two new challenges that
are really--
we're facing in law school education.
One is really a kind of political polarization.
So there's a polarization that's occurring in our society,
as we know.
But that is leaking into the classroom
in a really serious way.
We hear students talking about not feeling--
on both the left and the right, that they
don't feel that they can speak freely in the classroom.
We hear about fears of backlash if people say the wrong thing.
And secondly, it seems that there's an unprecedented amount
of just increased stress among students-- pressure,
anxiety, feelings of isolation.
And I want to posit, as we think about why that might
be the case, what are some diagnosis,
that there's a whole bunch.
But I think that what I really want to focus on
is a particular diagnosis, which is a lack of capacity not
to solve problems--
I actually think our students are incredibly
good at solving problems-- but the lack of capacity
is to sit in the presence of conflict that
feels uncomfortable.
And in the presence of conflict that
might not always have a really, easy, ready solution.
So I think what we've become really good at is if we see
a problem, we find a solution.
But there are some times, there are some kinds of conflicts.
So a student who's incredibly high performing,
who's always done incredibly well, and now
is feeling huge amounts of pressure
around extracurriculars and academics,
and there's not a ready, immediate solution to it.
And it creates feelings of isolation and depression.
Or we have very strong differences around identity,
or politics, or belief.
And what we do is, instead of kind of engaging with it,
we go into our corners, and we double down with our friends.
And so what I want to suggest is that this
is a moment for law schools to really develop in our students
a capacity for staying with.
So when I say staying with, I mean really
sitting in the presence of conflict
where there might not be a ready solution.
We actually have to sit with each other,
and hear each other, and be uncomfortable.
And maybe then only in time do we kind of learn that, kind of,
co-existence with conflict is OK.
And so broadly, in terms of prescription,
I want to suggest kind of three important capacities
that I think law students could really benefit from.
And the first is a listening capacity.
But it's a listening capacity that's
a little different from the kind of listening
we talk about in negotiation, which is usually a listening
so that I can understand where you're
from so that then I could frame the choice so
that you will agree with me.
This is really listening simply for the purpose
of learning about the other.
The second is really developing skills of perspective taking--
not on just the surface level, but on a kind
of really deep level.
And the third is really learning to sit
in the presence of conflict and not feel like any session,
any moment, anything we do, has to end in a like ribbon
and a nicely wrapped bow.
And so over the past two years, my colleagues, some of whom
are here, and I have been really thinking
about how can we do that.
We started an initiative on political dialogue
that we're kind of informally calling dialogue
across difference.
And we kind of have three big prongs to this work.
The first of it is really to capacity build our students.
And when I say capacity build our students,
I mean capacity build them for two things.
One-- to be facilitators of really hard conversations
that don't have immediate solutions.
And second-- to be effective participants in those
conversations themselves.
The second prong is really around serving the community.
And when I say the community, I mean not just here at Harvard,
but actually the world more broadly,
so that we become known as a place where we are actually not
afraid to be in conflict, and with conflict,
and sit with conflict.
And the third is to build some theory, and some pedagogy,
and some teaching materials, that can actually
be used by other institutions and schools that
might want to engage and go down this road in some way.
So I have a minute and 39 seconds.
I'm going to tell you really quickly what
are some of the things we're doing
with respect to each of these.
So with respect to capacity building students--
over the past few years we started
to offer with my colleague, Rachel Viscomi,
a class on facilitation, which started as a two credit class,
and then became a three credit class,
is now a four credit class.
This past fall we offered a political-- a reading
group on political dialogue called
Political Dialogue in Polarizing Times, Election 2016.
And that was really not about how to engage in dialogue.
But it really looked at kind of the history of dialogue
in our country, social psychological research on it,
pros and cons around dialogue.
We've also, this past spring, started
a community we're calling Harvard Community Dialogues.
We actually hosted three of these this past semester--
one on immigration and citizenship,
one on the role of press, and the other,
we actually did during reunion weekends,
on the future of health care in the United States.
More broadly, we've done some work in social media.
Rachel and I actually did a Facebook Live event
through the Harvard University.
And we've also, on our website, started a blog series called
Dialogue and Demonstration.
With respect to the community, we've done a number of projects
where we actually work in communities
helping them face conflict.
So in Portland, Maine this past semester,
we worked with Catholic Charities really
around immigration and refugee issues
and conflict around how Catholic Charities,
and other institutions that want to assist these people,
can deal with hostility in the community.
And we've done a number of projects related to that.
So for me, thinking about how do we
teach our students to sit with other people
where there are very, very tough differences.
Share those differences, not avoid them, not
pretend they're not there, and then
kind of be OK saying there isn't an immediate solution.
There might be down the road, but there isn't now,
and that's OK.
That seems to me like a really important set of skills
and capacities that lawyers ought
to have in the 21st century.
So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]