Director’s Update - Harry C. Katz
Harry C. Katz is the Director of the Scheinman Institute and the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining.
Although the mix varies by course and type of student, classroom teaching by Scheinman Institute faculty is distinctive in its combination of theory and practice. All of our faculty draw from both their hands on “real world” experience and their academic training to shape their courses.
Our on-campus course offerings this semester well illustrate that tradition. Some of our courses are “practicums” with a very heavy focus on the development of students’ skills at putting to use conflict resolution techniques. These courses commonly use simulations or real cases to convey this knowledge.
Katrina Nobles does this, for example, in her campus student mediation practicum courses where students perfect their skills by engaging as real time mediators in cases involving campus code violations. Marty Scheinman masterfully teaches how arbitration really works in his four-night special practicum course demonstrating key principles through discussion of cases he has settled. While Katrina and Marty’s courses emphasize practice, both of them use case analysis, simulations, and discussions as vehicles to draw out analytic points.
For the second year in a row I am overseeing a practicum course which has 32 students preparing and then arguing or making mock awards in baseball player salary arbitration simulations (using real player data). In this course the practical experience insights are provided by two ILR alums , Josh Fox (Proskauer) and Alex Gimenez (Boston Red Sox) who serve as guest lecturers in the course.
But even in our more “academic” course offerings such as Ariel Avgar’s conflict management or my labor relations core courses, cases and simulations are combined with analytic readings and discussion to provide a mix of theory and practice. I could additionally describe how practical and analytic knowledge is provided in innumerable other courses taught by Institute faculty to both on-campus and professional development program students. This is our way of doing what Marty and former Institute Director David Lipsky set as the core goal of the Institute – to train the next generation of neutrals.