BRANDON, MB – While Brandon University is shut down during the semester break, at least one professor will be heading overseas to speak on his expertise and experience in conflict resolution.
Alan Levy, associate professor in the faculty of business administration, has been asked to give a series of lectures at Haifa University in Israel, on alternative dispute resolution. The trip will include lectures to students along with public talks involving policy makers, judges, lawyers, politicians and other interested public.
Levy is particularly excited to be going to Haifa University, for its pluralistic campus with an equal number of Israeli and Arabic students.
“It’s time for collaborative, political and business initiatives between Israel and the Arab world. There is no military solution at this point but Israelis have much to contribute, and progressive Arabs working with them could create world-transforming partnerships,” says Levy. “This is partly what I will be lecturing on at Haifa University. The need for collaboration within the Middle East and how to design business conflict resolution systems there.”
His interest in dispute resolution was piqued when Levy was doing his under-graduate degree in Tel-Aviv at the age of 19. While sitting in a movie theatre, the adjacent office building was rocked by a terrorist attack.
“Once I saw corpses of women and children I thought why can’t these people learn to have productive dialogue with one another. I have spent a good part of my life studying the dynamics of negotiations in adversarial settings”
In Canada, that means in the workplace where Levy has negotiated more than a hundred collective agreements without one strike. He did this by designing alternative dispute resolution processes between the parties.
“The parties must have faith and trust in the dispute resolution process they had a hand in designing. As Churchill stated during World War II, ‘more jaw-jaw, less war-war.'”
With his international reputation and extensive experience in designing conflict resolution systems and labour relations/negotiations, Levy has lectured in the past in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Levy says he attempts to engage his students to think of collaborative methodological strategies to connect the communities they live in.
“I believe that education and the processes of education must be enablers to allow for progress.”
Levy has a Bachelor of Arts in political science and religion, from the University of Winnipeg and his masters in industrial relations from the University of Toronto. He also has a master of laws degree from Osgoode Hall School of Law at York University, Toronto.
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For more information, please contact:
- Alan Levy
- Human Resources, Labour Relations & Dispute Resolution
- Department of Business Administration
- Faculty of Arts
- Brandon University
- P: (204) 727-9708
- levya@brandonu.ca
- Brant Batters
- Communications Officer
- Brandon University
- P: (204) 727-9762
- battersb@brandonu.ca
Contact
- Brandon University
- communications@brandonu.ca
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