Cultivating a Campus Culture of Civility

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Paula Lustbader, Cultivating a Campus Culture of Civility, Robert's Fund (2016)

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Summary

Incivility permeates our culture including in colleges and universities. Higher education influences each generation, engenders critical thinking, and establishes cultural norms for professionals. When we teach and model ways to facilitate robust, yet civil, discourse about controversial topics, we empower students to be constructive, civil, and engaged citizens in an increasingly polarized world. After offering a definition and framework for thinking about civility, the paper summarizes the pervasiveness and cost of incivility in our society generally and the presence and impact of incivility on schools specifically. The paper then provides suggestions on ways that higher education can cultivate a campus culture of civility.

The WSBA Civility Survey: Promoting the Civil Practice of Law

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Lisa E. Brodoff and Timothy M. Jaasko-Fisher, The WSBA Civility Survey: Promoting the Civil Practice of Law, NWLawyer (December 2016).
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Excerpt

How might we promote a practice of law that is both exceptionally effective and highly civil?  As members of the WSBA, we should all care about this question.  The effective practice of law is a cornerstone of our democracy and key to a thriving market economy.  Civility promotes justice and reduces transaction costs.  Incivility is expensive.  Nationally, it is well documented that incivility costs us in terms of our business, our health, and our ability to deliver on our legal system’s promise of “justice for all”.  But is it really a problem in our state?  And even if it is a problem, what can we do about it?  These were some of the fundamental questions we set out to answer when Robert’s Fund’s Civility Center for the Law, Seattle University School of Law, and the WSBA joined together in May of 2016 to survey WSBA member’s about civility in the profession.  

5 Ways to Listen Better

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Julian Treasure, 5 Ways to Listen Better, Ted Talk (July 2011).
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Summary

Julian Treasure, a leading expert on sound and how to use it best, states that “listening is our access to understanding. Conscious listening always creates understanding.” We listen through filters of our culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, and intentions. To be a better listener, he suggests we listen with an awareness of our filters and adjust them to fit the context and to what we are listening.

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Learning to Listen, Learning to Be Heard

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Donna F. Howard, Learning to Listen, Learning to Be Heard, GPSolo Magazine (Apr.-May 2006).
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Summary

Ms. Howard argues that “good listening” is achieved through the strengthening of interpersonal skills. She emphasizes that lawyers need to focus on what makes each client unique, no matter how many similar cases he or she may have heard over the course of their career. Good listening, Ms. Howard posits, happens when a person is tuned into his or her own feelings and circumstances. This attunement better allows a lawyer to understand how he or she responds to clients. Ms. Howard also argues that for lawyers in particular, it is important that good listening is supplemented with clear communication, including confirmation that the lawyer’s and client’s understanding of the communication is the same. Clear communication requires a lawyer to pay attention to verbal and nonverbal cues, and helps ensure that the client is being treated with professional care as well as sensitivity.