Growing up in Bethlehem, Pa., David Lipsky '61 remembers the 1949 United Steelworkers strike well: "The fortunes of Bethlehem Steel and the welfare of the workers and the citizens of the community depended on how well the company and the union got along."

That was just the beginning of his lifelong interest in collective bargaining, said Lipsky, former dean of the ILR School and the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Dispute Resolution, in delivering a hypothetical last lecture April 12 in Uris Auditorium. His talk, "Conflict and Collaboration," also addressed his years at Cornell and his opinions on the current situation in Wisconsin.

His early exposure to unions prompted him to apply to Cornell's ILR School, which was relatively new at the time. Although he was not admitted as a freshman, he later transferred after briefly attending Lehigh University. Lipsky took classes with such ILR's founding professors as Milton Konvitz, Alice Cook and Maurice Neufeld -- legends who, Lipsky said, he has tried to emulate in his own teaching.

Lipsky described the campus in the 1950s as a "peaceful, button-down kind of place" with well-dressed students. But when he returned to campus as a professor in the late 1960s, Cornell was a much different place.

"An air of protest and turbulence everywhere," he remembered. "Students were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, the women's movement, an anti-war movement."

Just months after he joined the Cornell faculty in 1969 (after earning a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 80 students took over Willard Straight Hall to protest "an unfair campus dispute resolution system." Ironically, then-president James Perkins had to cancel a speech on "The Stability of the University" because of the incidents. Classes were suspended for the remainder of the semester, but the takeover spurred changes in the campus justice system.

"World War II, the Holocaust, labor relations, strikes, picketing, student protests -- is it any wonder I've been fascinated with conflict and its resolution my entire life?" Lipsky said.

Lipsky cited a misunderstanding of the "nature and roots" of conflict as an obstacle to its positive outcomes. He acknowledged that, while it can be "dysfunctional and destructive," it often results in positive consequences.

"At the ILR School, we have a culture that not only tolerates dissent but welcomes it," he said. "We believe that the free exchange of ideas, even when individuals are in strong opposition to those ideas, brings us closer to the truth. Academic discourse is predicated on the legitimacy of discord and disagreement [which] do not jeopardize our civility and our mutual respect."

With those ideals in mind, Lipsky gave his opinions on the situation in Wisconsin, where teachers were recently stripped of their collective bargaining rights.

"Collective bargaining is not part of the problem -- it is part of the solution," he said. "It has proven to be a remarkably flexible means of confronting workplace problems. I support and endorse collaborative decision-making in all settings, both union and nonunion, including at universities."

Lipsky concluded his talk by describing Cornell students as "an incredibly diverse assortment of individuals" with a "curious mixture of idealism and pragmatism."

"There is no question in my mind that Cornell students are the very best students in the world," he said.

The Last Lecture Series is organized by the Mortar Board Senior Honor Society. The lecture was supported by the ILR School, the ILR Graduate Student Association and the Student Assembly Finance Commission.

Olivia Fecteau '11 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.