A Transformative Leader and Mentor

I knew of Jes Salacuse long before I started teaching at Fletcher in 1999. He was a member of the senior faculty at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, where I was affiliated during my graduate school years. Jes and our colleague Jeff Rubin co-founded the International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (INCR) field at Fletcher. Their complementary expertise and close friendship made them a formidable team. After Jeff tragically died in a mountain climbing accident in 1995, I was honored to be hired to work with Jes and others at Fletcher to continue building the field.

Working with Jes was a privilege. By then, he had stepped down as Dean of Fletcher, but the story of his deanship and how much it changed the school’s direction for the better was already legendary. He was soft-spoken but possessed a strength of character that commanded enormous authority and respect. He raised the standards for hiring and retaining faculty, thereby elevating the school’s reputation. He continued to teach in both law and negotiation for several decades, anchoring the INCR field for many years and mentoring countless students. Jes seamlessly integrated his love for negotiation with his practice of arbitration and his seminal scholarship on negotiation in leadership. His constant inquiry and expansive thinking through his writing and teaching inspired all of us.

I am especially grateful for Jes's mentorship as I navigated the academic world. We shared the teaching of the core course in International Negotiation, and he often invited me to join him in his outside engagements. The most recent set of training programs he created were for the National Center for State Courts on leadership in the judiciary. It was, as was always the case with Jes, a creative and extremely relevant approach to a set of institutional problems viewed through a negotiation lens. He invited me and a few other Fletcher and Harvard colleagues to teach in the program, and it was a joy to collaborate with him.

Jes has been a strong, steadying force at Fletcher for many years and a personal and professional mentor to me. I will miss him greatly.