By Michele Richinick
Following years of inactivity, the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution (OSCCR) will formalize its conflict resolution program.
Conflict Resolution at NU will be co-administered by OSCCR and the Spiritual Life Center and will offer training workshops on conflict resolution and mediation as preventative and reactive services for student groups and students, said Colleen Ryan, assistant director of OSCCR.
The program is designed to provide students with resources for when they deal with conflict in their lives, said Valerie Randall-Lee, director of OSCCR, in an e-mail to The News.
“We all experience conflict; it is normal,” she said. “However, sometimes we don’t have the tools we need to resolve the difficulties we are faced with. We have resources we can provide to our community to assist students and provide resources they can learn and use after they leave Northeastern.”
OSCCR and the Spiritual Life Center will provide training workshops for student organizations and the general student body to allow them to have a hands-on experience with conflict resolution skills and empower them to resolve conflicts in a constructive way, Ryan said.
The training workshops will include conflict resolution overview and skill development, and discuss approaches to solving conflicts, according to OSCCR’s website.
There will also be a portion of the program that will include conflict coaching, a meeting where students in a conflict would meet with Ryan and answer a series of questions intended to make students think about why they’re in a conflict, what may have caused it and what the solutions are, Ryan said. This coaching is for people who don’t feel like their conflict needs a mutual third party to mediate, she said.
When a third mutual party is needed, mediation would come in to facilitate a conversation, but it is not there to make a decision for the parties, Ryan said.
“The mediator is trained in a process that allows for people to come to their own resolution,” Ryan said. “It is a very empowering process because there aren’t that many processes where we own the results. The beauty of meditation is you own the dispute and resolution. It is confidential and voluntary.”
For the past couple of years, there has not been much development in the area of conflict resolution in OSCCR, for reasons like staffing changes, Randall-Lee said.
Randall-Lee and Shelli Jankowski-Smith, director of the Spiritual Life Center, began talking about the idea for a conflict resolution program in October 2007.
“The Spiritual Life Center and OSCCR saw a need for helping students to resolve issues in a manner that would not result in a conduct history, and that can empower students to deal with resources to resolve their own issues,” Randall-Lee said.
During the past spring semester and throughout the summer, Jankowski-Smith and Randall-Lee met with student groups, faculty and staff to determine the needs for the program, Randall- Lee said.
“Based on our meetings with students and with faculty and staff, it is clear there is a need for a resource and support for students,” she said. “Everyone experiences conflict in their lives, but overall, few are taught skills before coming to college on how to deal with it.”
There are some less formal systems on campus that deal with conflict resolution, like Resident Assistants dealing with conflicts in residence halls, but there is not a campus wide systematized way to give every student access to conflict resolution in a structured way, Jankowski-Smith said.
“It seemed that was something that would be helpful in a practical way,” she said. “We should have this on a college campus.”
Since September, Ryan has been attending student organizations’ meetings to inform them about the program, and she has been building relationships and letting people know this program is available to them.
The goal is to have a complete website working by the spring semester, Jankowski-Smith said, which will not only help centralize information for people on how to go through conflict resolution training, but will also provide resources in general for conflict resolution and allow students to request mediation and workshops.
The conflict resolution services are important to have on campus, said Erin Pritchard, Student Government Association vice president for student affairs.
“There are a lot of different ways for it to be utilized, like in student organizations and in residence halls,” she said. “There are a lot of issues that this will help to alleviate.”
Pritchard said the services will be helpful for student organizations to have conflict resolution training in case situations arise throughout the year that need to be resolved within their groups. The services are also important to have in residence halls for people to have possible ways of resolving their issues before conflicts escalate, she said.
Sean Maloney, a sophomore economics and political science major, said the program will be beneficial to students on campus, especially to freshmen.
“There are many students who seem to have problems with their roommates, and the service seems like it will help students when they get into [conflicts], instead of them taking the easy way out and switching rooms,” he said.
Conflict can actually be a positive aspect that helps people and communities grow, Jankowski-Smith said.
“We’re a big and diverse community. Just like anywhere in the world and any community, conflict is going to occur,” Jankowski-Smith said. “I think as a culture we think of conflict as a negative thing, as a scary thing, so a lot of people, including me, respond to conflict first by either avoiding it or letting it bubble up until it goes overboard.”
OSCCR and the Spiritual Life Center will expand the program to fit students’ needs, Ryan said.
“We’ve really got our ears to the ground to hear what people are saying and responding accordingly,” she said.
