Volume
1, Number 4, Nov/Dec 2000
FIPSE
Funds New Conflict Management in Higher Education
Resource Center
www.campus-adr.org
Premiering Spring 2001
A
new online Resource Center, www.campus-adr.org,
will be premiering this Spring, thanks to a major 3-year
grant from the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary
Education (FIPSE). Wayne State University's College
of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs will administer
the $364,000 grant, with REPORT Editor Bill Warters
serving as the Program's Director.
As readers of the REPORT are aware, conflict is endemic
in higher education, touching the lives of students,
staff, faculty and administrators. We know that conflict
handled well can provide valuable opportunities for
learning and change. However, it is also clear that
conflict handled poorly can be quite costly for colleges
and universities in terms of time, motivation, perceptions
of safety and security, interpersonal and intergroup
relations, and direct and indirect financial costs.
Current
Challenges
While
campus conflict resolution and mediation efforts are
growing in popularity, they still are only available
on some 10-12% of campuses nationwide. Further growth
of these efforts is hampered by difficulties relating
to accessing relevant program development materials,
wide dispersion of the relevant literature, programs
of similar purpose being unable to locate and network
with each other, the absence of a central publication
serving the field, minimal program evaluation and assessment,
and the lack of shared standards of practice.
To respond to these challenges the new Conflict Management
in Higher Education Resource Center is being established
to support the expanded use of constructive forms of
conflict management in post-secondary education. The
Resource Center builds on the success of the existing
Campus Mediation Resources website which will be phased
out. The primary objective of the project is to significantly
increase campus administrator, faculty, staff and student
awareness of, access to, and use of conflict resolution
information specifically tailored to the higher education
context.
Creative Solutions
Thanks
to a collaborative arrangement with CRInfo's
Higher Education Focus Project, the new clearinghouse
will build on CRInfo's sophisticated Access database
foundation. Similar to CRInfo, information will be served
to the web with the dynamic middleware program known
as ColdFusion. The
Resource Center will provide:
-
mediation
and conflict resolution program development and
assessment tools;
-
a
regularly updated database of existing campus conflict
management projects or programs;
-
skill-training
and in-service workshop exercises, case-studies
and role-plays;
-
collections
of full-text articles on campus conflict issues
that can be searched, sorted, and then packaged
as tailor-made "online coursepacs" to supplement
teaching and training efforts;
-
annotated,
searchable bibliographies;
-
topical
briefing papers related to campus conflict;
-
information
on upcoming professional development and networking
opportunities specifically in the campus conflict
management field;
-
a
university dispute resolution policies index;
-
a
searchable FAQ database; and
-
further
development of the Conflict Management in
Higher Education Report.
Carefully
Targeted Working Groups
The
project will have a broad-based steering committee,
and in addition will sponsor a number of important
working groups. These include a group focused on
integrating high school mediators
into college programs (to be developed in
affiliation with CRENet and the Youth M-Power project);
a group addressing
the question of campus mediation program standards
of practice; and a group focused on research
and evaluation whose charge will be to develop
a Campus
Conflict Resolution Program Evaluation Kit
to improve the ease and quality of program evaluation
efforts.
FIPSE, a program of the Department of Education, has
been funding innovations in postsecondary education
since 1972. Along the way a number of other
valuable campus conflict resolution projects have received
FIPSE support. However, the current project is particularly
welcome given the rapidly growing interest in Alternative
Dispute Resolution on campus, the relative scarcity
of useful information and isolation of existing programs,
and the tremendous advances in information technology
touching campuses across the globe that will facilitate
the project's broad outreach goals.
For
more information on the project, contact Program Director
Bill Warters at 313 993-7482, w.warters@wayne.edu
