About the Campus Conflict Resolution
Resources Project

The primary objective of the Campus Conflict Resolution Resources project (Campus-adr.org) is to significantly increase administrator, faculty, staff and student awareness of, access to, and use of conflict resolution information specifically tailored to the higher education context. The project came into being thanks to seed funds from the Conflict Resolution Information Source project followed by a major 3-year grant from the federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE).

Wayne State University's former College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs administered the $364,000 3-year FIPSE grant, which began October 1, 2000. Bill Warters continues to serve as the Program's Director. Core staff for the 2002-2003 academic year (use link to see photos) included Trevor Richards (Program Manager), Samantha Spitzer (Associate Editor, Conflict Management in Higher Education Report), Marie Colombo (Lead Evaluator), and Paul A. Saba (Graduate Assistant).

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 12-15% 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 has been 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 Campus Mediation Resources (CMR) website built by Bill Warters and hosted by the Mediating Theory and Democratic Systems program at Wayne State. The CMR site has been phased out.

Creative Solutions

Thanks to a collaborative arrangement with CRInfo's Higher Education Focus Project, the new clearinghouse includes information from CRInfo's online database system. Our site is served from a webserver housed at Walter P. Reuther Labor Archives at Wayne State University. The Resource Center is working to 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 established a broad-based steering committee, and sponsored a number of important working groups. These included a group focused on integrating high school mediators into college programs (see report here); a group addressing the question of campus mediation program standards of practice (get pdf copy of guidelines here); and a group focused on research and evaluation who have developed a Campus Conflict Resolution Program Evaluation Kit to improve the ease and quality of program evaluation efforts.