Hoping to avoid lawsuits and rancor, more colleges use conflict-resolution experts
Have you heard the one about the airline pilot who, by accident, announces his longing for a certain flight attendant over a plane’s loudspeaker? Well, when a young female assistant professor heard it from a male colleague a few years ago, she didn’t think it was funny.
She filed a complaint against her fellow professor. The administration at the small, public university investigated but found no evidence of sexual harassment. The problem lingered. People took sides. And pretty soon, the nasty conflict had spread through the university.
That’s when Sandra I. Cheldelin stepped in. A professional conflict manager, Ms. Cheldelin helps solve problems, especially thorny ones that have festered for months, years, or even decades in academic institutions. A licensed psychologist who is an associate professor at George Mason University’s Institute of Conflict Resolution and Analysis, she has worked with dozens of institutions on conflicts that include ideological rifts, personal spats, and illegal forms of discrimination.
Academe, with its rigid hierarchy in what is supposed to be a collaborative culture, is a natural incubator for conflict. People fight for power, much of which comes in the form of access to scarce resources -- whether a job, tenure, grants, or the best time slots for classes.
Many colleges have learned the hard way that even mundane conflicts can lead to protracted dramas and expensive lawsuits. In the past, college officials have called on people like Ms. Cheldelin as a last resort. Now, increasingly, they are trying to head off conflict before it does serious damage.
Some institutions have even recognized the value of creating their own conflict-management programs. More than 200 colleges have mediation or conflict-resolution services for their own populations, says William C. Warters, who directs the Campus Conflict Resolution Resources Project at Wayne State University, in Detroit. While it’s difficult to assess whether the number of conflicts in academe has grown, he says, the legal costs of letting a dispute go unmanaged have increased, driving administrators to try to handle them more effectively.
But Ellen Mercer Fallon, a lawyer in Vermont who represents a number of private colleges, says conflict management may harm some individuals more than it helps them. “The danger is that parties feel pressure to go that route rather than make a real complaint of discrimination,” for example, she argues. “There’s a legal entitlement to have that complaint determined in a more formal context.”
The University System of Georgia has established a program that trained 3,000 people in conflict-resolution skills at its 34 institutions. In addition, it coached 385 designees to handle mediations at institutions other than their own, as well as large-scale conflicts across a given campus. (Mediation is a voluntary process, and both parties must agree to it.) Over its first four years, the systemwide mediators handled 41 cases, 80 percent of which were resolved.
Elizabeth E. Neely, associate vice chancellor for legal affairs for the Georgia Board of Regents, says the program prevented a vote of no-confidence in the president at one institution, and helped fix a dysfunctional department at another. “If we prevent one lawsuit a year at the university, that’s at least $100,000,” she says, adding that the saving would more than pay for the $70,000 annual cost of the program.
Besides being cost-effective, says Mr. Warters, “the approach itself is valuable because the overall goal of the institution is to be a place where people can speak their minds freely and find ways to collaborate.”
For a college, as for any organization, the cost of conflict goes far beyond a dollar amount. Good faculty members or programs are lost, reputations are ruined, lasting animosities are formed. And, according to Maria R. Volpe, director of the Dispute Resolution Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, a lot of time, energy, and even good health can be forfeited. She has heard people complain of ulcers and backaches as a result of campus conflicts. It may start out as something small, like petty jealousy over who got the best office. But, if allowed to continue, it begins to affect people’s working relationships.
The costs explain why John Jay takes the initiative in using conflict-management train-ing, she says. For example, the members of a panel that investigates sexual-harassment complaints are trained in mediation skills. And the college holds monthly “town hall” meetings for students, faculty members, and administrators to discuss conflicts before they get out of hand. “The more people who learn to do it informally, the better,” says Ms. Volpe.
But the advantage of having a third party, like Ms. Cheldelin, tackle such disputes is clear: She comes into a situation with no baggage, and she has no personal stake in the outcome.
Group Therapist
About half of the 150 organizations that Ms. Cheldelin has worked with are academic institutions and professional schools. “That’s where I feel most comfortable,” she says. It’s no wonder. Both of her parents were professors at Oregon State University, and her husband, R. Eugene Rice, who directs the Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards at the American Association of Higher Education, used to be dean of the faculty at Antioch College.
Ms. Cheldelin, 56, was provost at Antioch University’s McGregor School, which focuses on adult learning, and has held deanships at the California School of Professional Psychology. She was also a practicing clinical psychotherapist for much of her career. And she has two books on conflict resolution in higher education in the works with Ann F. Lucas, an emeritus professor of management at Fairleigh Dickinson University. One, Conflict Resolution, is to be published by Jossey-Bass this spring.
Ms. Cheldelin, who stands 6 feet tall in high heels, is usually the most imposing woman in the room. But her manner is welcoming. She’s not afraid to flash a mischievous grin when coaxing her graduate students at George Mason to join her at an antiwar rally one day. “Let’s go create some conflict,” she says, her eyes twinkling.
She is fond of “active listening,” which she explains as listening attentively to someone, noticing when the speed or volume of his or her voice escalates, and paraphrasing to the speaker what she has heard. “You have to use yourself as an instrument,” she says. “When you feel tense, it’s likely they feel tense. Therapists really do learn how to trust themselves.”
When a college tries to introduce change, people instinctively resist it, she says: “It provokes an irrational side of us.” In showing up to resolve the conflict that can result, she works to establish the sense that it is a group enterprise. That reassures those involved that the process won’t be about picking on individuals.
In one situation, Ms. Cheldelin worked with a liberal-arts college that had expanded into a university. (As with all her cases, she declines to disclose clients’ names.) Some people felt that the administration had taken their resources to set up new programs.
She began, as she often does, by interviewing everyone involved and reporting her findings to them. “I tried to point out the stories so that everyone was sort of guilty,” but without naming names, she says. Once she started talking frankly about the problem, people in the room began owning up to their roles in it. That encouraged them to take part in a solution, she says.
She helped the group members write down their 30 top problems. First on the list was the idea that the college had been unfairly robbed of money and resources. So a team of professors and administrators from both the college and the university came up with a budget. The team figured out a payback system: Every new department at the university would pay the college a 10-percent “tax” on its revenue. Though the college never got back all of the money that its faculty members and administrators felt they had lost, the good-faith gesture worked to mollify them.
Ms. Cheldelin charges colleges less than $1,000 a day, plus expenses, for her work as a private consultant, which she does part time in addition to her work as a professor at George Mason and at the conflict-resolution institute there. On average, she spends about two or three days on a campus, then makes herself available for follow-up phone consultations. She is hired by administrators, and the process is usually not voluntary for the parties involved. “When I bring a group together, they usually dread it,” she says. But once she starts working, she says, people come around.
That’s because she dreams up ways of getting people to work together in roles they are comfortable occupying, says Richard E. Rubenstein, a professor who works with Ms. Cheldelin at George Mason. If a leadership dispute arises between an administrator and a faculty group, for example, she might suggest several options, such as having the administrator draw up a proposal and letting the faculty vote on it, or involving students or outsiders in the decision. “It’s a very flexible and creative process,” says Mr. Rubenstein. “That’s exactly what we preach [at the institute]. Sandy gets us to walk the walk.”
‘A Huge Success’
Ms. Cheldelin’s own ego doesn’t come into play, according to those who know her. “She’s not trying to give you bad news to make herself look better,” says Alan E. Guskin, a professor in the leadership program and former president of Antioch University, where Ms. Cheldelin worked for a number of years.
Sue DeWine, provost of Marietta College, who hired Ms. Cheldelin to work with the Board of Trustees at a retreat on which they discussed the institution’s mission, praises her directness: “She’s not afraid to say that 40 percent of the people she talked to are looking for a new job.” But the consultant approaches people in a friendly, matter-of-fact way, Ms. DeWine says. “She’s the kind of person who can tell you you’re fired, and still have provided you with some counseling service so that you know what your next job is.”
That is why, when Mr. Guskin found himself dealing with a problem during his presidency at Antioch, he turned to Ms. Chel-delin. He had hired a director of a program, and although some people were telling Mr. Guskin great things about the director, the new man chose to fire a longtime educator on the verge of retirement. Another staff member accused him of verbally abusing subordinates, writing negative evaluations of competent people, and creating a hostile work environment.
Ms. Cheldelin, whom Mr. Guskin already knew, interviewed everyone involved and presented her findings to them. The director was given opportunities to change his ways. But he refused to acknowledge the problems and ended up being forced to resign. The president appointed a new director from the staff, who rehired the woman who’d been fired. “It was a huge success,” says Mr. Gaskin. “I’ve seen people who are angry all of the time, and she’s able to talk with them. After interviewing everyone, if she had said, ‘Al, you’re wrong,’ I would have eaten crow on this issue.”
Not everyone is quite as sold on conflict resolution. Higher-education officials in Texas will have nothing to do with it, says Gaines West, a lawyer there who has represented many faculty and staff members in disputes with colleges. He says he has asked administrators many times to consider mediation or conflict resolution, but “there’s just no interest [because] they literally can get away with anything.”
Delmar Cain, general counsel for the Texas A&M University System since 1996, has never hired a third-party mediator or conflict-resolution professional. Doing so would just add another level to an already unwieldy internal process that is plagued by too many committees, too many appeals, and too many time-consuming procedures, he says. He prefers administrators to handle conflicts swiftly and decisively on their own.
Jeffrey M. Duban, a lawyer in New York City who represents mostly professors and students in lawsuits against colleges, says that when institutions hire conflict-resolution professionals, it’s likely that their own grievance systems are inadequate. “It’s part and parcel of what is generally a kind of passing-the-buck mentality,” he says.
In a situation like the one involving the female professor and her joke-telling colleague, Mr. Duban says the campus equity office should have been able to handle the situation. “If they have to bring in a third party, they are not doing their jobs.”
But Ms. Cheldelin says she hopes to provide new options in cases where all else has failed. She determined that the equity office’s finding that there was no evidence of sexual harassment had only exacerbated the dispute. “The men thought, ‘This woman, oh, she’s too sensitive. They’re just stupid jokes.’ Her story was that no person should have to sit in an environment in which crude remarks are made about women.”
Ms. Cheldelin found a lot of bad feelings on both sides, which had spilled over into other departments. “The men felt unsafe, like they had to walk on eggshells. The women felt the men were toads, and that because the equity office didn’t do anything about it, the institution itself was sexist.” Because the complaining professor was a lesbian, it also brought up some people’s issues with having a gay colleague.
What’s more, the former head of the department had been romantically involved with a student and had been asked to leave the university for a year. But he had recently returned to the faculty and was making snide remarks about the current director’s handling of the situation. “It actually got pretty ugly,” recalls Ms. Cheldelin.
Case Closed
After listening to the professor who was so fond of telling jokes, she told him that it seemed as if he wanted to make people laugh and feel good, and that he clearly was upset that this woman did not feel good. Ms. Cheldelin then went back to the department and said, ‘This guy wants to make people laugh, while this woman wants support -- can you help them?’
She asked everyone in the department to come up with jokes that weren’t offensive to anyone in the group. She reconfigured the offices of the two professors so that one had to walk past the other to get to the coffee machine. She also encouraged them to find a shared interest. The two professors started a film club and pledged to see movies together once a month.
Did the solution work? “It must have,” says Ms. Cheldelin. They have not called her back since.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 28, Page A12