An Elite STEM College Makes Conflict Resolution Lesson 1

Harvey Mudd College’s Atwood residence hall is in hell this Tuesday afternoon.

“I don’t even know what to do,” says one dejected student who received an academic warning in a core physics class. “I just got, like, the lowest grade in the course.”

A depressed young woman who hasn’t ventured out much explains how homesick she is and how hard it is to make friends. A dude defiantly blasting the Guns N’ Roses song “Nightrain” says loud music is “just how I de-stress.” Another has been hunkered down in his room for a week — since he was groped at a party. “I’ve been really confused,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to talk about it.”

Down the hall, two roommates are shouting at each other about conflicting schedules. A woman curled in a fetal position on her bed speaks barely above a whisper. She wants to come out as gay but isn’t sure how to tell her friends and family. And in the lounge, a drunk student is conked out on the couch — or is his condition more serious? “He’s had, like, six drinks in the last two hours,” his roommate says.

Fortunately, this is role play, but none of these scenarios would be exotic at Mudd or any other college in America. Fourteen proctors (seniors who might elsewhere be called residential advisers) are training 37 mentors: sophomores and juniors who regularly watch over freshmen in dorms that house students from all four years. The mentors have five minutes to start processing the scenarios they’re confronted with. Then they review the situations and their initial approach to them with the proctors or with members of Mudd’s student-affairs staff.

College, careers, and life generally involve conflict. So Mudd makes resolving conflict — internal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup — a component of its residential life skills and, as of this year, an explicit aspect of its first-year orientation too.

Conflict resolution, a student survey last year showed, was among top stressors for students. Noise and schedule conflicts, particularly, are regular irritants, as are the residential group politics of the spring Room Draw for the following year.

Students appreciate each other’s differences, says Anna Gonzalez, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, but don’t always know how to handle interpersonal conflicts. Too often, they prefer to hash things out by email or have student-affairs staff members resolve their conflicts for them.

It’s a stereotype, but there is some truth to it, she says: Gen Z students, raised on social media and in a partly virtual world, are not always comfortable sitting in a room together and talking matters through. But that’s a skill they’ll need, in college and beyond.

Internal and External Tensions

The vast majority of Mudd’s 893 students live on campus, and collaboration at the prestigious STEM-focused college, with its challenging academic demands, is integral to most coursework. That collaborative approach is a major draw for many students, like Max Maleno, a proctor and a senior from Port Washington, N.Y., who is studying engineering. “It’s the people around us that really help us get through it,” he says.

Mudd alumni are known for their collaborative skills and inclinations, and employers value those graduates — figuratively, but literally too, with median starting salaries for bachelor-degree only employees of $107,500 for the class of 2019. Mudd graduates also have a top ranking for mid-career salaries.

But that collaborative approach can make for an intense environment, particularly when sleep is sacrificed and nerves fray.

“Harvey Mudd culture is go go go,” says Gonzalez. Things can get volatile — for students and faculty too. The nature of the campus and its work offers the exhilaration but also the frictions of a big family.

Whether among students, faculty, or staff, “every single person thinks they own the college,” says Maria Klawe, Mudd’s president since 2006. She is 68 but dresses like a seasoned undergraduate, walking around the compact campus with a magenta backpack over a black Mudd T-shirt. The universal sense of ownership is wonderful, she says, but challenging too.

Klawe (pronounced “klah-veh,” like the percussion instrument; not claw, like a James Bond villain) has brought gender parity — a remarkable achievement in a STEM institution — and greater diversity overall to Mudd’s student body. But when unflattering comments by some faculty about the caliber of recent students were leaked from what was supposed to be a confidential report in 2017, students were outraged. In distress about the report, their suffocating workload, and other factors, students protested. Klawe canceled classes for two days during a period she says was a low point for the college and her career.

This year during student welcome week, sitting in her sunny, spacious office, Klawe points to other elements that have buffeted Mudd recently. Computer science is overturning the traditional dominance of engineering, causing workload and turf anxieties among faculty. Aggravating those anxieties is an ongoing revamp of the notoriously tough core curriculum for students’ first three semesters, which includes a daunting first-semester course on special relativity. And with the ascendance of computer science comes a larger shift in institutional culture: Faculty members are disturbed that students are increasingly taking lucrative tech jobs right out of college instead of pursuing prestigious doctoral programs, which have traditionally been for Mudd a point of pride and prestige.

With a roughly eight-to-one student-to-faculty ratio, say students like seniors Maleno and Ivy Chen, another proctor, undergraduates are close to their faculty contacts, and frictions and clashes at the student or professorial level are mutually felt.

Add to those internal and market pressures the national tensions, particularly since the 2016 election, over politics, race, class, gender, sexualities, and immigration, Klawe says. And those tensions aren’t likely to subside between now and November 2020.

A college can grit its teeth and suffer such strains stoically, hoping for the best, or it can acknowledge them and try to systematically offer the tools across campus to deal with them. That’s what Mudd is trying to do.

“We are building skills,” Klawe says.

And not just among students. An outside consultant, Kathy Obear, trained 11 faculty members a couple years ago on managing difficult conversations. Those 11, in turn, conveyed active listening and other techniques they’d learned to some 60 of their colleagues. The results still benefit faculty and classroom discussions, says Lisa M. Sullivan, vice president and dean of the faculty and a professor of economic history. Because there has been some faculty turnover, it may be time to offer similar workshops, she says.

Serious Games

For new students, team-building begins with a welcome lunch, an honor-code lecture, and a night meeting in their residence halls. At about 10 p.m., in the lounge of one hall, Drinkward, students are arrayed in a circle of sofas and on a giant beanbag chair. They say their names, where they’re from, and the most memorable experience of their summer. One had the best mac and cheese of her life at a specialty restaurant in Miami. One had a magical European tour with his choir. And, says a young woman, “My friends and I got lost in the forest, and a park ranger had to come rescue us.”

Two proctors, Joon Lee and Josh Morgan, go over practical details like whom to call if you lose a key, and they assure students that three staples of undergraduate existence — candy, condoms, and ear plugs — are readily available. When conflicts arise, Lee says, “Try to communicate with each other. Try to see each other as human beings first.”

To help enable that, the next day chartered buses take the freshman, bag lunches in hand, the 45 minutes to Buena Park, Calif. There, packed into a ballroom at Knott’s Berry Farm Hotel, next to giant amusement and water parks, are the 224 first-years, 34 of the mentors, and staff members from student affairs. Tables of brownies, cookies, lemonade, and ice water line the entrance, and soon students are seated in groups of a dozen or so on the floor.

The announcements, the music over the PA, and the buzz of animated conversation subside. For 10 minutes, there is an intense silence while the students, pen in hand and working from a template based on George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From,” describe themselves:

“I am from being too sad to get out of bed,” writes Valentina Vallalta. “I am from all of my emotions, feeling them fully and learning how to deal with them. I am from love, loving others and being loved. I am from learning how to love myself. I am from laughing till it hurts. I am from the journey and being excited (but slightly anxious) as to where it will take me.”

“I’m probably too white for most of my family and too Asian for the rest,” writes one of her classmates.

The paradox of building a group is that it requires knowing when to back off and respect solitude. Sometimes, Gonzalez, the dean of students, tells the students, people are in the mood to share their identity and their history. “But sometimes people want to protect themselves. Sometimes they’ve just had a long day,” even if they know that the inquiry is made “in a well-intentioned manner.”

The groups rotate through a collage project reflecting their community, their values, and their strengths. They play games such as a sequenced steppingstone challenge and an oversized version of Jenga.

Another group has to make a hexagon out of a rope that the members are jointly holding. The catch is that they are all blindfolded or have their eyes closed, and only one can speak. Reach out to your right, suggests Marcos Acosta, a freshman from Massachusetts who has the speaking role. If you’re tapped once, he says, you are one of the vertices, so pull the rope back taut. If you’re tapped twice, you are a side.

It’s not the prettiest hexagon you ever saw, but it kind of works. “It’s hard to give instructions and get no feedback,” a mentor, Katie Partington, says sympathetically.

Owls and Teddy Bears

At a fancy dinner in a large hall downstairs that evening, the freshmen get some downtime. How about that computer science placement test? they ask each other. Recursive functions get a little rusty if you haven’t done them in a few months, says one. More introductions are made. “What’s your name?” “Occam.” “Like the razor?” “Yeah.”

Afterward, there’s a presentation and exercises on conflict resolution.

Conflicts arise, says Leah Nepomuceno, assistant director of wellness, from misunderstandings, poor communication, lack of planning, frustration. “None of those will you experience as a first-year student,” she says, deadpan. Silence. “That was a joke.”

But importantly, she tells the students, this is not a conflict-avoidance lesson but a conflict-resolution lesson, because conflict is necessary, beneficial. It offers opportunities to grow, to understand ourselves and each other, to draw closer together, to demonstrate respect, to develop self-control, and to innovate.

Are you the owl who collaborates? The turtle who avoids? The shark who competes? The teddy bear who accommodates? The fox who compromises?

There is no one correct way to handle conflict. Each way entails trade-offs, explains Marco Antonio Valenzuela, associate dean of students and director of residential life. Turtles and teddy bears don’t have the stress of engaging in tense confrontations, but they often end up being treated as doormats and risk low self-esteem. Sharks are good at confronting bullies, but they can be tactless and often escalate a situation. Foxes reach a solution but leave others with a lingering sense of resentment, wondering if they’ve been outfoxed. Owls are effective, but you need more than one of them for the process to work.

There is, among the students, some listless phone checking. But they listen and fill out a questionnaire to help them figure out what animal they are — or animals, because most people combine the traits of more than one.

The freshmen act out scenarios — confronting the bully in the study group, for instance. Don’t confront him at all, one team concludes. Just start asking each other questions to draw out others, and maybe he’ll get the message. Hmm. Foxy!

Nepomuceno introduces the notion of “carefrontation” — confrontation from caring. What situations might carefrontation be used in? Students answer: a friend with a substance-abuse problem, a classmate who steals a bike, an inconsiderate upperclassman antagonizing or belittling younger students.

The presentation ends with information about a Mudd 101 transition class, leadership “lunch and learn” sessions on Wednesdays, the counseling center, first-year experience programs, and the nine dimensions of wellness (physical, emotional, intellectual, interpersonal, cultural, spiritual, environmental, financial, and occupational).

Then it’s off to the class photo.

Don’t Wait for a Crisis

The conflict-resolution session builds on the hours of diversity and identity exploration that came before. After all, you can’t resolve differences unless you know at least something about the people you are resolving them with.

Obear, the organizational-change expert who worked with Mudd’s faculty, says in a phone interview that “scaffolding” in such programs is key, because by the time you get to the conflict-resolution skills, “people have a relationship within which to learn it.”

The type of skills Mudd freshmen are learning, says Anna Yeakley, a consultant with a background in higher education, partly evolved from diversity, communication, and conflict-resolution methods taught by the University of Michigan’s National Intergroup Dialogue Institute. Those include active listening, consideration of one’s psycho-social upbringing and its inherent assumptions, handling hot topics, analyzing one’s own trigger points, and working toward social change at personal and policy levels.

The Mudd program, says Gonzalez, the dean of students, is a hybrid drawing from that model and from leadership exercises inspired by positive psychology and Gallup’s StrengthsQuest.

When students find their strengths, Gonzalez says, they also, inherently, find areas they need to develop. As with the sharks, owls, and foxes, every advantage has disadvantages, and you have to know what those are to navigate group situations.

Consultants say that when conflict-resolution programs are brought to college students, it’s usually in reaction to a crisis, often a hate incident. Far better, they say, to teach those skills early and pre-emptively, before the arguments over schedules, the academic emergencies, the drunk roommate, or worse.

The Harvey Mudd freshmen have been penned in long enough. On the last Friday before classes, sunscreened and wristbanded on a glaring Southern California morning, they set off with mentors and staff members. The rides at Knott’s Berry Farm and Soak City call out to them: The Dragon Swing, GhostRider, La Revolucion, Montezooma’s Revenge, Supreme Scream, Xcelerator …

Then it’s the excited, exhausted evening bus trip back to campus before boarding together the roller coaster that lasts four years. On that, a few new tools in hand, they’ll see each other through college’s brain-straining, perception-warping thicks and thins and discover as collaborators their special relativity.