Conflict Resolution
Information for Faculty, Deans, and Chairs
Setting Expectations and Resolving Conflicts

Why participate?

Program Options

The first option would focus on graduate students for faculty as separate groups of participants. All new graduate students need a clear understanding of the processes and demand of graduate education, and of the importance their responsibility for the understanding of roles within the discipline. The acquisition of interest-based skills during orientation programs can aid them in this process of academic and social integration into their departments. Similarly, new faculty can use orientation programs to understand how university policies work and then understand the importance of clear communication of using interest-based approaches.

The exploration of the interest-based approaches by all interested faculty and students in cross-campus training sessions, either mixed or separate student and faculty groups, is also a useful option and could be organized by the university within its faculty development programs, by the Graduate School for student groups and mixed groups and by those campus units charged with raising university awareness of specific issues that can be addressed using these approaches (The Office of Intellectual Integrity, the Women's Resource Center, etc.)

Whether training involves individuals as individuals or as members of larger groups, the campus-wide rising of consciousness of the approaches will result in interests, not positions, increasingly becoming the basis of discussion within those offices on campus responsible for adjudication of disputes. Making the implicit interests or desires explicit also make the creation of multiple options and solutions more likely when a conflict does arise.

Although faculty and students in cross-disciplinary meetings can share and exchange experiences, it is really within their own departments that they can actively use these approaches to foster change and to set out mutually agree upon expectations of roles and responsibilities. Departments are home to multiple examples of implicit understandings and organizational folklore that affect the lives of graduate students and faculty, both as individual and as a group. Faculty can use the interest-based approach to discuss their understanding of departmental policies and goals and to ensure that these are commonly understood. In addition, faculty can build framework-a net of common expectations-that they can then use for discussions with students in setting individual expectations and goals. A second approach, which we believe holds the greatest promise, is a joint training and expectation-setting experience involving both graduate students and faculty in a single department, unit or subspecialty.

How can you participate?

Frequently Asked Questions

Clearly there are interests that will not be shared with students. But we believe that faculty have both an individual and a collective academic duty to make sure that such interests will not adversely affect rights of each individual student that you have (individually and collectively) admitted to your programs to the quality graduate education you have promised to them.

There is research that demonstrates that faculty and students both are more productive (and continue to be productive) if there is a good relationship between them. (this also positively affects other students in a lab, for example).

This would fall into the category of "non-negotiable". An example might be sexual harassment. Federal and state laws and your own university policies dictate the procedures to be followed for these issues.

Of course you would rather spend your time on research ! But, explicit processes like this may help you as an individual or even a collective of faculty as a department have a more productive environment for research and graduate education. Preventing conflicts can be much more time effective than resolving them in more traditional ways. Do you know what the completion rates for doctoral students is in your department?

There is a tendency for people to do this. One of the important reasons to have interest-based approaches become a "habit of mind" is to think more openly about interests and options rather than to focus only on positions.

Yes!