Conflict Resolution
Program Highlights
Setting Expectations and Resolving Conflicts

Workshop Format:

• Participants engage in facilitated discussions that use video vignettes as catalysts. Each vignette depicts a snippet from a potential conflict situation within graduate education. Participants are lead through the basic concepts of interest-based strategies for conflict resolution. (Sample overhead - PDF Format) Additional small and large group discussions using video vignettes further emphasize the interest-based strategies and permit practice and active learning of the skills. Each video vignette also contributes to the socialization of student participants by making explicit the potential points of conflict that might arise.:
• As options for resolving conflicts are discussed for each vignette, the facilitator links the interest-based strategy to the successful setting of mutually understood expectations as a process to prevent conflicts.

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Program Goals:

• Introduce to faculty and students the practice of the interest-based strategies to set expectations and resolve conflicts
• Raise awareness of issues of potential conflict in doctoral education
• Improve graduate handbooks
• Improve doctoral student completion rates

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The Problem:

Nationwide, only 60% of students entering Ph.D. programs actually obtain their degree after 10 years. Why do students leave their graduate programs before completion?

• Faculty conflict: interpersonal relationships with faculty/lack of integration into department
• Lack of adequate financial support
• Differences between "early leavers" (who may decide that graduate school is not for them, or they are not in the right program or university) and "late leavers" (those who may leave after a serious conflict arises, e.g. Nerad, UC Berkeley)

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Basic Assumptions:

• Many issues in graduate education are not negotiable
• Faculty set standards for quality and progress
• All conflict is not necessarily to be avoided; conflict over ideas advances knowledge
• The power differential between graduate students and faculty will always exist
• We should not aim for 100% retention and completion; there are appropriate reasons for students to leave their graduate programs.

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According to faculty and graduate student focus groups, ten concerns that may lead to conflict include:

1. Power relations between faculty and graduate students
2. Mentoring
3. Financial support
4. Mechanics/Process
5. Intellectual property
6. Access to information
7. Team vs. individual work
8. Quality of student life
9. Orientation and adjustment for new students
10. Workload

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Conflict resolution using an interest-based approach:

Interests must be the basis of true expectation setting on the departmental or personal level and therefore, must be the basis of resolving conflicts over expectations. How can we accomplish this?

• Identify the issues in the situation
• What expectations were stated?
• Who are the parties involved?
• What are the individual interests of each party?
• Identify the range of possible options
• Determine mutually agreeable options

This negotiation of expectations must be doable within overall university and departmental guidelines, within individual understandings and even with no guideposts or policies.

The interest-based strategy promotes the fixing of problems (not the fixing of blame), greater reliance on facts (not rules), and it dwells on the future, not the past.

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Preventing conflict is possible, only if we make the implicit explicit. We need to overcome:

• Information that is incorrect or not universally shared or understood
• The lack of commonly shared and agreed upon expectations
• The lack of specific expectations between individual faculty and individual students regarding possible areas of conflict and their resolution