With services beginning in the fall, the recently created conflict resolution group Mediation at Dartmouth hopes to tackle a variety of issues facing the College community, ranging from tension between roommates to hazing. The group is currently training its first mediators and collaborating with student and administrative organizations to solidify its plans.
Ji Hyae Lee '13 formed the group after completing the Foundations of Leadership public policy course last fall, which compelled her to draw on the experiences she had with mediation in her high school, she said. Since then, the group has received funding, drafted a constitution, accepted members and received recognition from the Council on Student Organizations.
"It's something I felt I could bring to Dartmouth," Lee said. "I'm hoping mediation will generate a different culture of facing conflict and being open with it."
By resolving conflicts rather than ignoring or escalating them, Lee said she hopes to use the group to provide an alternative to judicial action and to create a link between students and administrators. She said she has adopted a "bottom-up," student-run approach and plans to work with various campus groups.
While the group cannot mediate cases in which students have broken the law, it can work to resolve other serious issues and is partnering with the Inter-Fraternity Council and presidents of Greek organizations to bring mediation services to various sectors of campus, she said.
To prepare students to offer mediation services, the organization has provided two-day training sessions led by graduate students from Champlain College. These eight-hour sessions allow students to become College-certified mediators, though participants are not yet eligible for state certification due to the state's 48-hour training requirement, according to Lee.
The group, which will fill a role unlike that of any existing campus organization, will accept its first conflict cases during Fall term 2012, according to executive board member Adrian Ferrari '14.
"Administrators can't do what we're doing all they can do is say this is right or this is wrong, and as students we can say, I understand where you're coming from,'" Ferrari said. "The College is of the opinion that certain crimes need to be punished, things like sexual assault, but sometimes it's just not as black and white as that."
If a student is made to feel uncomfortable but the actions cannot be classified as sexual assault, for example, the two parties can sign an "enforceable agreement" via Mediation at Dartmouth.
Ferrari envisions the group as a resource to help students solve their own problems while avoiding College judicial processes that create "definite winners and losers," he said. Students may be recommended for mediation or come of their own initiative, and by the end of the process, will have signed an agreement designed to resolve the issue at hand, he said.
While Dartmouth students led a similar mediation-based group in the 1990s, Mediation at Dartmouth focuses more closely on collaboration between students to resolve campus issues, a cause supported by Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson, according to Aine Donovan, director of the Ethics Institute and official advisor to the group.
"Dean Johnson has been incredibly enthusiastic about the training," she said.
This support has been necessary for the growth of the program, especially due to the high costs associated with training student mediators, according to executive board member Joseph Miller '14. Because each student's training costs between $600 and $700, the group initially planned to accept just 15 members.
Johnson, however, encouraged the group to double the goal to its current size of 26 students and four administrators. As a result, the organization has been able to accept a greater variety of potential mediators, according to Ferrari.
"We were worried about diversity when we sent out these applications, but we have affiliated people, we have unaffiliated people, and if there's anything that's skewed, it's skewed toward '14s and '15s to build institutional memory," Ferrari said.
The group's future plans may also involve a trip to Florida to shadow law students at the University of Miami in local conflict resolution situations. These efforts may appeal to students who are interested in law, but will also provide participants with generally useful skills, according to Donovan.
"It's learning skills for communication, listening and strategies for resolving conflict," Donovan said. "It's learning ways to ask the right question."
The group's executive board members also hope to use the skills to reach out to a larger segment of campus, according to Miller.
"In the long term, I would like to see us become an established organization like the other mentor groups on campus," he said. "I'd like to see us have logos that people recognize and have it in the public consciousness that any student can come to us and get help when they have any sort of a conflict."
Staff writer Claire Groden contributed reporting to this article.
