Faculty Group Quests for Peace : Center Finds It Isn’t Easy to Resolve Conflicts

DETROIT — It’s a small step in a quarrelsome world, but Judy and Cassandra became best friends again after a bitter falling out over a ruined stereo speaker.

Chalk one up for the 10th-grader who mediated and the Mackenzie High School’s Conflict Mediation Center--in turn an offshoot of the more formidably named Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Wayne State University.

Founded in 1965 when the Vietnam War roiled campuses, the university center then was all but alone in a field that now counts more than 100 such programs.

The center operates on a shoestring budget of $52,000 annually, with a staff of two. It has struggled to pay its bills, adapt to changing times and gain academic prestige. It offers undergraduate courses in areas such as dispute resolution, the physics of nuclear war, the Vietnam War and union-management relations.

Diverse Backgrounds

Its faculty members are drawn from many university departments, including physics, law, medicine, sociology, history, education, criminal justice and theater.

Activities are divided into undergraduate studies, programs for kindergarten through 12th-grade students and the Council for World Affairs, which puts on programs for the general community.

Reaching out to schools like Mackenzie High is an example of how the center pursues its mission of promoting nonviolent conflict resolution at all levels--from the interpersonal to the international, Director Lilian Genser said. She has worked at the center since its founding.

“Conflict is a natural part of life,” Genser said. “Without conflict, you don’t have growth. It’s the way you solve conflicts that’s important.”

For high school students, solving conflicts without resorting to force doesn’t come easily, Betty Vereen, principal at Mackenzie, said. Students who tangle outside of school often bring their conflicts with them to class.

Sources of Disputes

Typical disputes are over repeated gossip--”He said she said”--personal property, jilted love or even something as simple as one teen accidentally bumping another, Vereen says.

Since May, Mackenzie students have had an alternative--voluntary mediation by students and staff members trained in workshops offered by the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies.

In one month of operation, the school’s Conflict Resolution Center has successfully mediated 27 disputes among ninth-graders, and the program will be extended to 10th-graders in the fall, Vereen says.

Cassandra and Judy, for example, tangled over who should pay for Cassandra’s speaker, which was ruined when Judy hooked it up to a defective stereo system.

The girls, whose names have been changed, were sent to the center after their hallway shouting match disrupted classes one morning.

Need Cooling Down

“They came to school pretty hot, I guess,” said Philip, who was assigned to mediate the dispute. “This was a tough one.” After cooling down a bit, the girls agreed to split the cost of the speaker.

According to Marilyn Schmidt, director of the center’s conflict resolution training program in the high schools, its goal goes beyond helping students get along better.

“We make the ties to a larger view of the world as a place where the same techniques of conflict resolution can be used,” she said.

Some on the Wayne State campus aren’t happy with the center’s “view of the world” and its advocacy of what they see as a particular political position.

“At the time the center was founded, it attracted a number of the liberal and left-liberal faculty members,” Fred Dohrs, a retired geography professor, said.

‘Strong Liberal Bias’

“What the center has had ever since is a strong liberal bias,” said Dohrs, who led a failed effort in the late 1970s to block creation of a peace studies co-major for undergraduates at Wayne State. The center’s political bias, he said, has made it a “miserable failure” in pursuing open academic inquiry.

“There obviously is a good deal of suspicion here and elsewhere about the existence of peace and conflict studies centers,” said Prof. Melvin Small, a historian and adviser to students in the co-major program.

Small is author of “Johnson, Nixon and the Doves,” a study of the effects of the anti-war movement on presidential decisions in Vietnam.

While faculty members’ political views influence the topics they choose to study or teach, they strive for fairness and objectivity in their classes and writings, he said.

Former Ohio Gov. John Gilligan, director of Notre Dame University’s Institute for International Peace Studies, said political leaders never will be able to move toward reducing world tensions unless universities serve as open forums for all possible alternatives.

Result of Pastoral Letter

Gilligan, a law professor, said his center was founded in response to the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops’ 1985 pastoral letter on war and peace.

Two $6-million grants from Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s Corp. founder Ray Kroc, have put Notre Dame’s center at the forefront of peace studies programs nationwide.