New Program Helps Guide Students
To Conflict-Management Resources

Assistant Director of Residential Life Carolyn Lloyd '99

During her five years as an employee of Bryn Mawr's Office of Residential Life, Carolyn Lloyd '99 has seen plenty of conflict.

“Conflict is inevitable in any social situation,” Lloyd says. “When it arises, most of us have ways of deflecting or avoiding it. But it's pretty hard to avoid your roommate.”

Because Residential Life oversees the functioning of the dormitories, Lloyd has advised many students about their conflicts with roommates and neighbors. But her job, she says, is not to make their problems magically disappear, but to offer guidance and support while encouraging students to confront their problems themselves.

“Our message is a lot like the Home Depot ad,” Lloyd says: “You can do it. We can help.”

Relationships among undergraduates at Bryn Mawr, which has the nation's oldest undergraduate self-government association, are governed by the College's Honor Code. The Code includes not only an academic component, but also a social one that stresses personal integrity and mutual respect. A cornerstone of the Code is its reliance on students to work together to find their own solutions to problems and conflicts.

For many Bryn Mawr students, the Honor Code is one of the most valuable aspects of a Bryn Mawr education. But, says Lloyd, living with it is not always easy.

“Our students tend to be eager to comply with the part of the code that asks them to respect each other – they do their best not to offend other people,” Lloyd says. “What presents more of a problem is learning to confront other students who have offended them. Like most people, they'd rather not talk about unpleasant things; they want to get along with everybody.

“Managing conflict requires a set of skills that have to be learned and cultivated like any other skill,” Lloyd continues. “It's great that students can begin the lifelong process of learning those skills at Bryn Mawr, but nobody arrives here with the complete set. Students who are leaving home and experiencing community living for the first time are confronted with situations that are radically different from anything they've seen before, and the learning curve is pretty steep. If you're going to present students with something as challenging as the Honor Code, you need to have support structures that make it feasible.”

A variety of programs and resources dealing with conflict management have evolved at Bryn Mawr, but students, Lloyd says, have sometimes had trouble finding those resources or determining which one is appropriate to a given situation. To help students find support in dealing with conflicts, Lloyd has created Conflict Management Services, which gathers together in a single place a variety of programs that can help students handle conflict. A new CMS Web site, at www.brynmawr.edu/cms, offers an overview of the range of available services, charts that can help students determine which services best meet their needs, some tips and suggestions for dealing with conflict, and a Web intake form for students who recognize that they would like to get some help with conflict management but aren't sure where to go.

“We've tried to take Bryn Mawr's relatively diverse support structures and consolidate them in a way that's easy to look at, easy to understand and easy to access,” Lloyd says. “The list includes some services – counseling services, for instance – that can be critical in addressing individuals' conflicts, but might not immediately jump to mind as conflict-management tools. There are services that attack problems in different ways that appeal to different personalities, and that can help people in different situations and various stages of the conflict process.”

Honor Board Head Sarah Martin '07

Honor Board Head Sarah Martin '07 is enthusiastic about the new program. Martin, who has served on the Honor Board in various capacities since spring 2004, says that the Honor Code was one of the primary factors in her decision to go to Bryn Mawr. She has dedicated much of her undergraduate career to promoting understanding of the Code and ensuring that it remains a working document – to the extent that she forfeited an opportunity to spend a semester abroad because she felt that her work with the Honor Board was at a critical stage.

“A couple of years ago, a controversy on campus revealed some problems with the Social Honor Code, or at least with the way it was being implemented,” Martin explains. “There was some confusion about what was required of students in the way of face-to-face dialogue before taking a case to the Honor Board for a hearing. And the Social Code was invoked so infrequently that nobody who was on the Honor Board had ever seen a Social hearing, so there was no institutional memory of how it was done. We realized that change needed to happen.”

The Code has since been amended at plenary meetings of the Self Government Association to make the requirements for personal confrontation clearer. As Lloyd restructured Residential Life's peer mediation program, the Board has also revived a requirement that one member of the Honor Board be a trained mediator who serves as a liaison to the mediation program. This year, the liaison is Sarah Malaya Sniezek '07.

Martin also worked with Lloyd this summer to coordinate the Honor Board's efforts with the new Conflict Management Services program. An important innovation was an introduction to CMS during Customs Week, Bryn Mawr's orientation program for incoming first-year and transfer students. Honor Board members made their traditional presentations about the Code in the context of presentations about conflict management in general, joining hall advisers, peer mediators, customs leaders and staff members who work in various conflict-management programs on campus.

“Customs Week is sort of a blur of activities and it's a challenge to fit things into the schedule,” Lloyd says, “but the Customs Heads [Angeldeep Kaur '07 and Stephanie Masiello '07] and their advisers in the Dean's Office all agreed that it is important for students to start thinking not only about what the Honor Code is, but about practical ways of implementing it. We want them to know from the outset that there are people ready to help with that.”

Martin agrees. “I hope this development will continue to reinvigorate the Code,” she says.

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