About Us > Our Philosophy & Values
Despite its transience, the university community and its response to conflict play an enormous role in the development of tomorrow’s leaders. For many young adults, the university is their first taste of autonomy, and their experiences here at Cal will shape their interactions with the world at large for the rest of their lives. The need for a diverse student community is obvious, and Cal remains actively committed to the goal of diversity. This diversity, however, introduces the possibility of intense conflict.
We believe that all conflict, no matter how similar the participants, has its roots in culture. One’s expectations of others are shaped in part by one’s experiences, and the presence of deep, cultural differences heightens the risk of miscommunication and misunderstanding. These minor conflicts can escalate and create the possibility that students’ lived experiences of diversity are ones of rancor and enmity. These conflicts - from disagreements between roommates to clashes between whole communities - also provide the opportunity for cross-cultural understanding. The difference in outcome is dependent on the tools and services offered to students.
Conflict is an essential part of life; there is no community, no relationship, and no individual in which conflict is absent. Furthermore, many conflicts are also critical junctures: opportunities to realize progressive change. Despite this, our culture tends to view conflict as negative, or something to be avoided. Effective means of responding to conflict do not involve suppression or avoidance. While this may hide the conflict for the moment, conflict will invariably re-emerge with renewed force and emotion, creating a cycle of escalation. In order to prevent these cycles, students need to have access to services which help them to explore their unspoken assumptions as well as the cultural and societal context of conflict.
By providing students with a safe, impartial environment with trained mediators, we can not only facilitate a creative solution to the conflict at hand, but also lay the foundation for a solution to the next conflict. Our mediation emphasizes the transformation of a conflict into an opportunity for interpersonal dialogue and personal improvement. Such a transformative orientation would be the most productive approach, taking into consideration the highly interdependent nature of the campus community and the importance of ongoing relationships. Lastly, in addition to our conflict resolution services, we will offer the campus community educational workshops, collaborative problem solving classes, and other forms of preventative education to aid students in solving conflicts before they escalate to the point of needing third-party intervention. Aside from its far-reaching potential, this educational component is essential to our goal of humanizing conflict in the campus community.
Our aim, then, is to provide the Cal campus community with the help and tools necessary to transform their everyday conflicts into creative opportunity.