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Rutgers
University
Administrative
Assembly

Report of the

Ad Hoc Committee on Mediation

July 9, 1998

On July 7 Bev Tarter and I met with Anu Rao (ombudsman at Princeton University) to discuss the successes and failures of their relatively new "Fairness Review Process," which replaced the former grievance procedure.

Basically, we learned just a few new items (aside from the literature they had already supplied).

  • Mediators are volunteers from support staff and administration. .
  • The Panel is made up of members of administrative staff elected for three years. .
  • There is a three day training period for mediators. They do not have a defined term. .
  • After training, the mediators are paired up with experienced mediators to observe, at first. .
  • Mediators prefer to work in teams. There is a problem in scheduling off-time, sometimes, so the other members of the team can take over. .
  • Violation of University (policy) is not required to request and experience a mediation. .
  • The survey conducted at Princeton was conducted in small focus groups instead of sending out one survey to all members. (This) allowed for much more give and take, questions and answers, interaction in general. (There is only a 13% return when surveys are sent out to be returned.) This proved to be very informative, and brought out some critical points to be addressed in creating the new system. .
  • Anu and Fred Clark (Director of Human Resources at Princeton University) would be willing to come to Rutgers to speak to us (and our Administration) about this.

    • The meeting was quite inspiring and somewhat restored my faith that perhaps Rutgers could successfully alter the existing procedure to include mediation, and to be of more benefit to our staff members in resolving issues.

    Since my last day of work prior to retirement will be July 31, I shall not be able to complete this project. However, since I am truly dedicated to this issue, I have offered to come out of retirement as a consultant, to continue this work.

    If not, I truly wish you all the best and do hope that you will be able to better deal with issues between employees than is presently being done. My work on the Assembly was one of the highlights of my career at Rutgers, and I will miss you all very much.

    Respectfully submitted

    Edith Frankel