Northridge : CSUN Study Aims to Foster Campus Unity

As repairs continue on the quake-battered college, Cal State Northridge will now turn its attention to rebuilding the campus community as well, according to a CSUN official.

The university has been awarded a $90,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a study of conflict resolution, said Robert Kemmerling, director of counseling and testing at CSUN and the person who will oversee the two-year project.

“Not only are we trying to rebuild our buildings,” he said, “we also need to rebuild our community.”

A variety of activities are planned to explore “pluralism and unity” on the campus, Kemmerling said, with a focus on resolving conflicts and improving communication among diverse groups.

Project Community, the primary experiment, will attempt to bring together segments of the campus “to talk about what it means to live and work together at CSUN,” he said.

Activities will include cultural events and a participatory theater performance exploring issues “that are sometimes difficult to talk about,” Kemmerling said.

The funds will also be used to train faculty for a freshmen orientation course beginning next spring and to support existing counseling services, such as the dispute resolution center.

Kemmerling explained that once the study is completed and the results analyzed, CSUN hopes to emerge with a set of “community principles” that will be distributed to students, faculty and staff.

Although the campus has been the site of several fractious disputes between social and ethnic groups in recent years, Kemmerling said that such incidents are common at large colleges and that it was more likely the diversity of the student body that appealed to the Hewlett Foundation.

In 1993, the percentage of white students dipped below 50% for the first time, down from a peak of 67.3% in 1986. Latinos make up the largest campus minority group, followed by Asians and African Americans.

“We’re very diverse and we could be looked at as a place that would be a laboratory for looking at these issues,” Kemmerling said.