Midterm Evaluation

On the positive side, I believe I showed a good understanding of the organization’s mission and goals, demonstrated a good ability to identify issues and solve problems and an ability to work well independently, and communicated effectively through writing. From the feedback I received from Brett, it seemed like I was getting the foundations and principles of organizational ombuds work right, and was successfully answering the questions she asked in the worksheets.

On the negative side, I would say I did not demonstrat a good ability to follow through on assigned tasks or to meet schedules or deadlines. I underestimated how much energy it would take for me to keep up in my internship obligations through law finals and working full-time at the Oregon DOJ in Salem. As a result, I struggled to complete the seventh assignment and ended up submitting it several weeks late. I worked on it during my commute to Salem, but most days I was too tired in the morning and the evening to be able to focus on it well. Then the eighth assignment was a review and more difficult than the previous assignment and it took too much mental energy to get done on the commute. Because it was already so late, completing it felt even more overwhelming than it otherwise might have. Working on it felt stressful, so I put off stress by avoiding working on it. This was made easier because I did not have much contact with Brett after the first couple assignments.

So yeah, that was all a bad thing to do. I should have been more realistic with myself before the term started about how much work finals and my job were going to be and designed a process to keep myself focused on finishing the internship. Instead, I ended up juggling too many balls and the internship was the easiest to drop.

 

 

Week 10

For the last assignment, we were asked to answer six hypothetical questions that served as an overview for the material we covered over the term. Question 1 dealt with issues of bullying and racial harassment. Question 2 dealt with a visitor’s personal relationship issues that bordered on issues with depression. Question 3 dealt with a student who worked with another student on a project getting inappropriate messages from them. Question 4 dealt with conflict regarding the organization of the department and the manager’s poor response to criticism. Question 5 dealt with a professor who was unwittingly disturbing their colleagues by playing loud music from their office and generally being distracting. Question 6 dealt with safety issues during construction.

 

It was an interesting process to have to try and synthesize the distinct concepts we had learned over the term. It was a useful exercise to put myself in the perspective of an actually practicing ombudsperson and how that would feel, what my style would be.

Week 9

This week we learned more about how ombuds create annual reports given the data they collect from their visitors. We read the University of Pennsylvania 2015/2016 Report, the University of Washington 2013 Report, and the North Carolina State University 2015-2016 Report. For each university we reported on how the program operates, what constituencies are served, what trends the ombuds recognized, how the ombuds presented their data, what the report did well, what I would want to do differently, the similarities with the other reports, and the differences with the other reports. Some reports had really good organization of the substance of their report, but had poorly designed and difficult to decipher graphs and visual depictions of their data. Other reports took a narrative approach to presenting data, and mostly told anecdotes about the kinds of cases the office was able to help resolve. The third report was short and to the point, but did not report much on objective measures or use data much at all.

Week 8

This week we were asked to learn about workplace bullying. Workplace bullying is broadly defined as repeated actions directed towards an employee that a reasonable person would find hostile, offensive, or intimidating. Workplace bullying is distinct from rude behavior in that bullying would cause a reasonable person to feel vulnerable and shut-out from their workplace. Workplace bullying is sustained, consistent negative behavior. It is distinct from harassment. Harassment is a legal term of art that refers to offensive conduct serious enough to adversely affect the terms and conditions of a person’s employment and occurs because of the person’s protected class.

 

We were given a hypo to respond to regarding a visitor who feels targeted by their boss. We were to write a list of questions we would want to task the visitor and what assistance we would provide. My suggestion was to talk the visitor through what workplace bullying is and how to be resilient to it. Help them form connections with colleagues that can help mitigate the impact of the bullying. Encourage the visitor to speak with the boss personally, but let them know they have other options, like going to HR, if they do not feel comfortable doing so.

 

We were also given a hypo as to how we would respond if multiple people came in over a period of months to complain about the same person.

Week 6

This week we continued to talk about the ombuds role in Title IX. We read the article Is Title IX Guidance and Enforcement About to Change? The main point of this article is that it is uncertain how the Trump administration is going to alter Title IX enforcement and, as such, schools should continue with the OCR’s guidelines from the Obama administration for now. In 2016, the OCR published a Dear Colleague Letter that had broad requirements and changes related to Title IX enforcement. It has been widely criticized as not being a valid promulgation of agency rules under the APA because it provided substantive interpretations of Title IX without using notice-and-comment procedures. The Trump administration has shown some antagonism to the DCL. It is also possible that the Trump administration will try to roll back prior DCLs related to sexual assault and gender discrimination, but it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will go that far, especially since the older DCL was more grounded in Title IX jurisprudence and may have been partially written into law in a subsequent federal statute. As a result, the Title IX requirements that schools faced under the Obama administration may be going away, but until they are officially removed schools should continue attempting to be in full compliance with the old guidelines.

 

We were also asked to make a list of the three best arguments for why ombuds should be and why they should not be mandatory reporters.

 

Week 5

This week we were asked to review the UO AAEO website on sexual assault and review the current UO policy on mandatory reporting in the Title IX context. The UO categorizes Designated Reporters as University employees who have mandatory reporting requirements for Title IX purposes. Designated Reporters are generally “high-level and supervisory employees such as the president, vice presidents, deans and athletic directors as well as employees tasked with responding to incidents of sexual harassment and violence such as the director of student conduct, Title IX appeals officers, resident advisors, and UO Police Department officers.” Student-Directed Employees and Confidential Employees are not mandatory reporters for Title IX issues.

 

Designated Reporters have a requirement to report evidence of sex and gender harassment and discrimination to the Title IX Coordinator or the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity. If the student is under 18 then state-law may mandate that the employee report child abuse.

 

We were then asked to respond to a hypothetical regarding a student visiting the UO ombuds with issues concerning sexual harassment.

Week 4

This week we were to familiarize ourselves with the challenge of assessing ombuds effectiveness. I read What Is Success in Ombuds Processes? Evaluation of a University Ombudsman by Tyler R. Harrison. Harrison claims that in spite of the rise in the use of internal dispute resolution mechanisms there has been little empirical research on how the mechanisms function, who uses them, and what they accomplish. To fix this problem, Harrison studies three questions: How successful are ombuds processes on conventional measures of success such as number of cases handled, decrease in litigation, student turnover, case disposition, and disputant satisfaction? What constitutes success in ombuds process from the ombud’s and disputants’ perspectives? What case and disputant characteristics are related to perceptions of successful resolution?

For the first research question, Harrison found that the ombuds office handled 250-300 cases per year, representing 3.5% of the student population. None of the students pursued legal action against the university. One student left the school as a result of their grievance. The ombud resolved a majority of the cases, and more than 50% of cases ended with students getting some or all of the remedies they sought. The disputants held a very high level of satisfaction for the ombuds.

For the second research question, the answers Harrison gives are a bit more murky. He uses three cases to qualitatively describe situations in which the ombud and the disputant thought the outcome was a success or a failure. The ombud at this university valued building relationships within the larger university community, and thought of success as an outcome in which all parties respect the rights and positions of the other parties; engage in open, honest, and non-defensive dialogue about their differences; and make and act on decisions because it is the correct thing to do, not because of coercion or force. Harrison brings up examples of student dissatisfaction to consider whether this ombud’s values lead cases to outcomes disputants find successful.

For the third question, Harrison explains that the perceived seriousness of the dispute, time to resolution, and circumstantial constraints on options for resolution all affected the ombud’s ability to successfully resolve disputes. Factors that affect the perceived seriousness of the dispute are being a graduate student or student with grievance against an in-major professor, the disputant being highly vested in the outcome of the dispute, and perceptions of the seriousness of the dispute. Time to resolution was affected by the student’s timeliness in producing evidence, the ombud’s power (or lack thereof), and the ombud’s choice of strategy.

We were also asked to make a mock survey to provide visitors to the UO Ombuds office to collect useful metrics for self-evaluation.

Week 2

This week we were to read about how the ombudsperson and ombuds office fit into an organization. I read and reported on An Organizational Ombuds Office in a System for Dealing with Conflict and Learning from Conflict, or “Conflict Management System” by Mary Rowe. This article posits that an organizational conflict management system (CMS) has a number of dilemmas that an Ombuds Office can help resolve. These dilemmas include: how to help everyone in an organization to take action appropriate for them, how to coordinate the different services in the CMS, how to maintain the CMS’s accountability, and how to improve the CMS. The article details these dilemmas and explains an Ombuds Office’s potential role in them. The author suggests that coordination is necessary for a CMS to engage with and resolve broader conflict, rather than just dealing with specific instances of conflict. Organizations often develop complex CMSs in order to engage with different kinds of conflict, but complex systems make it harder for people to understand and know how to interact with the system.