'Prince' board honors Sustained Dialogue

The 'Prince' presented The Daily Princetonian Award last Monday to Sustained Dialogue, a campus organization devoted to improving race relations.

The award is given every year to an undergraduate who has made a superlative contribution to the Princeton community.

The 2001 editorial board, however, decided to award it to Sustained Dialogue as a whole.

Sustained Dialogue is an organization that invites students to meet every two weeks and discuss race relations in small groups. The content of the conversations is kept confidential.

Each group is run by a moderator — either a trained student member of Sustained Dialogue or an administrator — who guides the conversation and keeps group members on-topic, according to David Tukey '02, a leader of the organization.

"Sometimes the moderator will share a story to get people talking," Tukey said. "Or sometimes the moderator assigns a homework assignment, to think about something or talk to someone outside of the group and then share that experience at the group meeting."

Sustained Dialogue is not merely a campus invention. It is the execution of a methodology for conflict resolution developed by Harold Saunders '52.

Saunders, who served as Assistant Secretary of State under President Carter, was involved in the historic Camp David Accords and is now a director of international affairs at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. He created a model of what should happen in an ideal conflict resolution and tried to turn it into a road map for conflict discussions.

The method requires that the discussion undergo five steps, beginning with group members sharing personal experiences and gradually leading to an understanding of the sources of the problem and an effort to find a solution, according to Teddy Nemeroff '01, a founding member of Sustained Dialogue.

"Discussions move from personal venting to the problems themselves and where they originate, and finally, to taking action," Nemeroff said.

Robin Stennet '01, a leader who has been involved in the organization since the beginning of her junior year, has been both a moderator and a group member. She said both have been positive roles for her.

"The point of the group is to get to know other people and form relationships over a long period of time, all on the premise of race relations discussions," Stennet said. "A lot of the time, I feel that [the experience] has been able to surpass that."

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Sustained Dialogue was founded in April 1999, when a group of student leaders went on a retreat, heard a speech by Saunders and began discussions.

It was last year, Nemeroff said, that "things really began to happen."

Saunders spoke at another retreat, students broke into discussion groups, and after the retreat, they continued their talks throughout the year.

Sustained Dialogue expanded this year, adding multiple discussion groups, and the organization continues to grow. One member, Aime Scott '01, has compiled a report on race relations for the University administration.

"It's been a think tank on campus," Nemeroff said. "Its goal has not been to take credit as a cure-all solution, but to create a lot of action . . . Members who have been affected by the experience have taken action, and in some ways, it's Sustained Dialogue taking action."