I have sat across the table from more department chairs, deans, and provosts than I can count, all of them facing the same situation: a conflict that started small, was left alone, and is now sitting in front of legal counsel.
Every single time, somewhere early in the conversation, they say some version of the same thing: "I knew I should have dealt with this sooner."
They are right. And they are not alone.
The Pattern Is Consistent
In academic environments, unresolved tension between faculty members, or between a faculty member and leadership, almost never stays contained. It expands. It draws in colleagues, affects students, poisons committee work, and eventually surfaces in a formal complaint, a grievance, or a lawsuit.
The original issue is rarely what ends up in the filing. By the time a matter reaches that stage, the list of grievances has grown to cover months or years of accumulated incidents, each one small on its own, collectively overwhelming.
The institution does not just pay to resolve the dispute. It pays for the time spent managing the fallout, the strain on leadership bandwidth, the drop in departmental productivity, the potential reputational exposure, and in many cases, the legal fees that dwarf what early intervention would have cost.
It is worth knowing what the far end of that path looks like. In the twelve months ending September 2025, 1.0 percent of employment civil-rights cases terminated in US district courts reached trial, and the median time from filing to trial across all civil cases was 34.8 months. Across federal employment discrimination cases from 1979 through 2006, plaintiffs won 3.59 percent of pretrial adjudications, against 21.05 percent for other plaintiffs. The formal route is slow, and it does not favor the person who files.
Why Leaders Wait
It is worth being honest about why the conversation gets delayed, because it is rarely negligence. The reasons I hear most often are:
- "I was hoping it would resolve on its own."
- "I didn't want to be seen as taking sides."
- "I wasn't sure I had the authority to act."
- "I brought it to HR and was told to document and wait."
These are understandable responses. Academic institutions are complex environments with tenure protections, union contracts, shared governance structures, and deeply ingrained cultures around faculty autonomy. A department chair is often an academic first and a manager second, without formal training in conflict intervention.
But understanding why delay happens does not change what it costs.
What Early Intervention Actually Looks Like
Early intervention does not mean confrontation. In most cases, it means a structured, facilitated conversation between the parties involved, conducted before positions harden and before the matter is on record.
The window for that kind of intervention is real, but it is not unlimited. It exists in the early weeks and months of a problem, when the tension is visible but the parties have not yet retained counsel, filed formal complaints, or built coalitions among colleagues.
Once that window closes, the options narrow considerably. Resolution becomes harder, more expensive, and more disruptive.
For contrast, the EEOC's own mediation program resolved between 65 and 78 percent of the charges it mediated in every year from 1999 through 2020, closing them in an average of three to five months. That is not proof that mediation is categorically faster or cheaper than litigation; the two strongest federal studies of court-connected mediation disagree on precisely that question. It is evidence that a structured conversation, held while one is still possible, resolves most of what enters it.
A Practical Question for Academic Leaders
If you are reading this and a situation comes to mind (a tension in your department that you are aware of, that you have been hoping will settle itself), ask yourself one question:
Is it smaller now than it was three months ago?
If the answer is no, waiting is not a strategy. It is a decision to let the situation dictate the outcome rather than intervening while you still have leverage.