"I feel that while the Dean of Students office has launched the service, it is beginning to exist on its own," Epps says. "We tried to set it up to avoid the appearance of control by the Dean of Students office or any actual control."

Joan R. Cheng '95, a student mediator and former co-president of the Asian American Association, says she is pleased with the activities of the service. "We don't just want to sit here waiting for people to call," she says.

The mediators will try to establish relationships between different mediators and student groups or set up an open house in the fall, Cheng says. Epps calls these relationships "beats."

This March, the pilot mediation program began with 18 mediators selected from a pool of 40 applicants.

Epps says the mediators were selected according to the quality of their applications, communications skills, maturity and prior experience dealing with racial tensions.

During training, the mediators learned to teach conflicting groups how to analyze situations from different perspectives, according to Robert Rosigliono, a CMG consultant.

Rosigliono says the mediation members will work to improve the false perceptions people have about different genders and races to lessen the chance of conflicts.

"[People of one race] tend to see a problem in a certain way," he says.

One of the areas which Epps has targeted for the mediators' skills is police and community relations.

During the April training session, the mediators were informed of a video which deals with the issue of minority students being harassed by the Harvard police. Black students have repeatedly made accusations of racial discrimination by University officers in the past.

The video created by the police last winter contains simulated interactions between the police and students.

"I'd like the mediation service members to look at the video and suggest an approach to the problem," Epps says.

Cheng says she will participate in a summer committee of mediators to publicize the group and to plan activities with proctor groups, houses and the Bok Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.

Through the Bok Center, the mediators say they want to work with the teaching fellow staff to improve the dialogue in the classroom settings.

Although the idea for the service was conceived in the fall during Epps' overhaul of the race relations bureaucracy, actual mediation has yet to begin. First, the mediators must decide how to approach the campus.