Helping students meet their goal: when they fight

I've never witnessed fist fights in the literary magazine in the past 18 years. However, ugly rumors, yelling, crying, complaints, demands - I've heard all that. Usually it's one person or a group against another person. The dangerous thing is when a student leaves and takes half the staff with them - something similar happened this fall when three students stood up and left. I think the idea of advising students is best when this happens - let the editor handle things, and stay in the loop but out of the line of fire. It's also true that sometimes there is nothing one can do, and suddenly your publication staff is half of what it was. Such things happen in real world publications, too.