Militancy

This University isn't the place to be militant. Nobody needs to be; they'll be accepted anyway. For example, there are gay people, but we don't see people yelling slogans or wearing flamboyant clothes. I know a student from Turkey who's a Muslim. He respects his religion and practises it, but not in a splashy way. He fasts during Ramadan, but I get the feeling he does it because it's engrained in him. He's very much like the rest of us: open to discussion and new ideas about almost anything. People want to keep an open mind to learning new things -- that's why they come.

Maybe some of it comes about because it's a small University. Suppose you behave in strange ways, or you try to impose your view onto someone else. Tomorrow, you'll see that person again who you might have offended. And next term, you might be in the same seminar and have to work together.

You feel an obligation here to find out more about people who you would normally be suspicious of. People who are set in their ways tend not to come here, and when they come, they get to know other students as people; they see the genuineness of the person, and realize that stereotypes apply a lot less than they'd perhaps thought. When you look at people like that, you get more tolerant as time goes by.