The Campus Where People Held Hands

In February 2013, I wrote about something I had seen twelve years earlier.

The memory was from 2001, when I came to Hacettepe University for registration.

I was walking around the campus.

Young men and women were sitting together on the grass.

Some were holding hands.

Some were lying down together.

Some were kissing.

And I found it strange.

Not because I had arrived from another century.

Not because I had never heard of people dating.

The difference was simpler.

I had come from a place where people did not behave that openly in public.

At least not in the world I knew.

So I walked into a university campus and discovered that behavior I had considered socially impossible could be completely ordinary somewhere else.

That kind of discovery is one of the real beginnings of university.

Not the registration form.

Not the student card.

Not the department.

The moment when you realize that the rules you grew up with are not the rules of the universe.

They are local rules.

That is a disturbing and liberating realization.

Until then, much of childhood feels universal.

You assume that families work roughly like your family.

That neighborhoods behave roughly like your neighborhood.

That people speak, dress, flirt, argue, eat, pray, celebrate, and judge according to some shared logic.

You know differences exist.

But knowing differences exist is not the same as walking into them.

Experience has a different force.

A textbook can tell you societies vary.

A campus lawn can show you in five seconds.

There they were.

Young people stretched out on the grass.

Comfortable.

Visible.

Not hiding.

The important thing was not what they were doing.

It was how ordinary they seemed while doing it.

Nobody appeared to think the scene required explanation.

That was the shock.

If everyone around you is shocked, then your own shock feels confirmed.

If you are the only one looking twice, the question changes.

Maybe the unusual thing is not the scene.

Maybe it is me.

University does this repeatedly.

It moves the student from a familiar environment into a place where assumptions are exposed.

Some are strengthened.

Some collapse.

Some become choices for the first time.

That distinction matters.

A value inherited unconsciously is different from a value examined and still chosen.

Before exposure to alternatives, habit can look like conviction.

You do something because everybody around you does it.

You avoid something because nobody around you does it.

Then you meet people who live differently and seem perfectly functional.

Now your position requires thought.

Do I actually believe this?

Do I simply feel uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar?

Would I behave differently if nobody judged me?

What exactly am I defending?

Those are university questions even when they never appear in a syllabus.

The old entry ends with a simple observation:

Some people get used to it.

Some do not.

I still like that sentence.

It avoids the temptation to turn exposure into automatic transformation.

People often imagine that once someone sees a more liberal, more conservative, more cosmopolitan, more traditional, or simply different environment, they will inevitably change.

Not necessarily.

Exposure gives information.

It does not dictate the conclusion.

Two people can see the same campus and move in opposite directions.

One may think:

So this is possible.

Another:

This is exactly what I do not want.

Both have learned something.

The difference is that their position is now partly comparative.

They know another arrangement exists.

That changes even refusal.

The 2001 version of me was at the beginning of that process.

I had not yet lived on campus.

I was there to register.

That is important.

Registration days have a peculiar atmosphere because you are technically inside the institution before you belong to it.

You walk through buildings that will later become ordinary.

You see students who already know where they are going.

You do not.

They know which path leads where.

Which cafeteria is worth using.

Where people meet.

How long the walk takes.

Which building is terrible in winter.

Which lawn belongs to which crowd.

You are a visitor carrying the future version of yourself somewhere inside you.

Everything feels slightly oversized.

Universities are especially powerful during first encounters because campuses contain visible independence.

Young adults move without parents.

Sit where they want.

Dress differently.

Spend time without obvious supervision.

They appear to own their hours.

For someone arriving from a more controlled environment, that can feel like a different social climate.

Freedom is often noticed first through other people’s bodies.

Where they sit.

How close they stand.

What they wear.

Whether they touch.

Whether they seem worried about being seen.

The couples on the grass were therefore not only couples.

They were evidence.

Evidence that public space could operate differently.

Evidence that young adulthood had different boundaries here.

Evidence that a university was not simply a larger school.

That last distinction takes time to understand.

Before entering university, students often imagine the change academically.

Harder courses.

Different teachers.

New subjects.

Maybe a bigger campus.

The deeper change is social.

School usually arrives with a relatively fixed community and clear supervision.

University disperses authority.

Nobody may care whether you attend a particular lecture.

Nobody checks whether you ate lunch.

Nobody asks why you are sitting on the grass for two hours.

This freedom is wonderful.

It is also dangerous.

You can build yourself.

You can waste enormous amounts of time.

Sometimes both happen simultaneously.

That is part of the education.

When I read the old entry now, I also notice that it was written in 2013, not 2001.

That means the memory had survived for twelve years before I wrote it down.

Why that scene?

There must have been countless details from registration day.

Forms.

Queues.

Rooms.

People.

Instructions.

I remembered the couples.

Memory is selective in a revealing way.

Administrative detail disappears because it fit expectations.

Of course there was registration bureaucracy.

Of course there were offices.

Nothing about that challenged the world I knew.

The lawn did.

We remember violations of expectation.

The first time we see snow.

The first time we enter a giant city.

The first foreign supermarket.

The first workplace where the manager behaves casually.

The first family that eats differently from ours.

The first couple openly affectionate in a place where we did not expect it.

Surprise makes a bookmark.

Years later, you may not remember what you signed.

You remember what made you stare.

This is why personal history should not be reconstructed only from official milestones.

“Started university in 2001” is a fact.

“Walked through the campus and was surprised to see couples lying on the grass” is memory.

The fact tells you what happened.

The memory tells you what kind of person arrived.

That is more interesting.

I was someone carrying a particular social map.

Hacettepe immediately showed me that the map was incomplete.

Every student arrives with one.

A map of what is normal.

What is respectable.

What is embarrassing.

What adults do.

What men do.

What women do.

What families allow.

What people will say.

University places these maps on top of one another.

Students from different cities.

Different families.

Different schools.

Different incomes.

Different levels of religious practice.

Different political ideas.

Different accents.

Different expectations.

Suddenly “everyone knows” becomes difficult to maintain.

Everyone does not know.

Everyone was taught something slightly different.

This can produce conflict.

It can also produce humility.

The healthiest lesson may be that your own normal is provincial in the literal sense:

It comes from somewhere.

That does not make it wrong.

It makes it situated.

This is one of the reasons I resist mocking the younger version of myself for being surprised.

It would be easy now to say:

Why would people holding hands be surprising?

Because it was.

That answer deserves respect.

Not every past discomfort is evidence of stupidity.

Sometimes it is simply evidence of where someone came from.

The more useful question is what happened after the surprise.

Did curiosity replace judgment?

Did familiarity reduce discomfort?

Did the person become more tolerant?

Did they become more certain of their earlier values?

The original entry does not answer for me directly.

It only says some people adapt and some do not.

That restraint is useful.

I should not invent an ideological transformation the archive does not record.

What I can say is that the scene remained meaningful enough to write about in 2013.

That means it had become part of how I understood the distance between environments.

There is another reason campus affection mattered in 2001.

Public behavior is never just personal.

It is shaped by who might be watching.

Family.

Neighbors.

Teachers.

Relatives.

People who know your parents.

In smaller or more socially dense environments, anonymity is limited.

A public gesture can travel home before you do.

A university campus can create a different condition.

Thousands of people.

Many strangers.

A population made mostly of young adults.

More distance from family supervision.

Behavior changes partly because the audience changes.

This is not necessarily rebellion.

Sometimes people simply behave more naturally when consequences are lower.

Sometimes they experiment.

Sometimes they imitate the new environment.

Sometimes they discover that a rule they had treated as personal was actually surveillance.

That realization can be profound.

What do I believe when nobody who knows my family is standing nearby?

University gives many students their first chance to answer that.

Not only romantically.

Everything becomes negotiable.

Clothing.

Friendship.

Politics.

Religion.

Sleep.

Study habits.

Food.

Money.

Alcohol.

Language.

Identity.

You can change dramatically.

You can also discover that you prefer the person you already were.

Freedom does not require transformation.

It requires possibility.

That is perhaps what I saw on the grass before I had language for it.

Possibility.

People behaving without the visible tension I expected.

The scene said:

There are other ways to be young.

That sentence is larger than romance.

It contains the promise of university itself.

I also think about how quickly such scenes become invisible.

Imagine seeing the same couples every day for a year.

Soon you would walk past them without noticing.

This is adaptation in its most basic form.

The extraordinary becomes background.

The campus stops being “a campus where young men and women sit together.”

It becomes the route to class.

That is how humans survive novelty.

We normalize.

But normalization has a cost.

We forget what once surprised us.

Old writing restores the first look.

This is valuable because first looks reveal cultural boundaries clearly.

Later familiarity blurs them.

The 2013 entry was already an act of recovering that first look.

It said:

I remember when this was strange to me.

That sentence contains growth even without claiming a particular conclusion.

To remember that something once shocked you is to recognize distance between selves.

The current self has enough separation to observe the earlier one.

This is one of the pleasures of aging when you keep records.

You do not have to rely on the story you currently tell about who you have always been.

The archive interrupts.

No.

You were surprised by this.

You believed that.

You cared about something you no longer remember caring about.

Good.

Consistency is overrated.

A life should leave evidence of movement.

There is also a class of memories that become important only because society later debates the same behavior.

A phrase like “young men and women sitting together in a garden” can become politically loaded depending on the period.

My old entry approached it through personal memory instead.

That is better.

Political arguments tend to turn people into symbols.

Young people on grass become evidence for one side or another.

Personal memory keeps them ordinary.

They were students.

They were sitting.

Some were kissing.

I was surprised.

That is enough.

Ordinary life should be protected from the demand to symbolize everything.

The couple does not need to represent modernity.

I do not need to represent conservatism.

The campus does not need to become a battlefield of values.

Sometimes cultural difference first appears as a young man walking through registration day thinking:

People do this here?

That is the scale I trust.

Large social change is experienced through small scenes.

A skirt.

A handshake.

A meal.

A language.

A couple on the grass.

History enters the body before it enters analysis.

The body reacts.

Surprise.

Embarrassment.

Curiosity.

Discomfort.

Then thought arrives later.

In my case, apparently twelve years later, the scene was still available.

That is a long survival for a few seconds of campus observation.

Which suggests it had become linked to something larger:

the beginning of university life.

Beginnings attract symbolic details.

The first dorm room.

The first lecture.

The first failed exam.

The first close university friend.

The first night out.

The first time getting lost on campus.

These details become shorthand for a transition.

The couple on the grass may have been one of mine.

It said:

You are somewhere else now.

Not geographically only.

Socially.

Developmentally.

Your old environment no longer explains everything.

This is both frightening and exciting.

University offers a large world at exactly the age when identity is still flexible enough to be changed by it.

The timing is brutal and generous.

At eighteen or nineteen, many students are confident about things they have barely encountered.

Then university introduces people who violate every theory.

The person you assumed would be arrogant is kind.

The person from the group you distrusted becomes your friend.

The lifestyle you assumed guaranteed unhappiness appears to suit someone perfectly.

The respectable person behaves badly.

The person you judged behaves generously.

Reality becomes inconvenient.

This is education too.

Perhaps more important than some courses.

The ability to live with contradictory evidence is a mature skill.

The world does not always reward our categories.

University is often the first place large enough to demonstrate that repeatedly.

None of this means every campus experience makes people wiser.

Some become more prejudiced.

Some retreat into smaller groups.

Some seek only people exactly like themselves.

Plurality creates the possibility of learning, not the guarantee.

That is why the original ending remains right:

Some adapt.

Some do not.

Even “adapt” deserves nuance.

Adapting does not necessarily mean adopting the behavior.

You can become comfortable seeing something without wanting it for yourself.

This is an important form of tolerance.

Young people sometimes assume acceptance means imitation.

If you approve of someone’s freedom, you must want the same life.

No.

A plural society depends on a more mature arrangement:

You do not need to live like me.

I do not need to live like you.

We need enough confidence in our own choices not to experience every difference as a threat.

That confidence often requires exposure.

The first sight may be shocking.

The hundredth is simply part of the landscape.

That is not moral decline.

Sometimes it is nervous-system education.

You learn that the world does not collapse when someone behaves differently.

This may be one of the most practical lessons a university campus can provide.

Years later, I think the scene also carries tenderness.

Those students on the grass were young.

So was I.

At the time, they looked like representatives of a different world.

Now they look like people at the beginning of their lives.

Some relationship on that lawn may have lasted a week.

Another perhaps years.

Most of those people are now middle-aged.

The shocking young couple becomes, with time, two ordinary adults who once kissed on a campus lawn.

Time removes scandal efficiently.

It turns rebellion into a photograph.

This is why older people should be cautious when reacting to youth.

Much of what feels unprecedented has happened before in different clothes.

Young people test boundaries.

Older people announce civilization is ending.

Then everyone ages.

The formerly shocking becomes nostalgic.

I do not know who any of those students were.

That anonymity improves the memory.

They remain scenery.

Not insignificant scenery.

They were part of the first lesson the campus gave me.

Not a professor.

Not a textbook.

Just bodies at ease in public space.

The lesson was not:

You should do this.

It was:

This exists.

That is where intellectual life begins.

Existence before judgment.

See first.

Then think.

A good university should increase the number of things you know exist.

Ideas.

People.

Ways of living.

Questions.

Possibilities.

It should make the world harder to summarize.

That is a frustrating kind of education because certainty feels good.

But complexity is more honest.

The 2001 version of me arrived with one idea of normal.

The campus immediately made normal plural.

That alone made the trip worthwhile.

And twelve years later, when I saw another discussion about young men and women sitting together in a garden, I did not first think of policy or morality.

I remembered registration day.

I remembered walking around Hacettepe.

I remembered seeing couples on the grass and thinking that this place followed different rules.

That is how memory works.

Public debate opens a private door.

Behind it stands a younger version of you, carrying registration papers, looking around a campus for the first time.

He does not know yet what he will learn there.

But he already knows one thing.

The world is larger than the place he came from.