WILMINGTON — Bred-in-the-bone peacemaking, an active concern for people abroad, and quiet respect for heartfelt dissent define Wilmington College's response to terrorism and vengeance.

        Take, for instance, how that Quaker ethos shapes the arguments between juniors Sasha Burton and Katy Burns.

        “I think that they deserve everything they're going to get,” Miss Burton said of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.

        “I understand why we're doing doing what we're doing but I don't know if I agree with it,” said Miss Burns, a Quaker. “Something has to be done, but is it the most ethical?”

        Friends since Wilmington High, the 20-year-olds laughed dismissively when asked whether this national crisis might come between them.

        Similarly, no one hissed in class when Miss Burton talked about cousins called to active duty and her Air Force veteran father's work at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

ABOUT QUAKERS

Most of the 250,000 Quakers live in this country, heirs to a tradition begun by George Fox in mid-17th-century England. Their formal name is the Religious Society of Friends.   “Quaker” was a judge's insulting response when Mr. Fox told him to “tremble at the Word of the Lord.”   The Inner Light of Christ, the internal spiritual experience rather than any specific creed, guides Quakers. They reject war and racism, stress peace education and humanitarian works, and they are pioneers in prison reform. These values arise from the commonly held Quaker belief there there is something of God in every person.

        On most campuses, Miss Burton would have represented the majority and Miss Burns the dissenters.

        No one demanded that Miss Burns be explicit in her rejection of violence as an answer to violence at this 130-year-old Quaker college in Clinton County, about 50 miles from Cincinnati.

        Nor did everyone agree in the women's early-childhood education class, where assistant professor Michele Beery explored ways to help youngsters cope with war news or a parent going on active duty.

        There, a classmate wondered aloud why her brother became a Marine when the family's Pentecostal tradition rejected military service as un-Godly.

        That willingness to listen characterized the past month, Miss Burton, a Church of Christ member, said. “It's our mission and now we're implementing it.”

        Or as senior Summer McBrayer, 21, another Quaker, put it, “When people know you are against retaliation, it becomes your job to prove retaliation isn't the right thing.”

        In the same way, there has been no reported harassment of the one teacher or six students known to be in the reserves or National Guard.

        “We respect people's freedom to believe and to express what they believe,” said president Dan DiBiasio.

        Fewer than 10 percent of the 1,182 students on the main campus are Quakers. About half are Roman Catholics. Yet hundreds of students, faculty and staff of all faiths or no creed came together repeatedly for prayer, silent meetings and vigils since the Sept. 11 atrocities.

        Wilmington also will host on Oct. 17 the annual Westheimer Peace Symposium on “War and Media: Rhetoric, Romance and Reality.”

        Another Wilmington tradition asserted itself Sept. 11: paint the 7-ton granite glacial boulder in front of College Hall.

        Miss Burns and others fetched gallons of red, white and blue paint, but when they reached the boulder that first Tuesday, she said, “If we just put a dove on there that's all that's really needed.”

        That's what they did. Later, it was painted with an American flag.

        Among Quakers, pacificism and patriotism are complementary, not opposites.

        That surprised some students who came to Robert Powell, an assistant math professor. Many were “the people who want to kick ass and take names and believing with my background that I'd agree with them.”

        They didn't get much joy from the F4 Phantom pilot with 449 Vietnam combat missions who had a conversion experience after leaving the Air Force and “found a home with the Quakers.”

        He gave classes “a little homily” Sept. 12, suggesting that “this was a catastrophe that transcended Pearl Harbor and was possibly the most significant of their lives” if only for the “sheer unreason of the act.”

        Their responsibility, he said, was to “use reason in constructive ways and to arrange their lives to inculcate reason.”

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