Interviewer: So going off of that the importance of intercultural interface dialogue and with globalization and you’re speaking about how Slovenians can maintain also their rich culture and still engage, you know, whether it’s globally or regionally in dialogue I think, you know, there has been talk about how we can balance these two because we can get so immersed in the diversity and go forth and have the dialogue which is very important, but also it’s very important to be able to maintain, you know, who we are as a people culturally, nationally, racially, you know, so on and so forth. So being able to balance these two I think it’s very important and so can you speak about that and the balance of the dialogue and being able to maintain who you are as a people and how important that is.
Interviewee: Well, that’s why I said at the beginning that this diversity is a source of richness and opportunities but also a challenge. Because if you nurture this diversity as a, you know, as a value then it means that not only you accept it but you also promote this through building up institutions that, you know, serves you a well to address this differences. And differences are there, they are not dealt with once forever even in the United States which is case specific, you know, how we dealt with diversity but even United States now you may have problems now, look in Arizona what the law has been passed. So it means that diversity is never, you know, done. You always have to deal with that. You also have to face with that. It reappears in different forms. These differences reappear, the important is that they do not appear in a violent form in antagonizing that’s why tolerance, you know, should serve us as a value as a point of departure how to deal with that and when you have these values present, when you have instruments, then you may fear not of any dialogue with different people of different mind of different culture beliefs, you feel safe in entering that. So dialogue is not threatening you in this way.
Interviewer: Absolutely. So, we’ll open to questions in the audience now. Yes sir?
Audience: My name is Michael Frazier I’m a professor at Howard University in the city here and I travel for the United States state department speaking on diversity and I’ve been to Louisiana and last I was on a lecture tour in Belgrade as well as Novi Sad in Serbia and during my talks and with the people I’ve met with the issue of diversity and management of diversity surfaced multiple times and you’re right, diversity is good but it is also quite a challenge because it means that people have to do things different and to develop tolerance most people usually agree that the educational system is the key ingredient. So we’ve embarked upon University of Novi Sad and University of Belgrade and Howard University with a research project and I’m just curious when you talk about diversity, have any of the universities that involved with any research efforts to develop a database particularly as relation to differences, Slovenia is different in the sense of the homogeneity that you spoke of, whereas other parts of the Balkans is quite diverse with some people particularly the [IB] people having difficulties with different national origins. So I’m just curious have your universities been involved with developing cultural diversity or multicultural educational programs because they have not at all in Belgrade, they have talked about it and we are working on something but it’s not something that’s been institutionalized, so if you can comment please.