Education: To Be Continued

According to the guidebooks, there should have been a great university, standing in the middle of the town. But when British troops moved into Caen that July day in 1944, they saw no university. The night before, an Allied bomb had struck the library, and fire had destroyed the buildings. The pride of Normandy, the 500-year-old University of Caen, had vanished.

In the bombing, the rector had been wounded, and scores of professors and students killed. But that fall professors reopened classes in the town’s normal school, which had been used as barracks and hospital by successive waves of French, German and British troops. Students made benches and desks out of crates and rubble, plugged up windows with rags. For the rest of the war, with hardly a textbook, little paper, and no typewriters, professors lectured and gave examinations just as before. “We felt that if we could hold out for two or three years,” explained one professor, “the university would be saved.”

Sure enough, books came in from U.S. and British colleges for a new library (Caen would have one of the biggest collections of British and U.S. literature in France). Money had been promised by the French government for a new campus, bigger and better equipped than before.

Last week, on the desolate, shell-pocked plateau outside Caen, scholars from Harvard, Yale and Smith, from Oxford, Liege, and Lausanne, and ambassadors from Belgium, Canada, and Sweden, gathered near a grandstand bedecked with flags. There France’s Minister of National Education Yvon Delbos and Minister of Reconstruction Claudius Petit laid the cornerstone of the new university. Later, at a convocation in Caen’s movie theater, the only large auditorium left in the city, an honorary degree was awarded to a university president who wasn’t there: Columbia’s Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose invasion plans had unintentionally brought destruction to the old and indirectly made possible the new.