PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti \u2014 Christina Julme was scribbling notes in the back of a linguistics class at the State University of Haiti<\/a> when, in an instant, everything went black.<\/p>\n Christina Julme was in her linguistics class when the earthquake struck, and she was buried for two days under the rubble.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Conor Bohan, an American who founded the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, a scholarship program for students, surveying the wreckage of the program’s center.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re in class, your professor is talking, you\u2019re writing notes and then you\u2019re buried alive,\u201d said Ms. Julme, 23, recounting how her semester came to a halt on the afternoon of Jan. 12 when the earthquake<\/a> turned her seven-story university into a towering pile of wreckage, with her deep inside.<\/p>\n Ms. Julme, ailing and slipping in and out of consciousness, was pried from her collapsed classroom after two days of having her dead professor\u2019s leg touching her, an injured friend\u2019s face a few inches from her own and many of her classmates\u2019 bodies growing fetid.<\/p>\n Haiti\u2019s best universities are in wreckage, their campuses now jumbles of collapsed concrete, mangled desks and chairs, and buried coursework. Hundreds of professors and students were entombed, although the exact number of dead is complicated by the fact that class lists and computer registries were also wiped out by the quake.<\/p>\n At St. Gerald Technical School, workers going through the wreckage with heavy machinery came across a classroom in which dead students were still at their desks. At Quisqueya University, much of the multimillion- dollar renovation work that had just been completed was shaken to bits. Joseph Chrislyn Bastien, 25, an engineering student, peered into a foot-high crevice of concrete where one could see shoes, books and flattened furniture. \u201cThis was a classroom,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The obliteration of higher education is expected to have longstanding effects on this devastated country, where even in the best of times a tiny percentage of young people went on to college.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat the earthquake has done to us, besides breaking buildings and killing much of the population, it has wiped out many of those who were the future leaders of the country,\u201d said Louis Herns Marcelin, a University of Miami<\/a> sociologist who runs a research institute here. \u201cThe impact was huge, but we still don\u2019t even know how huge.\u201d<\/p>\n The country\u2019s main nursing school is gone, as is the state medical college. The science building at the state university has been ripped open, and the teacher\u2019s college teeters on its side. At the Graduate School of Technology, Jean Foubert Dorancy, 22, climbed atop the wreckage, littered with computer parts, and lamented: \u201cThis was the best computer school in Haiti. What do I do now?\u201d<\/p>\n It was a troubled education system that fell. Many of its buildings were decaying, the result of decades of neglect. Classes were overflowing with students, and many had only mediocre preparation academically because students from the best high schools, the children of the elite, would often go to overseas universities and not come back.<\/p>\n In a country so poor, the sudden loss of educational opportunity is hard to fathom. \u201cMost of my friends weren\u2019t studying but were just hanging on the street,\u201d said Jacques Gaspard, 38, who was enrolled in a trade school that collapsed. \u201cNow I\u2019m on the street, too. Everybody\u2019s on the street.\u201d<\/p>\n Protests, strikes and walkouts were a regular feature of Haitian university life, and hundreds of state university students had, in fact, left their classes to march around the National Palace to protest the killing of a popular sociology professor when the earthquake struck.<\/p>\n \u201cThat protest saved a lot of lives,\u201d said Beneche Martial, 26, a medical student who helped arrange it. \u201cWe were blocking the streets, yelling and marching. When the earth started to shake we were running in all directions.\u201d<\/p>\n Haiti\u2019s state university was the only place to earn a degree until the end of the long rule of the Duvaliers in 1986. Since then, scores of universities have opened, many of them slipshod institutions without accreditation, but others are well-run schools open to talented students regardless of their means.<\/p>\n In the days after the earthquake, the director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization<\/a>, Irina Bokova<\/a>, called on universities outside Haiti to help shoulder the burden. \u201cUniversities in the region and beyond should make every effort to take in Haitian students,\u201d she said in a statement, calling the damage to Haiti\u2019s education system \u201ca catastrophic setback for a country already hit by other disasters.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the universities that have offered to help displaced students and faculty members is Dillard University in New Orleans, which suffered significant damage during Hurricane Katrina<\/a>. A delegation of university deans from the Dominican Republic also recently visited President Ren\u00e9 Pr\u00e9val<\/a> of Haiti to offer to help displaced Haitian college students. One proposal would allow Haitians to cross the border to attend some Dominican universities on weekends.<\/p>\n There are already plans to revive Haiti\u2019s universities using tents or temporary structures until more permanent structures can be built. And some early signs have emerged that Haiti\u2019s damaged university system may be rebuilt better. At Quisqueya, Evenson Calixte, the assistant dean of engineering, said all students would be required to study geology from now on so that they understood earthquakes. There will be a particular focus in the curriculum on building codes, he said.<\/p>\n It was arguably a shortage of educated professionals in Haiti that ensured so much of Haiti would collapse. \u201cThere\u2019s a total lack of qualified architects, urban planners, builders and zoning experts,\u201d said Conor Bohan, an American who founded the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, a scholarship program for students with top grades but few resources. \u201cPeople were living in substandard housing in places where they shouldn\u2019t have been.\u201d<\/p>\n With classes canceled for the foreseeable future, many students are using their free time to help with the recovery effort. Future doctors are pitching in at field hospitals and helping arrange a major vaccination campaign. Psychology students are talking with displaced people about how they are holding up. Ms. Julme, who studied communications, managed to get a job at the United Nations<\/a> radio station, although she focuses on music, not news, to get her mind, and the minds of her listeners, off of all the awful things that have occurred.<\/p>\n \u201cThe dean is dead,\u201d she said of her destroyed linguistics college. \u201cThe vice dean is dead. I don\u2019t see how the university can go on.\u201d<\/p>\n Haiti\u2019s educators hope that international rebuilding efforts ensure that universities are able to bounce back. \u201cHow are you going to have a critical mass of people to run the country if you don\u2019t invest in the next generation?\u201d asked Mr. Marcelin, the sociologist, who is also the founder of the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development, a consortium of universities that operate in Haiti. \u201cIf the international community overlooks this, we will spend our lives dependant on experts from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2010\/02\/14\/world\/14schools2\/14schools2-articleInline.jpg\")
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