HAITI: Higher education levelled in quake

Christina Julme was scribbling notes in the back of a linguistics class at the State University of Haiti when, in an instant, everything went black, writes Marc Lacey for The New York Times. "You're in class, your professor is talking, you're writing notes and then you're buried alive," said Julme, 23, recounting how her semester came to a halt on the afternoon of 12 January when the earthquake turned her seven-story university into a towering pile of wreckage, with her deep inside.

Julme, ailing and slipping in and out of consciousness, was pried from her collapsed classroom after two days of having her dead professor's leg touching her, an injured friend's face a few inches from her own and many of her classmates' bodies growing fetid.

Haiti's 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.
Full report on The New York Times site