Yenching Reopens

On Dec. 7 Yenching University, near Peiping, was the biggest, richest and best-equipped Christian university in China. Then Jap soldiers seized its $2,500,000 campus, one of the world's loveliest, put its President J. Leighton Stuart in "honorable confinement." Last week, as it has done each autumn since 1920, Yenching began a new semester--in Free China's Chengtu, 2,000 miles from its old campus. The new Yenching, though it had lost its President, had many of the same faculty and students, the same standards of untrammeled scholarship. Educated Chinese were as elated as Frenchmen would have been if the Sorbonne had reopened on the Free French island of St. Pierre.

With campus and equipment gone, Yenching makes shift in three middle and primary school buildings in Chengtu, limits its enrollment to about 250 (a quarter of its pre-war students). But 3,000 candidates, a record for a missionary college anywhere, anytime, took its entrance examinations.

U.S.-supported Yenching was one of only three universities that survived the Japanese invasion of North China. It flew the U.S. flag and kept its Chinese students right up to Pearl Harbor. When the Japs seized the college, students and faculty lit out for West China. One group of nine, trapped in a village surrounded by Japanese, were rescued by a timely guerrilla raid. Another party, penniless, found a roll of bedding on a train, turned it in to the Y.M.C.A. They were rewarded with $2,000 by a merchant who had lost it--hidden in the roll was $7,000.

Yenching's alumni and trustees reopened their university not only to continue its own life but to forestall the opening by the Japanese of a bogus Yenching on the old campus. Though the university lost its campus, it did not lose its $2,800,000 endowment: that was safely in the hands of its board of trustees in Manhattan. At Chengtu (nickname: "Little Peiping"), where it is a neighbor of West China Union University and three other Christian universities (Ginling, Nanking, Cheeloo), Yenching is likely to remain one of the world's great universities: to its already distinguished faculty it plans to add several eminent foreign scholars.

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