Letters of remembrance

It was the darkest day in the history of Canadian universities: Dec. 6, 1989. Late in the afternoon, a crazed gunman named Marc Lupine entered the building that houses the University of Montreal's engineering school-the Ecole Polytechnique-and opened fire on students. By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 students lay dead. All were women. Lep ne had applied earlier to the school to become a student and was refused. "Feminists have wrecked my life," he wrote in a suicide note.

If one of Lepine's deranged goals was to scare away women from studying engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique, he failed. The year after what has come to be known as the Montreal Massacre, the number of women enrolled at the school jumped from 18 to 25 percent, an increase that some credit to young women wanting to show collectively that they would not be intimidated by the actions of one lone madman. Still, "increasing the number of female students today remains very much a long-term process," according to Esther Caouette, recruitment coordinator at the Ecole Polytechnique. "It seems that society will have to change if we want to encourage more women to become engineers," she adds.

Ecole Polytechnique has set up a special chair to encourage women to enroll in the school. Called the MarianneMareschal Chair for the Promotion of Women in Engineering, the program invites universitybound students to spend a day with an engineer. A scientific summer camp is offered for girls 10 to 15 years old. There is also a daylong event sponsored every year for high-school students, which includes conferences with women engineers and workshops. Coholder of the Marianne-Mareschal Chair and mechanical engineering professor Marie Bernard says, "It's a question of education. Often I find young women are looking for jobs where they can help people and work with others. Somehow they don't see how much engineers help society and how the job involves a lot of personal interaction."

Bernard says that many of the women who enter engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique recently have no recollection of the terrible events of Dec., 1989. "After all, some of my students were only 8 or 9 years old at the time." Still, she says the spirit of the young women who were slain lives on. Every year across Canada, ceremonies are held on Dec. 6 to pay tribute to the 14 women. The city of Montreal has also created a permanent memorial to their memory. On Dec. 6, 1999, the loth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, a memorial was dedicated in a rectangular park at a busy Montreal intersection across the street from the entrance to the Ecole Polytechnique. Called the Place-du-6-decembre, the memorial consists of a stone path that bisects seven arcs of dark granite set in the ground, creating 14 smaller arcs-seven on each side of the tree-lined path. Next to each arc stands a two-foothigh polished steel pedestal that features a three-dimensional rendition of the first initial of the victim's name. The family name is printed in metal in the granite next to the pedestal, along with the birth and death dates of the student.

According to Danielle Savard, the project's director, the memorial was designed to create a place for both reflection and prayer. One of the most poignant times to view the memorial is in winter, when snow drifts across the park creating a scene where the arcs appear or disappear depending on snow conditions, and slight undulations frequently form where snow drifts cover the steel pedestals.

Pierre Home-Douglas is a freelance writer based in Montreal. He can be reached at pdouglas@asee.org.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Feb 2003
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