For almost six decades, a slice of American university life has been quietly thriving in the Grand Duchy. The Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center, known to most simply as MUDEC, has welcomed students from Ohio to Luxembourg since 1968.
This month, its first Luxembourgish executive director, Raymond Manes, closes a 24 year chapter as he steps into retirement. He arrived at Miami in 2002, took the helm in 2020, and steered the centre through the pandemic when American students were able to continue their semester abroad while most universities on both sides of the Atlantic had gone fully online.
For me, it's a love story of 24 years. It has been really a wonderful time at Miami. But Miami is not in Florida.
That last point is the one Raymond loves to correct. Miami University sits in Oxford, Ohio, roughly halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton, and its name traces back to the Myaamia tribe, whose people were later moved to Oklahoma.
The connection runs deep today: tribe members study at Miami with free tuition, and of around 150 who have graduated, 45 have come through Luxembourg. The university's Myaamia Center leads the revitalisation of the tribe's language through dictionaries, educational platforms, and storytelling.
Luxembourg students are also allowed to study at Miami University in Ohio, with scholarship and tuition waivers.
The D in MUDEC belongs to one extraordinary man. John E. Dolibois, a Luxembourger born in 1918, who emigrated to the United States aged 13 without speaking English, became an American citizen in 1941, and graduated from Miami University.
As a US soldier he returned to Europe near the end of the war and became one of the interviewers of Nazi war criminals, first at Mondorf and later at the Nuremberg Trials. The moment that changed everything came on holiday in Venice, when a waiter relayed a phone call from "the President".
He thought it was the president of the university, his boss. He picked up the phone: 'Yes, this is John Dolibois.' 'Yes, sir, this is Ronald Reagan.'
Reagan appointed Dolibois US Ambassador to Luxembourg in 1982, the seed that grew into the centre bearing his name in 1988. Raymond knew him and his wife Winnie right up until his death in 2014, visiting John at his retirement home near Cincinnati, where a glass of Luxembourgish wine would loosen the stories, including the time he interviewed Hermann Göring in his cell.
That bond between America and Luxembourg sits at the heart of the programme's founding philosophy, captured in three words: study, engage, travel.
The host family tradition was born of gratitude, with Luxembourg families opening their homes to young Americans as a way of saying thank you after the war, and out-of-class learning, from the military cemeteries to the museums of Diekirch and Ettelbruck, remains central.
If there is a tension running through American higher education, it is that high tuition turns students, and their families, into clients. Raymond is candid about the pressure that creates, where nearly everyone expects an A, and about the parents who can make an educator's autonomy a daily negotiation.
We call them the helicopter parents, always watching, hovering; and the mowing parents, who try to clear every obstacle from their child's path.
Across 24 years, the student has changed too. The year-long students who once crossed by boat, taking classes onboard during the week-long voyage, have vanished, replaced by shorter, faster, more individualised semesters. Cell phones keep students tethered to home, the humanities are quietly retreating, and AI is reshaping the classroom faster than anyone can plan for, a worry Raymond shares with University of Luxembourg Rector Jens Kreisel: nobody knows how to design a classroom for the next five years.
What endures is the 13,000-strong alumni network that funds, mentors, and champions the centre, and a successor, Stephanie, ready to carry it forward. Retirement, Lisa suggested, need not mean stopping, and Raymond half-promised a draft course on school administration by this time next year
After 24 years of planting a quiet flag for MUDEC, few would bet against him.
