Last week I promised you we’d have Isak Froumin on to talk about post-Soviet higher education, but for technical reasons we’ve had to delay that broadcast until next week. Instead, today, we’re going to be taking a trip down memory lane – to 1926, and a rather remarkable educational experiment that originated at New York University. It was called – the Floating University.

It was the brainchild of NYU’s James E. Lough—a professor and educational reformer with an entrepreneurial spirit. His idea was to take several hundred students from across America and take them around the world on a steam for eight months. While on board they could study and learn as they did at home – from knowledgeable teachers, but while on shore…well, they could really get to understand the world and become more worldly citizens. Now, educational tourism was not unknown at the time, but what set this venture apart was the idea that a serious university would actually give credit for all these activities. It was such a sensation that American press stringers all around the world sent in stories about the ship’s progression, and Americans could follow the students’s exploits in near-real time through the press.

With me today is Tamson Pietsch, author of a new book on the Floating University from the University of Chicago Press. Her book covers a number of facets of this story: the extraordinary journey itself to over 40 ports around the world, the students’ curriculum and on-shore activities (which included meeting an extraordinary number of world leaders), and the extraordinary shenanigans that went on between NYU and Lough that threatened to stop the voyage before it even began. It’s a multi-faceted story, concentrating to a significant extent on the politics of educational tourism: which students got to take part, what parts of the world were they shown, and how were local issues framed? But for me it’s even more important as a story in the history of credentialing knowledge. The floating university was a huge and genuine attempt to not just to prise learning out of classrooms, but to widen the scope of activities of what could be recognized as “credit” towards a degree. It failed, of course, partly because of problems in organization and management but perhaps more importantly because it was steamrollered by the way that universities as institutions were becoming much more protective about their monopoly over credentialing.  

But enough from me: let’s hear from Tamson. 

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.10 | The Floating University

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Tamson, tell us what was the idea behind the floating university and how did it come to fruition?

Tamson Pietsch (TP): The floating university was the idea of a New York University professor called James Edwin Lowe, who was the professor of educational psychology there. He had a background in psychology, and he was interested in experience. He was very influenced by the ideas of William James and John Dewey at the end of the 19th century, really American pragmatism. He wanted to bring those notions into the university classroom. How can experience be the foundation for university credit? He set up a series of courses at NYU in the period before the First World War, in which, courses in places like the municipal building in New York, Grand Central Station for engineers, and the big one was Wall Street, where he set up courses in commerce that were taught by professionals, by people working in the vocation, to students who then got university credit for those courses. The philosophy being that you can learn in place. You can learn in the environment in which work is being undertaken. After that, immediately before and then after the second world war, he thought if we can do this in New York, why not travel abroad? So, a series of courses he ran overseas to Europe in 1914, the very first study abroad courses from America to Europe. Then he relaunched these after the second world war. And again, in the 1920s, in a kind of era of internationalism, he thought let’s take students on a whole year around the world cruise for university credit. We can teach them to be global citizens at sea, by experience in the world and by meeting the people of the world. American students will learn to be world minded.

AU: You make an important point very early on in the book that the floating university comes along the exact time that universities are starting to make certain claims of exclusivity for the delivery of expertise. It’s actually a pretty important point in the development of modernism, I would say. The floating university is explicitly a project of experiential learning, which challenges that claim of exclusivity. So, what’s the politics of this inside a university? Why might the university, in a sense, challenge its own claims of exclusivity the way NYU was thinking of doing in the mid 1920s?

TP: It’s a great question. This is what I found so fascinating about this voyage. It lets us see this context of different ways of warranting knowledge, which I think has been completely buried in our histories of the 20th century, precisely because one side won. So, it’s interesting. As you say, this is precisely the moment where American universities and universities across the world are making claims to monopoly over knowledge. Some of these have been established in the period before the First World War, but places like NYU, second tier institutions, are really getting on that bandwagon by the 1920s. However, NYU faced a series of financial crises in the period from 1900 onwards, and what Professor Lowe’s experiential courses offered, and the big ones were in education, were income. So, in many ways, some of the courses Lowe offered to students played a huge role in saving the financial bacon of the institution. A lot of those courses will run through what was called the extramural division and I really think the history of extramural studies in this period is there to be written by some enterprising scholar. By extramural studies, what universities meant was university credit that was offered beyond the walls, extramural, beyond the walls of the university. It was different than the extension division, which was engagement and lectures to public audiences. This was university work that was done outside the institution, and it was a massive movement in this period. On the one hand, you can see these ideas as separate: experience pulling in one direction, expertise pulling in the other. But it’s also useful to think about how they dovetailed because many of the courses that Professor Lowe is establishing in these workplaces of New York become a kind of settlement that then the university closes the walls around. So, the commerce courses are an experiment. They’re offering to hold new set of students that come in. But pretty soon the walls go up and these are now these are now disciplines that the university exclusively offers. So, it’s a bit like a colonizing enterprise, a knowledge colony, where they set up camp and then suddenly the camp becomes a settlement, and soon enough it’s the university that’s kicking out all those vocational teachers and arguing that it alone has authority over that domain.

AU: The Floating University is an NYU project where we’re going to take students around the world and teach them things and they’ll see things and learn things. It’s designed to issue NYU credit for what we would now call experiential learning. But the students who wanted to take part weren’t exclusively, or even for the most part from NYU, if I understand correctly. In fact, it was deliberately advertised right across the United States. So, how would students in 1927, before the internet, before TV, how would students in those other places have come to learn about the floating university and what would they have expected in terms of credit at graduation? Would they have taken for granted that if NYU issued the credits that their own institution would accept them?

TP: Again, university credits, it sounds very technical, but I think it is the linchpin of understanding university authority in the 20th century, if that’s not too big a claim. With the demise of the classical curriculum at the end of the 19th century, universities like Harvard begin by experimenting with the elective system. Where students can pick subjects that they want to package together to make their degree rather than following a prescribed course. The difficulty with that is how do you know when students have done enough to equal a course? Harvard and other institutions invent this thing called university credit, where a certain amount of time equals a certain number of points, and a certain number of points equals enough to have a degree. Now, by around 1910, this is spread across the country and many institutions have adopted it as the kind of currency of academic learning. But then Carnegie come in behind it and back it. From that moment onwards, it becomes the official currency around the entire nation, and that means that students can transport those credits from one institution to the next. So, by the time 1926 happens, students in undergraduate institutions across America know that if they get credit at one institution, their own university will acknowledge and accept that credit, so they can transport it. The way these students find out about the Floating University is through a combination of advertising in the newspapers. Also, there’s a lot of connections into lecturers, and into professors, and to university principals and vice and chancellors and presidents who are then promoting the crews within their student body. It really has the backing, not only of NYU, but also of several institutions across the United States. I have to say though, there are some institutions who are skeptical of it. They are mostly East Coast elite Ivy League institutions who say things like, “our students are going to Europe anyway in the summer. We don’t need a cruise.”

AU: It’s always impressive how prestige can play a role in these things, even back in 1927. So before casting off, NYU decided to sever its ties with Lowe and the Floating University. Why did that happen? What did that mean for the voyage, specifically with the notion of what credit, if any, students would receive? Because if it’s not NYU, where’s the credit coming from?

TP: In looking through the New York University’s minute books, you see this contest playing out between on the one hand experience and all that Professor Lowe has offered the university and on the other hand, this new desire for status and particularly to have authority over knowledge through expertise. What kind of drives that initially is a scandal or a kind of sense that Professor Lowe in organizing his study abroad trips might have used a company of which he was the President to organize the visas and all the rest of it. So, the university was worried that there was this financial scandal at play in which Professor Lowe might have received some profit for an organization that the university was funding. Now in the end that was all exonerated. It did cause an investigation into who was doing the teaching on these travel abroad courses and in the floating university to who was offering who was delivering the knowledge? In the course of that, NYU realizes that it’s not their professors that have a dispensing authority, it’s all these people that work on Wall Street that don’t carry the authority of the university. It starts to really worry NYU on how can people trust our credits if they’re not being delivered by us? Where is our ownership lying? This causes a kind of crisis at the university and it leads to them completely abandoning the voyage and setting it on its own devices and they withdraw quietly because they don’t really want a scandal. They don’t want bad press. But what this means for the floating university and Professor Lowe, is that no longer is NYU offering credentials, rather it will be the students’ home institution. So, it will be up to the students to take their course guides, take their exam results and present them to their departments upon their return and say, “please issue me credit on the basis of this work that I’ve done” rather than just a simple process of transfer, it’s the students that then have to make an application.

AU: It sounds like the early years of Erasmus, actually. That’s the way that it worked there. So now, tell us about the trip. What did the students see in an eight-month cruise around the world? Where’d they go?

TP: What didn’t they see? They left New York, they sailed west, they went to 42 countries, which included Japan, Shanghai, China and the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines then an American colony, then after visiting India, all around Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, and then back across the Atlantic. They met world leaders like Gandhi and Mussolini, Pope, and King of Siam, and the Queen of Spain. They also undertook an official curriculum whilst they were on board. So, this meant while the ship was at sea, the students enrolled in anywhere between three and six subjects. They sat exams as they sailed across the Pacific, and they sat semester two exams as they sailed back home across the Atlantic. The idea with those courses was that it would be experience that the students gained whilst they were in the port that would then be repurposed when they came back on voyage and inform the kind of next stage of the course. This worked really well in some subjects, it worked less well in others where professors didn’t really put the time in. In biology, for example, students visited the botanic gardens in every port that they got, they often collected specimens and they brought them back on board to analyze before they moved on to the next stop. There was also a program of kind of extracurricular activities and often the students were hosted by institutions in the port and universities in the ports in which they stopped. There were lectures and they met local students but many of them also went AWOL did not attend those events and instead made up their own program, which was probably far more educational.  

AU: I love the stories about the students in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. I thought that would be very educational. I understand how the learning takes place in the ports that you’re actually seeing things and it’s experiential. How does it work onboard a heaving ship in heaving Pacific seas with limited library facilities? How much are they learning in the travel portions here? 

TP: It depends what you mean by learning. It also depends what subjects you’re talking about. I think some of the courses like classics, it looked very much like they would in a kind of land-based institution where students are reading over it and it’s not until they get to the ancient world that some of the experiential elements come into place. But for subjects like journalism, the students are running an onboard newspaper. So, this gets published every day that the ship is at sea. Students not only edit that newspaper, they write the articles, they also print it, and distribute it. It’s actually an incredible resource to learn and know about what happens while the ship is at sea, which otherwise might be a little bit of a black box. Let’s not pretend that experience is, it is as integrated as it otherwise, claimed to be, but I think there are some subjects that really embrace it and the design and the art course, for example, uses all aspects of the ship as a kind of laboratory in which students can observe, create, draw, make color, line, and the rest of it.

AU: One of the things I found most striking about this trip, and you alluded to it just a few seconds ago, was the extent to which the cruise organizers managed to get meetings for these pretty typical undergraduate students with important world leaders. You named some of them Gandhi, Mussolini, the Pope, the King of Siam. It’s amazing when you were going through the list of that. I know higher education was rarer and more stratified and carried more prestige back then, but still, this is an undergraduate class. How did they manage all that?

TP: It is astonishing, isn’t it? The voyage leaders try and get the official sponsorship of the State Department before they leave, and they don’t pull that off. But when they get to Hong Kong, they meet the United States Ambassador, and they meet the British Governor of Hong Kong. And it’s at that meeting that the that the American ambassador and one of his consuls is just seized by the idea behind the voyage. He writes to all of his colleagues in the ports that the ship will visit following. It’s that in combination with the personal connections of Henry Allen who is on board the voyage as a sort of teacher and leading the journalism program. He is the governor of Kansas and in the first world war, he played a really big role in the relief efforts and reconstruction efforts in Europe in 1919. It is through that work that he has remarkable connections across the world, including with people like Mussolini. The combination of that official advocacy on behalf of the state department, even though the state department back in Washington was not approving, but the consoles across the world were mobilized by their colleagues and then Henry Allen, that they managed to pull off these visits. And it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing that 21-year-old Americans, were able to shake Mussolini’s hand in 1927.

AU: I recognize this is an inevitably subjective judgment I’m going to ask you to make, but what do you think the educational impact of the trip was? As you said, a lot of students had a good time, but did they learn much? Did they get the credit? Was it accepted at their home universities? Not just did they learn, but did the learning count?

TP: What you’ve just listed are a series of different ways education can be measured. Some of them are in conflict with each other. I think it’s important to surface those and think explicitly about them. On the one hand, 75 percent of students completed their exams, and they got university credit. Their marks map onto a bell curve that is exactly like what you would see at a home institution. But the newspapers were completely unconvinced that this equated to learning because if students are having fun and then we’re alluding to some of the scandals that that beset the voyage and that were reported every day in the American newspapers, stories of drunkenness and skipping class and romance. Sex jazz and alcohol is really the kind of tagline for this trip in terms of the newspapers. They thought if students are having fun and going AWOL from their classes, then they can’t be learning. That’s not educational. So, as far as they were concerned, they didn’t learn anything. But then you ask the students, what did this voyage mean to you? And many of them say it was the most transformational experience of their entire life. The ship undertakes surveys of its of everybody on board and they all write back saying I’m so glad I went, and. So it’s another way to think about that is to then trace the careers of those students across the course of their life, can we make a connection between what they did later and the voyage? I think in many cases you absolutely can. Some students completely change the course of their careers, and they enroll in international relations programs and they become professors in international relations. Others of them go into the tourism and travel industry or get jobs in standard oil or newspapers through the very connections they made on board. Of course there are others for whom, it doesn’t necessarily leave an obvious mark, but who go and do things like build gardens in the middle of Centralia, Missouri, which replicate the places they saw on the voyage.

AU: The lesson’s a lesson. Tell me about how the experiment was judged in the U. S. at the time. It’s clear that the floating university didn’t herald a bright new dawn of experiential learning via travel. But I’m curious, how much of that was because the depression came along and more or less put paid to expensive educational luxuries? How much of it was because the universities as institutions closed ranks and abandoned the idea of experiential education altogether? If that happened, how much of that was because of this voyage?

TP: I think the depression is the nail in the coffin. In the 1920s – 1927, 1928 and 1929, before the Wall Street crash hits, the leaders of the Voyager are trying to relaunch this ship and run successor voyages and it never gets up. Part of the reason it never gets up is because the universities have like explicitly stepped away from it. Professor Lowe gets sacked immediately upon his return by NYU. The State Department launches an investigation into this voyage and concludes it’s just a trumped-up travel agency and the universities are writing to each other. Some of them are supportive and but at the tier down from the president, at the level of lecturers and professors, there’s a lot of clamor to be teach on board these voyages. Why not? It’s a great free trip around the world. At the executive level, they’re really skeptical of what this means and the threat that it means to their credentials. And NYU, in fact, abandons its entire study abroad program on the basis of this floating university and the risks, the educational, reputational, and financial risks that they think it poses to the business model that they’re rolling out. Instead, what they do is they set up courses in international relations that our students will pay fees for. They’ll be taught on campus about world politics and their professors can consult to any number of institutions, for additional funds as well.

AU: What do you think is the closest modern equivalent to the floating university? There are obviously some things which involve water, like semester at sea, but what about experiments like Minerva University, which explicitly try to bring people into different geographical domains each semester? Is that a good an analogy or are there others?

TP: Actually, I hadn’t thought of Minerva, but that is a that is a good example. I think the thing to think about with the floating university is it did aim to guide students around the world. It didn’t just let them loose. They ran loose in port cities, but the enterprise itself didn’t think that was where they would learn. What they thought was that they would learn in the classrooms and then they would be guided around a port city with a professor and that would provide experiential laboratory material, which then could be worked up, but all of it was under supervision in theory. In some senses it’s courses like the American campus experience, which is actually a more fit analogy for what for what the floating universities philosophy or actual organizational philosophy was. What actually happened was that students went loose and conducted their own independent learning in the bars and in the port cities and get lost and rode bikes across Hawaii. So, what the analogy for that is I don’t know, it might be gap year travel. I think most study abroad programs do have an element of oversight in them still.

AU: A large chunk of the rationale for international study, then as now, is simply that travel broadens horizons. But the question, then and now is how well these experiences line up with accreditable knowledge delivered through courses? More broadly, how easy is it to separate tourism for pleasure from exploration for knowledge? In the end what’s your assessment of how the Floating University integrated tourism into education? Are there lessons from this project that are still relevant to study abroad today?

TP: There is a fundamental tension between how universities claim authority over knowledge or how that is packaged up in their degree programs and the basis that you identified of study abroad, which says it’s experience in the world that will be your educational guide. There’s a fundamental tension between those things because experience will always be a threat to universities that claim to have monopoly over what counts as knowledge. So, what Study Abroad programs do is try and square that circle by having forms of oversight. As long as credit is being offered for experience, the university will want to be involved, not only because there’s a an educational question at stake like who owns knowledge. But there’s also a reputational question at stake like what do our degree programs mean? Are our students giving us a bad name? What does that mean for our market share? I think this, the next question we need to ask is, what does our world need? How is trust in universities to be secured? Is it only through the kind of insistence that it’s universities that have control over knowledge and it’s expertise and the technocratic elements that flow from that determine who gets to ask the questions and who gets to come up with the answers? Or do we need to think more broadly about how experience and experiencing what a university is can be built into the ways our institutions work? Because if we don’t do that, the gap between experience and expertise just widens. I think we’ve seen in the last 10 years, the consequences of that, and they’re pretty dire politically, but also intellectually. There were lots of interesting experiments that probably don’t get enough airtime that are seeking to bring those things back together. Study abroad in some ways is of one of them, but more have in mind the kinds of community engagement work in which universities open their canvas campuses up to people from the community to use services so that community members just have an understanding, an experiential understanding, that it’s a place for them as well as for students that are paying lots of money.

AU: Tamson, thank you for joining us today. And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek and of course you our listeners for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please drop us a line at podcast at higher ed strategy dot com. Join us next week when our guest really will be Isak Froumin, Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovation at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, and we will be talking about higher education and research in post-Soviet space. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.