When a unique university on a ship sailed up to India for ‘cultural immersion'

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In January 1927, a large contingent of American students from the Floating University travelled by train from Bombay to Agra, a journey of two nights and one day, to see the Taj Mahal. When Dewitt Reddick, a 23-year-old newly-minted journalism graduate, got his first glimpse of the Mughal monument, he said it was 'gleaming in the morning sun...like a dream palace from the Arabian Nights'.
A few hours later, 'under the hot rays of the sun, the building was sparkling, shining like a cold sun with a glistening marble surface,' Reddick wrote in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The mausoleum clearly left the young man, as it has it so many others, awestruck. He concluded his gushing write-up, saying, 'Silently white at night, coldly white even in the blazing sun of India's noon, the Taj Mahal stands in faraway central India, a thing of grace and beauty, symbolic of the spirit of India.'
Reddick was one of nearly 500 students of the Floating University – a unique educational experiment on a cruise ship that aimed to provide pupils with 'experiential learning through travel and cultural immersion' while imparting 'traditional classroom learning'.
Over nine months from September 1926 to May 1927, the ship wended its way around the world, stopping at 42 ports, visiting iconic sites like the Taj Mahal and the Acropolis. The most detailed account of it appears in Australian academic Tamson Pietsch's 2023 book The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledge.
Pietsch discovered the university by accident when she came across a two-page pamphlet in a book. The advertisement promised that the university would help students 'develop the ability to think in world terms…through first hand contact with places, people and problems'.
Apart from a chance to experience lands far and beyond, the Floating University offered academic credits just like any land-bound university. Over 70 subjects were taught and tested on, including psychology, mathematics, history, languages (French, Spanish and German), and journalism (at least three publications were produced on board).
A Holland American liner, named SS Ryndam, was enlisted for the experiment. As many as 306 young men and 57 young women, all recent graduates, signed up. Joining them on board were 133 adults, who were combining travel with education, as well as 63 faculty and staff from major American universities. The ship's crew was mainly Dutch and spoke little English.
Experiential learning
It puzzled Pietsch that, soon after the experiment, its story vanished from academic and popular discourse, though-study abroad semesters are still offered as part of degree programmes in the United States. Given the controversy surrounding the Floating University and its founder, Professor James Edwin Lough, shouldn't the buzz have lasted longer?
James Edwin Lough was born in 1871 in Eaton, Ohio. He studied at Miami University in Ohio and taught at schools in Eaton and Stockton before joining Harvard University for a doctorate in psychology. Among his teachers at Harvard were William James and John Dewey, both educationists and philosophers who profoundly influenced Lough. From James, Lough imbibed the belief in educational psychology and pragmatism, and from Dewey, he learned to have faith in democracy and building public opinion with free exchange of ideas.
Lough married Dora Bailey, a Massachusetts native, and moved permanently to the East Coast, joining New York University's school of pedagogy as professor of psychology.
His initial experiments focused on getting professionals to teach students. It was only after World War I, a time when America's influence was growing in the world, that Lough conceived the Floating University. In his imagination it was to be a chance for students to spend a year abroad, exploring different lands and cultures for hands-on, experiential learning.
To turn this dream into reality, Lough assembled an impressive team. Dr Charles Thwing of Case Reserve Western University in Ohio became the university president. Albert Heckel, George E Howes, William Haigh, Daniel Chase and Walter Harris served as deans. Henry Allen, the former Kansas governor and newspaper baron, oversaw the publishing of the daily four-page student magazine The Binnacle. And writer-illustrator Holling C Holling supervised the arts magazine The Student-Magellan.
For reasons known to him, Lough did not disclose that he was the president of the company overseeing the visa and travel arrangements. When this conflict became public, it drew criticism and ultimately led to the withdrawal of New York University's sponsorship of the voyage. As Pietsch notes, objections stemmed over the control over knowledge and the authority to dispense it.
Uninformed ideas
SS Ryndam set off on September 18, 1926, moving south from New York to Cuba and Panama, then travelling west to Los Angeles, and then sailing across the Pacific towards Asia. Three months later, following visits to Hawaii, Japan, China, Manila, Siam and Ceylon, the ship docked at Bombay.
Accompanying Lough on the voyage were his wife and four children. His 12-year-old daughter Dorothea or Betty, the youngest in the family, was the university mascot, the 'girl geographer' on board. His eldest son Edwin, meanwhile, was documenting the trip in the Floating University, a magazine produced on board. Edwin wrote specifically about their India visit in the newspaper Brooklyn Eagle.
Agra was a highlight of the trip – the first time, Lough wrote, such a large group had visited the Taj Mahal. Equally memorable was a hunting trip that yielded an unexpected kill, a jackal.
A few students made an out-of-the-way trip, several hundred kilometres east of Bombay, to Wardha, where the 'saviour of India', Mahatma Gandhi, had his ashram. In the eyes of those students, Gandhi's importance as a world figure was only as much as the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who had kept communists in check in Italy. When they saw him in Wardha, they were not impressed.
He sat 'Buddha-fashion on a dais, wearing a dirty loin cloth, a shawl and a cheap nickel watch on a white cord suspended from his throat'. Opinions changed when they saw the reverence the Mahatma received: 'People dropped to their knees and many kissed the hem of his shawl.'
The students who saw Gandhi compared notes with another group that had gone to meet the Maharaja of Baroda Sayajirao Gaekwad, 'a reformer who had made education compulsory in his province'. 'Gandhi's method was in general to oppose modern civilization while the Maharaja, in his own words, believed in 'keeping up with changes in the world',' Edwin wrote.
In the pages of the magazine Floating University, the students recorded other observations and opinions. Bombay was 'in many ways the finest city in the Far East,' wrote James Andrews. 'Somewhat westernized architecturally and civically, it was still essentially Indian. On the streets were all kinds of people wearing all kinds of headgear and clothing.'
Florence Stauffer, one of the few women students, wrote blithely: 'We had quite a time about our 'caste'. Fearing that we might do something to lower it, we were considerably exercised. Virginia had read somewhere that no members of the upper caste ever lifted their hands to do anything for themselves, a regime to which we took like ducks take to water.'
For all the novelty of the experiment, the Floating University generated considerable bad press. Several newspapers reported on the expulsion of some students for drunken behaviour at the Hotel Imperial in Tokyo. The presence of young women, it was reported, encouraged romances, scandalising many readers. The New York University suspended Lough from all teaching duties citing irregularities. After a legal settlement, Lough moved to Texas, where, as president of the University Travel Association, he continued to arrange educational tours. He died in 1952.
The Floating University remained a unique endeavour. When a similar Semester at Sea programme was founded in 1963, on its board was James Price – one of the students of the Floating University.