The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledge by Tamson Pietsch

In 1926 more than three hundred overprivileged American students travelled around the world on a hastily converted troopship, led by a recently sacked university professor determined to prove that travel could be as educational as any university course. What could possibly go wrong?

You are invited to (metaphorically) smash a bottle of champagne across the bow of Tamson Pietsch's new book, The Floating University, as it sets sail in 2023 into Australian waters. Come for the interwar highjinks and chloroformed marmosets, and enjoy a dash of epistemology on the side.

Event Details

5.30 arrival

5.45 panel discussion

6.15 drinks and canapés.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase on the night.

Directions

UTS is located on Broadway, a short walk from Central Station. Enter Building 10 via 235 Jones Street and take the lifts to Level 7. There is a car park under Building 10 which you can enter via Thomas Street.

About the book

In 1926, New York University professor James E. Lough—an educational reformer with big dreams—embarked on a bold experiment he called the Floating University. Lough believed that taking five hundred American college students around the globe by ship would not only make them better citizens of the world but would demonstrate a model for responsible and productive education amid the unprecedented dangers, new technologies, and social upheavals of the post–World War I world. But the Floating University’s maiden voyage was also its last: when the ship and its passengers returned home, the project was branded a failure—the antics of students in hotel bars and port city back alleys that received worldwide press coverage were judged incompatible with educational attainment, and Lough was fired and even put under investigation by the State Department.

In The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago, 2023) Tamson Pietsch excavates a rich and meaningful picture of Lough’s grand ambition, its origins, and how it reveals an early-twentieth-century America increasingly defined both by its imperialism and the professionalization of its higher education system. As Pietsch argues, this voyage—powered by an internationalist worldview—traced the expanding tentacles of US power, even as it tried to model a new kind of experiential education. She shows that this apparent educational failure actually exposes a much larger contest over what kind of knowledge should underpin university authority, one in which direct personal experience came into conflict with academic expertise. After a journey that included stops at nearly fifty international ports and visits with figures ranging from Mussolini to Gandhi, what the students aboard the Floating University brought home was not so much knowledge of the greater world as a demonstration of their nation’s rapidly growing imperial power.

Swimming pool aboard the Floating University, published in Walter Harris, Photographs of the first University World Cruise