On the morning of 6 November 1926, readers of the Detroit Free Press woke to sensational front-page headlines: ‘Sea Collegians Startle Japan with Rum Orgy.’ ‘More than a hundred students, among whom six girls were to be noticed, were doing intensive laboratory work this evening, in the bar of the Imperial Hotel’, continued the article. American newspaper correspondents, it later turned out, had themselves been at the bar of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo when the students flooded in, having climbed down the sides of their recently docked ship and snuck onto shore. Knowing promising copy when they saw it, the correspondents fed the story back to the United States, where it quickly appeared in newspapers across the country.

The students in question were members of the Floating University, an American educational experiment that in 1926 took nearly 500 students on an eight-month cruise around the world. The leaders of the voyage believed that travel and study at sea would deliver an education in international affairs not available in the land-based classroom. Rather than passive, indirect learning via textbooks and lectures, first-hand experience of places and people abroad would teach students to be ‘world-minded’.

While the ship was at sea, the students enrolled in formal classes, choosing from over 73 subjects including economics, mathematics, classics, psychology, public speaking and foreign languages. Although some professors were more organised than others, the best among them linked their curriculum to the experiences students were having while on shore: the botany students visited botanical gardens, the journalism students gathered material for stories that were published in the ship’s newspaper and the art students sketched materials they would later develop and analyse. Undoubtedly a good number of students did not attend to their studies, but they were, in the opinion of the Floating University’s academic dean, no doubt also negligent in their studies at home.

As the Floating University made its way around the globe, however, divisions soon surfaced that revealed tensions inherent in the project: was there a difference between students and tourists? How much latitude should students be given to ‘experiment’ onshore? What constituted an education? After long stretches at sea, the students chaffed at the formal receptions and lectures organised by their hosts and longed to investigate cities on their own. Mobilising the cruise’s own distinction between direct experience and book learning, many argued that unchaperoned exploration provided the very education that the Floating University had promised them. Having fun, by this logic, was not in opposition to cultural engagement and international education. Rather, it was a means to achieving it.

The flamboyant antics of college students were a familiar trope of interwar popular culture. Historian David Levine has argued that by the end of the 1920s going to college had become part of a ‘culture of aspiration’, to the extent that youthful transgressions were a desirable part of networking and social mobility. As Ellwood Griscome, the Floating University’s Public Speaking lecturer, put it: ‘The student of a floating college is at heart essentially similar to one on land’, and their stunts are ‘not unlike those occurring daily on many an American campus’. Yet these students were not attending a land-based American campus. They were enrolled in a travelling ‘educational experiment’ that had been launched with great fanfare and much controversy. Moreover, the scheme made claims to pseudo-diplomatic status. The students were received by American ambassadors along its route and introduced to leaders including the king of Siam, Pope Pius XI and Mussolini.

Questions about educational legitimacy therefore became acute when the students’ behaviour in port attracted the attention – and judgement – of the US and foreign press who had a nose for scandal. It took a few weeks for the really juicy details of what had happened in Japan to emerge. Not only had students snuck overboard and gone drinking, but a group also drank the sake offerings from shrines along the route to Nikko, carried off an image of the Buddha from a temple, and ‘engaged in a free-for-all fight with Tokio [sic] policemen’. The American ambassador declared that ‘the vandalism had done more to hurt the relations between the two countries than anything that had happened for fifteen years’ and threatened to cancel the whole trip. Soon American newspapers were citing the students’ unruly behaviour as evidence of the cruise’s educational failure. And that, for the most part, is how the Floating University has been remembered: a demonstration of all that could go wrong with educational travel.

Today study abroad is an established feature of university education. In 2018 one in ten US undergraduates spent time abroad at some point during their degree. In the UK in 2017 it was one in 13. In Australia in 2018 it was one in four. Anyone who has undertaken one of these programmes will know that they are subject to many of the same questions that attended the Floating University’s 1926 voyage. For example, recent studies have shown that American students studying abroad greatly increase their risk-taking behaviour. Yet the transformative benefits of international education are also well established, and those who have participated in it frequently describe it as a life-changing experience.

The students on the 1926 Floating University were no different. Brewster Bingham, a young man from Connecticut, described the cruise as having ‘had a great awakening effect’: ‘I sometimes felt as if I had always been dreaming before, and that here, for the first time, the realities of life were being presented before me.’ (Although exactly what Bingham and his fellow students learnt about the world during those eight months is a different story.) Does this mean that, despite its difficulties, the Floating University should be seen not as a failure but as a success? A pioneering example of an idea whose time has now come?

The story of the Floating University should make us question what constitutes an education. Study abroad programmes are founded on the recognition that immersion in a place, encounters with other people, and practical engagement in and with the world can offer students something that study at home cannot. No matter how regulated or organised it is, educational travel will always sit in tension with the university’s claim to be the institution which has ultimate authority over knowledge.

Tamson Pietsch is Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Director of the Australian Centre for Public History and the author of The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2023).