FloatingU Media Roundup

I was pretty thrilled that The Floating University was named one of the books of the year by History Today this week.

I’ve done a bunch of talks lately too, many of which are now up online. So I thought I’d do a bit of a roundup here of the links that I have.

Sincere thanks to everyone who has engaged with the book. As anyone who has written a manuscript will know, it’s completely surreal to have this thing that you have worked on for such a long time out there being read by other humans. I love that voices of Charles Ladd and Holling C. Holling and Lillian McCracken are now in other people’s heads as well as mine!

Of course the greatest recognition of all is that the book has now been pirated. Lib.gen you are too kind.

Recognitions

• Higher Ed Book of the Year (joint), Higher Education Strategy Associates – Dec 2023
• History Today, Books of the year – Dec 2023
• Sydney Morning Herald, Picks of the week – 5 Oct 2023

Talks available online

• The World of Higher Education podcast, 23 Nov 2023
• NYU Arts and Social Sciences Book Talk, 10 Nov 2023
• Eastside FM Between or Beyond, on the Floating University’s Jazz group, the Globetrotters – 7 Nov 2023
• New Books Network podcast – 5 Nov 2023
• Stanford & Trinity College, Academic Innovation for the Public Good series – 11 Oct 2023
• Late Night Live with Phillip Adams – 27 Sept 2023
• History of Universities Seminar, Knowing the World in the 1920s  – 5 July 2023

Press

• Psychology professor James Edwin Lough’s ‘floating university’ experiment to link education with experience, ABC RN, 22 Dec 2023.
• Was the 1926 Floating University a Failure? History Today, Dec 2023
• The forgotten ‘floating university’ comes back to life ($) The Australian Newspaper, 20 Sept 2023
• All Aboard The Ship of Self Improvement, The Critic, Aug/Sept 2023
• What is a University? Inside Story, 19 July 2023
• The Students Who Went to Sea, Literary Review, July 2023
• Author’s Corner with Tamson Pietsch, Way of Improvement Blog, June 9, 2023
• An unusual study abroad experience brought 500 students all over the world, Inside Higher Ed, 27 April 2023

Scholarly reviews

• Qing Liu. Tamson Pietsch. The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923. 320 pp. History of Education Quarterly. (2024) 64(1):108-110. doi:10.1017/heq.2023.47
• Stephen Tuffnell. The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge. By Tamson Pietsch. British Journal of Educational Studies (2023), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071005.2023.2281147

The Floating University sets sail

I’ve been talking about the antics of these interwar Americans for some time now – following them down archival rabbit holes and port city back alleys, and trying to piece together what happened in 1926 on that ship, and why it matters to us today.  It’s been ten years in the making, but my book on the Floating University is finally here!

The book tells the story of the 1926 Floating University: a bold educational experiment in which 500 American college students sailed around the globe in the belief that learning at sea would make them better citizens of the world. As well as a full curriculum, the voyage included visits to foreign dignitaries including Mussolini, Gandhi and the Pope, and stops in 47 ports. But the trip was also beset by trouble: reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. It explores this largely forgotten voyage and argues that – as well as revealing the tentacles of US empire – it 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.

The introduction and table of contents are available here, and (everyone’s favourite) the acknowledgements are attached below. Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way, and especial thanks to my partner Ruth and my daughter Vita – the cutest book mascot I could ever dream of. I submitted the manuscript the day before she was born and every day since I have thought my heart might explode.

A 40% discount is available from the University of Chicago Press website when you enter the code FLOATING.

If you want to know more, there’s an early Q&A with me about the book in Inside Higher Ed or please get in touch with me directly.

Pietsch-FloatingU-AcknowledgementsDownload

A history of university income in the UK and Australia

I have an article out on the sources of university income in the UK and Australia across the 20th century. To tempt you to read it, I’m going to try my hand at a twitter thread (which I have mostly just cut and pasted here!) @EmeraldGlobal https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2020-0040 (1/13)

[You can read the free-to-access pre-print version of this article here]

Where does funding for universities come from? How has this changed across the 20th century? How do patterns in Australia and the UK compare? These seem pretty important questions right now for lots of reasons @HistEdSocUK @ANZHistEdSoc #auspol (2/13)

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  Photo Credit : Howard Stanbury – plaque commemorating Cecil Rhodes in King Edward Street, Oxford

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  Senator Jacqui Lambie’s speech in Parliament, opposing changes to student fees

But answering them is hard because there is no official time series data on university income in Australia that is comparable with Vincent Carpentier’s quite brilliant UK study. @ResearchCGHE (3/13)

Vincent Carpentier (2004), “Historical statistics on the funding and development of the UK university system, 1920-2002. [Data collection]”, UK Data Service. SN:4971

Problem is: data + politics. Availability & quality reflects different periods of university governance. As @andrewjnorton says, “different historical data sources do not always match”. The 1970s & 80s in particular are a bit of a mystery (4/13)

But surely it’s possible to do better than this 2014 effort from the @Go8 ??? (5/13)

From the Group of Eight’s submission to the 2014 Senate Standing Committee on Education and Employment

So I trawled the CTEC reports and Yearbooks and other sources to create (with lots of data caveats) a comparable series for Australia and updated Carpentier’s series as well. What does it show??? (6/13)

Australian universities’ income from all sources since 1922 reveals three distinct periods: mixed 1922-1947; government-led 1952-1987; cost-sharing incl. international students 1992-2017. (7/13)

Similar patterns are evident in the UK, but there domestic student fees have come to make up much greater percentage of income (as it is likely too in Australia post Tehan reforms) (8/13)

Grouping these categories to show universities’ “private” income (ie international student fees & private income such as investments) makes these patterns even clearer for Australia. (9/13)

And the UK shows how domestic student fees have been used as a substitute for govt support. The % revenue universities’ receive from public sources is at its lowest since WW1 (for more graphs see the article!) (10/13)

So what? Do these graphs point to the end of the public as an organising principle of our political, economic & institutional life? (pace @James11Vernon) https://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/the-end-of-the-public-university-in-england (11/13)

Comparison w the UK was crucial to the foundation of @uniaus argue @ejwaghorne & @Gwil_C – Given the challenges of covid + climate, perhaps now the time to make new comparisons about the way #highered has and can be funded? https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2020-0040 (12/13)

Photo credit: Ali Amin @NUS_Welfare – South Australian students holding a snap protest outside office of @Stirling_G

For the full article see T. Pietsch, ‘A history of university income in the United Kingdom and Australia, 1922-2017’, History of Education Review (2020) 49:2, 229-248 https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2020-0040. The free-to-access pre-print version is here. (13/13)