Tamson Pietsch on The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge
Tamson Pietsch, associate professor in social and political sciences and director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, discussed her book, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge, with Eve Duffy, associate vice provost for global affairs at Duke University. Their conversation took place October 11, 2023, as part of the Academic Innovation for the Public Good book series. Here are the video and transcript of the event.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited; introductory and closing remarks from the live event have been removed.
EVE DUFFY: Tamson, thank you so much for writing this book. I hope that the audience members have read it. Not only is it amazingly scholarly, it's also incredibly good fun. So I hope we get to talk about some of the fun in this conversation. You were saying just as we were setting up, something that I want to pick up on about how the book talks about American politics in the world and the history of higher education.
And then maybe also, I could add — and the history of knowledge, right, and who gets to define authority. And that's, Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge, there are your three themes. Can you talk about those three themes, and how you see them balanced in the book?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, sure. I actually come from a background in which my first book was on the history of universities in the British settler empire. So, empire is sort of in my training. And when I came to this story, it seemed — and the history of knowledge and empire is in my training. So, when I came to this story, which on the surface is a sort of sex, drugs, and jazz, it's a fun thing to think with.
But those themes emerged very — it was always playing at the back of my mind. Like, where are the power relations here? What kind of structures and systems enabled these people to encounter the world? And what world do they encounter? And what produces that world? And how is the experiences and undertaking itself productive of structures of power? So, those were sort of questions that I always brought to this scholarship, this story, understanding the story. And, of course, I also was interested in the world of higher education and its changes in the 20th century.
So, I guess one of my stated, but hidden agendas here, is to bring the scholarship of higher education, particularly about knowledge more generally, into the center of political and economic and social history in the 20th century. I think, too often, history of higher education happens in a kind of sub-field, which is at the edge of history departments. And I think that's a real mistake because knowledge is so central to the 20th century. And we need to really place universities, but also the history of knowledge, in the center of our history, big histories of capitalism, empire, power in the 20th century.
EVE DUFFY: Wow, OK, you've thrown down the gauntlet now. I'll come back to that. So, I'm a historian by training. And one of the things that I was utterly fascinated by were your sources, and where they were located, and the lengths that you went to tell the story through the sources. How did you learn about this story? And how did you build the story from the sources that you then had at hand?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Well, thank you. Yeah, look, it took 10 years to write this book.
EVE DUFFY: Oh, my gosh.
TAMSON PIETSCH: And I've got a whole manuscript that looks quite different to this one. So it was a process. And I came across this story because, in some ways, this is a story that has been, I won't say forgotten, necessarily. But it's certainly been marginalized and sidelined. And so, how do you even come across a story like that?
And I have a little note in the book that, it was actually a pamphlet in the back. I was researching a completely different project. And someone, in 1927, had slipped a pamphlet advertising the cruise in the back of a book, which I was consulting in the library in Michigan, actually. And it just stuck in my mind. I thought, what is this? And I did a bit of googling. And various kinds of versions of the story of a floating university popped up on the internet.
And then I plugged it into a digital newspaper database. And it went, ooh! And then yet more versions of it, they just seemed to be — because advertising this voyage in the newspaper was very important to both generating and launching this first voyage, but also to the attempts to launch subsequent voyages. It seems there were floating universities every year in the interwar period. And so it took a long while to make sense of that.
And I have to say that the advent of digital sources, digital databases, not necessarily digitization, but the ability to search library catalogs and to search personal papers online made a massive difference. So, I was able to use various kind of search terms in digital databases to find personal papers, which were the biggest source. I also found the remaining archives of the voyage. University archives were very important. State Department records in National Archives in the US were very important, and then newspaper sources as well.
There was a newspaper published on board the ship that I managed to get a complete copy of. So that was 200 copies published every day at sea, and also, newspapers that covered the voyage in the ports in which it docked. And I even found this remarkable oral history of one of the laundrymen that worked aboard the ship. So it was a really lovely adventure, really, finding all these things. And trying to triangulate them together was the kind of difficult process, and nut out what story to tell.
EVE DUFFY: Well, it comes out in the book, that you — and you don't necessarily tell it chronologically, right? Like, you talk about different things, through different lenses. So I find that really interesting. So, here's this guy, James Lough. He's got this crazy idea. Tell us what it is and what he wants to do.
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, so, James Lough, I guess, in after 1902 or '01, when he is appointed as professor of psychology at New York University, specializing in educational and experimental psychology — I don't know if people are interested in his back story. But I think his back story is quite important. And I'll come to it in a minute after explaining his idea, I think, because he, after having done a PhD in Harvard under William James and Hugo Munsterberg, he grows interested when he's got this massive teaching load. He takes his research agenda and translates it into the classroom.
And he's interested in setting up experiential forms of learning through the New York University Extension Division. And the Extension Division offers university credit beyond the walls, extramural, beyond the walls of the university. And so, what Lough does through this division is run courses in places like City Hall, the Grand Central Station, Wall Street. He sets up the first kind of commercial and commerce courses and business courses on-site in Wall Street, taught not by university professors, but by practitioners from those vocational, professional, emerging professional fields.
And later, we can probably see this, we should see this, I think, as part of the process of disciplinarization and the professionalization of whole domains of knowledge that are being brought into the university. But in this period in the decade before the First World War, these courses become hugely important in New York University's financial health, really. And the field of education is a big one of them. So, he's teaching teachers.
And he's training teachers through what becomes the School of Education, but is initially the School of Pedagogy. So this is his method, to teach, to have students learn. And they're not necessarily undergrad. They're not necessarily conventional students. They're not 19-year-olds coming out of high school. They're people learning, getting university credentials on the job, basically. And he translates this in 1913 and '14 to travel courses to Europe.
And these, I think, are really important and have been completely ignored in American higher education historiography, as the very first study abroad courses in which academic credit from American institutions is given for travel, for study abroad. And now, of course, 1914 is not a very fabulous time to be in Europe. And so, after the war, it takes a few years for these to relaunch. And they do. And then, in the early sort of 20s and 1924, '25, the around the world cruises kick off.
So, the first around the world cruise leaves America in 1923. And I can talk about shipping endlessly, if you like. But it's that, I think, that really gives Lough the idea that, why not a whole year at sea? If you can do a travel year, and if you can get credit in a municipal building, why don't we take students around the world and enable them to have a whole academic year at sea, and in the process, learn international relations whilst studying biology, and English, and whatever else they like.
You can be citizens of the world, learn to be citizens of the world, to be world-minded, a concept in great currency at that period, Nicholas Murray Butler's concept, through experience. And I was going to say, sorry, at the start, why I think his background is important, because, later, the floating universities really — and maybe we'll come to this. I'm not doing a spoiler alert. It's completely ridiculed as a failure. It's cast out to the heap of folklore and idealism by American universities.
But it has really serious intellectual roots in American pragmatism. And it is a mistake, I think, to follow the contemporaries from the late 1920s and 30s and dismiss it. Professor Lough, as I said, was supervised by William James and Hugo Munsterberg. He's very influenced by William James and John Dewey's work on experience and habit. And there's actually a book he jointly authored in 1926, which provides a real intellectual grounding for the philosophy behind the floating university.
And I think that is initially how it is understood and accepted by his colleagues. And the university lends it its official sponsorship. So it begins as this recognized, socially endorsed "experiment," quote unquote, of which there are many experiments taking place at the time in higher education, as universities try and work out what education looks like in the wake of the demise of the prescribed classical curriculum. That sort of question is still at play.
EVE DUFFY: Very helpful. So, I want to dig a little deeper on the experiential piece because study abroad is experiential, right? If you go to another country, you can experience its culture, its history, its life. But for Lough, experiential meant something extremely particular onboard the ship. And you already talked about the newspapers as kind of an exemplar of this experience. Can you talk about the ways in which the education itself was uniquely experiential?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yes, thank you for that question. And that's part of the kind of intellectual legacy, I think, of Dewey and James, that by doing things in and with the world, this is a quote from John Dewey, School and Society. By doing things in and with the world, that is how students learn. And Dewey has a whole series of publications that develop this idea.
And it's that notion that Professor Lough wants to enact, not only on the floating university, but also in his courses through the extramural division at NYU, not through book learning, but through direct encounter with the environment — will students best learn. And so, the subjects and the courses — and there are 73 or 72 subjects offered on board that students can enroll in. The most successful of those, now, of course, some professors are not as diligent as others in their curriculum, but the most successful of those classes seek to implement that philosophy into the forms of education on board the ship.
So, the journalism students — and journalism is a new subject in America, an emerging subject in American universities in the early 1920s and the first decade of the 20th century, excuse me. They actually run a newspaper. That's how they're gaining their credit, by, when the ship docks, they go off, and they interview all sorts of people. And they write articles. And onboard the ship, they go down to the bowels of the ship and interview the colliers, and the chef, and the pursers.
And that newspaper becomes a very important source for me. And they manage the type and the printing. And they buy a press that can deal with the rocking of the boat. And so, that's one example. I guess another comes from the botany class, who go at every port that the ship stops. They visit the Botanic Gardens. And then they gather material, quote unquote. Sometimes, it's actual material. But that they come back, and then analyze on board the ship as it sails on to the next port.
So, the idea is that experiential learning is built into the curriculum on board the ship. And, of course, there's a sort of extra curriculum as well, which includes all sorts of — the jazz band, and the glee society. But every time — I mean, ideally, I guess, the archetypal visit involves a visit to the local university and various kinds of official lectures delivered by educationalists from the host port, and also visits to civic and national, in some cases, leaders, in the ports in which they dock.
And in some cases through Southeast Asia, really substantial welcoming committees are formed. And in China and in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and to a different extent in Java, in the Dutch East Indies, and Japan — Japan, English-speaking students, Japanese and Chinese students, are assigned to the voyage. They sleep on the boat. And they escort the students around the city. So there's a real attempt, I think, at engaging with the limitations upon that notion of encounter with local elites and local communities.
EVE DUFFY: And just to throw out some of the people that they met, Mussolini, Gandhi. I mean, this was not just the local policeman in some port city. These were quite worldwide figures. And again, this goes back to that first comment. This is also about American diplomacy and asserting American power. So let's switch over to empire now and talk about, how is this ship basically served and aided by empire? And then, how do the students themselves go on to become agents of empire? I'm kind of jumping ahead to the assessment piece. But it's quite fascinating.
TAMSON PIETSCH: I'll just remember that. Remind me of the second part of the question —
EVE DUFFY: I will.
TAMSON PIETSCH: — before I get too excited by the first. Yes, I mean, the ship, I guess I have a little line there somewhere. If the idea of this venture is that students learn about the world, I think we have to ask, what world are they learning to meet? What world are they meeting? And the world that they meet is produced at every turn by the expanding tentacles of US power, and also by the legacies of European empires, the coattails along which the ship sails.
So I think it's probably important at this point to talk about the route that the voyage takes. The ship leaves New York. And it sails south via Havana. And then it goes through the relatively recently-opened Panama Canal, around the bottom, to Los Angeles, and then across to Hawaii, which is, at that point, agitating for statehood, well, not yet. But the beginnings of that movement are developing.
And then it goes to Japan, China, Hong Kong, down through Southeast Asia, to Java, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines colony, American colony, and then up to India and Sri Lanka, Ceylon, through the Suez Canal via Aden and Egypt, and around the Mediterranean, southern Mediterranean. It dock, actually, in the Algiers, which is interesting. It takes in the French empire, as well. And up around Spain and Portugal, northern Europe, so, Paris, Germany, and then up to Scandinavia, and across to Scotland.
Its final stop is then in England, in London. And it then goes across the Atlantic and returns to New York. And I think that route is very important because before the students meet the world, they experience, they discover, really, for many of them, the United States. And it's not necessarily — I mean, many of the students have never left their home state before. And we must say, I know you probably have a question coming on this, that this is a white-only voyage.
It's a very deliberately segregated voyage. And not only are the students white — and racial exclusion is a part of the selection criteria. Not only are the students white, so are the crew. And that is really, actually, unusual at this time. It's a Dutch crew, not an American one. And anyway, so the students discover continental and imperial America. And they go to Havana and Panama before they even meet Los Angeles.
But Los Angeles is understood by them as really part of an expanding continental empire that then extends across the Pacific to Hawaii, and eventually to the Philippines. So the students learn America. They learn the United States, and the expanding United States, and its technocratic kind of tools for expansion, before they hit the world. And then they encounter Japan, which is its own expanding empire at this period.
And then they get the British Empire, and then the American — well, they get to Shanghai, which is a kind of international, commercial trading port, another version of international capitalist empire. They get Hong Kong, a much older British version, and the Philippines. And then they get the Dutch. And so, imperial comparison is very much at the forefront of the students' understanding of themselves, but so, too, are the commercial — the expanding tentacles of America's commercial empire, rubber plantations, the kind of huge business enterprises that are going on in places like Panama, the technical engineering works going on in Panama, in Los Angeles, transforming the environment, irrigation, harbor dredging, and, of course, the Philippines, and also moral empire.
This is the YMCA, its missions, its educational networks of many of these places where students have come — students from China and Japan have studied in the US and are now back in Japan at universities. And so, really, wherever the students go — and I must say, also, they are learning from the British. So, they're reading Rudyard Kipling. They're reading Alfred Northcliffe, who has published a book on his own world tour only a few years before. These are the sorts of guides. They're dressing in white pith helmets. Like, they are learning how to think about the world through the eyes of British imperialists.
And so, the world that they encounter is one shaped — it's not, like, an authentic Japan, or a Shanghai that they meet. It's one shaped by these kinds of tentacles of power. And one example of that is, I learnt, actually because there was a Japanese ship that is traveling much of the same route. And it arrives in these ports a few days before the floating university does.
And it's from one of the passengers on that ship that I learned that local shopkeepers put their prices up by 30% before the floating university arrived, eager, to take advantage of these credulous Americans. And I think that's a very good example of how the kinds of cities that these students encounter are themselves — well, they have agency. They're shaping themselves to take advantage of those Americans. But they're also produced. They're produced by these structures of power.
EVE DUFFY: So, I'm going to hold off on agents of empire because I do want to get to the scandalous nature, because you talk about how, really, the way that the journey could be legitimized was by its reputation, ultimately, right, that it had to have the reputation of being a serious intellectual undertaking. And that kind of went belly up. Can you talk about how?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Well, I guess there were two ways that it set out to legitimize itself. One was through university sponsorship. And I'm not going to go into the fascinating world of academic credits. But I do in the book. But the university of, NYU pulled out only a few months before the voyage departed. And so, that removed this kind of educational endorsement. And so, the leaders of the voyage turned to the press for public approval and opinion, and also because they needed to drum up support and get enrollments.
And on the one hand, that succeeded. It got huge coverage in the press before its departure, and huge coverage as it left. But the consequence of that, the press were very interested in this voyage. The American press were very interested in this voyage. And it came at a time when the US newspapers had been sort of consolidated into various national conglomerates.
So, what really was catnip for these newspapers was a big national story about celebrity, or sport, or scandal, which could have a local angle. And this provided that in spades because there were students from every state on the ship. So you could have a nice little local angle on a story that was otherwise collectively being circulated around the wire networks. And what that scandal eventually looked like was students doing what students do.
And it was Prohibition. And the students are very excited to encounter alcohol. There are many, many episodes of drunkenness, some of which are quite serious, particularly those in Japan, where students do things like, well, the ship arrives in the evening. And the leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decide not to let students who have been on board a ship for 10 days off. And so, 70 of them scale the sides at night and head straight to the local bar, where American newspaper reporters are also holed up.
And they get very drunk. And then there's fights with policemen. They break into the Imperial Hotel. Some of them get arrested. I think even more egregious is the trip the next day to Nico, where, along the railway line, there are shrines with saki offerings. And the students drink the saki offerings and arrive drunk at Nico, at a sacred place, really. And the American ambassador describes this as the greatest diplomatic incident that has befallen the relationship between America and Japan in the last 15 years.
So, that's one version of scandal. And that question of alcohol continues throughout the voyage. And American newspaper correspondents are sending messages back to the American press. And it splashes across the American press over and over again. But there's also a question of gender relations and romance, and sex on board versus sex off board.
And newspapers would speculate about how many engagements there are, quote unquote, aboard the vessel. And there's also other sorts of difficulties that emerge. There's a rumor of that the bubonic plague breaks out on board the ship. So it sort of becomes packaged very quickly — or not very quickly. But after Japan, in America, the ship acquires a reputation as a scandal, as a scandalous voyage where students are misbehaving.
And if students are misbehaving, quote unquote, if they are experimenting in the bars in the port cities — and, of course, the other thing that students do is they ditch the official program and go off to the nightclubs and experience the cities on their own. So if this is what students are doing, then they can't be learning, is what the newspapers conclude. And it's on the basis of that, really, that the voyages is dubbed a failure on its return. And it has really retained that reputation ever since.
EVE DUFFY: Yeah, I can't believe we're at time already. This is insane. I could talk to you for hours, Tamson. I love this book. I have just one quick question for you. You said at the very end of the book that, we're coming to an era where authority is being decided by data, and lots of big data. But at the same time, we're in a society where groups are saying that entire knowledge systems don't have authority. So, how do you see that tension being resolved, and/or being explored well in a university setting?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yes, it's a paradox at the end, really. But I think — look, as higher education professionals, we need to ask very serious questions about ourselves, and about how knowledge is socially verified, and the social legitimate, and how it attains social legitimacy. And I think, at this moment, both through big data, but also — which is challenging the traditional 20th century authority, that universities, the monopoly, really, that universities have had over the authority of knowledge in the 20th century, on the one hand.
And then, on the other, there's a whole range of political and populist movements, which are challenging expertise from a different angle. And so, those of us who work in the realm of knowledge need to ask very serious questions about where trust in knowledge comes from. And I think, at our peril, the 20th century, and, really, this book is interested in thinking seriously about where universities’ authority over knowledge comes from in the 20th century.
And the bigger story is that it is an act of enclosure, that through processes like that, that Professor Lough undertakes in New York, whole domains of knowledge which are outside, or at the edges of university authority, are brought into, inside it. Journalism is a great example, so is education. And the cost of that has been a kind of removal of the processes of knowledge and its legitimacy from ordinary people, quote unquote, ordinary people.
And experience is a really legitimate way of coming to know something. We demonize it. And I am interested in ways that universities might better integrate it, not only for their students, which is what study abroad is, but also beyond their walls and at the edges of their walls, for a general public who otherwise might, and does, feel alienated, either alienated by universities in their ways they claim authority, social authority, but also sees them now just simply as unnecessary.
There are other ways that knowledge works and is governed and is owned. And so, why do we need these pointy-heads that sit there, telling us what to think? And so, I think experience, as it was for American pragmatists, is a way to square some of those circles. And it's something that we might think about, both inside our walls, but also outside them.
EVE DUFFY: So, Lisa J. Anderson asks kind of a variation on this question, which is, what would be a modern day equivalent of the floating university. With the internet that we have, with the Zoom rooms we have, is there a way that we can create a floating university today?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Well, I should say, there is a floating university. And that's something probably familiar to Americans, very familiar to Americans. But I think Lisa is asking a different sort of question. And universities are trying very hard, through various kinds of experiential models. And I list a few of them at the end, place-based work, to draw in practical engagement with communities and problems into their curricula.
But I think it's also about how we engage, we, as academics, engage with our communities, and the sorts of ways we speak to them. And research projects too are now very focused on communities. And the voices and experiences and participation of those who are end users of research are increasingly being built into research projects.
But as academics, we too often go into the public realm and say, this is what I know. Listen to me, and trust me.
EVE DUFFY: This is true.
TAMSON PIETSCH: And I think there are other ways of speaking about that and participating in public conversations.
EVE DUFFY: So, this is — please, put other questions in the chat, folks. But this is completely not in your book. And I can go back to your book. And I would love to. But this is a conversation that we've been having on our campus around AI, to think that, now, AI can generate, basically, that B paper that you might have, in the past, just given a student, right? So, in terms of thinking about, what is it that we're trying to do in the classroom, even, it seems like experiential learning is a really wonderful antidote to that anodyne paper, essay writing.
TAMSON PIETSCH: I think that's absolutely true. And I would also add relational, relationality. What is it to be human in the world, being human in an age of climate crisis, really. That involves caring, caring for each other and our environment, the planet, but also the infrastructures that support us. And an AI can't do that. An AI can spit out some expertise, or argument, or analysis, even. And students can use that. And I think that's the way forward with AI, is not to push it out as the great —
EVE DUFFY: Bogeyman, yeah.
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, exactly, bogeyman. But it's to have students work with it. And that's what I do in the classroom, and see its limitations from the inside, but also to think through — I don't know. AI is going to eat its own tail pretty quickly. Like, this is completely not in my book. But it's Tamson, having an opinion about something she doesn't know very much about. But soon, AI will be feeding on AI.
And we weren't really — at the moment, AI feeds on human-generated content. And soon, it will feed. Its snake will eat its own tail. It will feed on AI-generated stuff. And it will go down a very interesting wormhole. I kind of want, in my next book's contract, to put a thing on the front cover that says, this is written by a human. And I think that's helpful for thinking about forms of pedagogy. What is it? Because as I began this answer to your question, what is it to be human?
What is it — what sorts of communities and societies do we need as we face data on the one hand, climate crisis on the other? And they are actually a very human thing. So, how do we teach our children? How do we care for each other when we're sick, when we're in crisis? How do we care for our environment physically, so that it produces oxygen and doesn't flood? And what structures politically do we build to facilitate those things? And, to my mind, AI is a tool in that process. But it absolutely can't do them for us, do it for us.
EVE DUFFY: For sure. So, going back to the idea of engaging with our communities, especially communities who have lost faith in the university's abilities to solve real problems and to speak with authority, what are some principles or frameworks for the ethical way for academics to engage with communities, given the inherent power dynamics present? And what does an ethical study abroad look like?
TAMSON PIETSCH: So, what is the last bit of that question?
EVE DUFFY: What's an ethical study abroad? That's a whole other topic. Let's do the community one first.
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, that's hard. Well, I think it's important for universities to begin by recognizing that they are anchor institutions, really. They exist in communities. And they derive their legitimacy, often their finances, but certainly their legitimacy, from their place in that political and economic community and context. So, a university is not just something that is a degree factory, producing experts and professionals.
It's also an institution who employs cleaners and caterers, and has a massive physical footprint, and has gymnasiums and park-lands, and lots of roofs on which solar panels could be placed, and employs probably more people in a small town in America than any other business. And so, what happens when you begin there? And I think that does echo back into what we can do in the classrooms.
And sometimes, what we can do in the classrooms is a bit at odds with what the university leadership is doing. Maybe I'll answer this question with an example. There's a university in Australia called Griffith University, who have recently built a new campus in an expanding suburb with lots of migrants in it. And what they have done is worked with the local counsel to put the maternal and child health clinic right in the center of campus. And then, associated with that is a whole set of play activities.
And the community runs kitchens so that the local community brings their children in, which is mandated under Australian law, to be weighed when they're three weeks old and six weeks old. And immediately — and this is all run through the university's nursing school. Immediately, they are engaging with education, with the state, on the one hand, and its health care services, its educational provisions on the other hand. And they're doing so in a way that is mediated and facilitated by people, because there's a kind of Somali-run kitchen next door.
And there's a playground where other mothers are gathering. But it's mediated by forms of community that is recognizable to them. And that seems to me a much better way to think about how you get legitimacy for educational structures and the state, than saying, you should trust us because we know better. So, these women will come in with their babies, often not speaking English, and experience care from the university and from the state, before they're told that that's what they must do.
EVE DUFFY: Right, that's lovely. I'm sorry, anonymous attendee. We're not going to answer what an ethical study abroad looks like. That's a whole other conversation. I'm just going to boot on that. Here's another question for you. Does it make sense, in your view, for higher ed to focus their curriculum less on disciplinary content and more on how to think? Faculty have their experience with deep thinking in their disciplines, or the discipline of deep thinking. I can find out what faculty know. But if they can show me how they got there, that's gold. So —
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, I think that's right. Like, the process matters. Process is everything. So, if you can — and I think that's also how we, as academics, should think about what we do in public. So if we can bring people into the process of how we know, rather than just telling them what we know, we bring them along with us. And they get to experience the thrills of encounter discovery, and its frustrations as well.
And I just have to say, in my other job as the director of the Center of Public History here, is that I run a series of podcasts, in which that's exactly what we try and do. So, you sort of — it's a bit like true crime. But it's history. So, you follow along, learning how the podcast host is finding out the stuff, and hopefully, in that process, learn historical method, whilst not even knowing, necessarily, that that's what you're doing.
EVE DUFFY: I love that. I want to go back to the university for a second because you talked a little bit about how, when they're in port and, let's just say, the community on shore comes onto the boat, it's a little uneasy, right? And there's a theme of liminality, sorry to use that word, folks, that runs through your book in terms of the boat itself because it's not really in any place.
And that makes it kind of this weird, hard to accredit thing, right? And then, it's this liminal space on shore and in the ocean. Can you talk about that liminal space, and what it meant for the ship and for knowledge acquisition? Or not, if you don't want to. Talk about the liminality.
TAMSON PIETSCH: The liminality, of course, in the spaces of the liminal, they're hugely productive spaces, I think. And on this voyage, they are deeply uncomfortable spaces, which discomforts all those on board. But it's through that discomfort that those on board, and I think, we, now, reading about that voyage, can understand and can — they learn a lot.
And now, they don't always learn what we might like them to learn from experiences of liminality. Sometimes, it's a thing that ossifies imperialist and quite racist notions and ways of reading the world. And an example of that is — tell me if I'm going down the wrong path, but —
EVE DUFFY: No, please do.
TAMSON PIETSCH: The floating university fields a lot of sporting teams. Why field sporting teams? And the idea is that they will — it's sports diplomacy, that they will play the teams from the University of Hawaii, and university of Egypt, Cairo, in the ports that they visit. And they do this. But they get completely trashed. And they get beaten. And this is deeply shocking to white Americans, that they're being beaten by their colonial subjects in the Philippines at baseball.
And it kind of provokes a sort of crisis, in some ways. But it provokes questionings about the racial hygiene, and the kind of basis of American power in the world. And those are not ever fully resolved. But it's through them, and in them, that the Americans on board get a little bit of a sense of — and through other kinds of alliances. I have a whole chapter that's interested in thinking about how other ways of knowing might echo through the voyage, from those who encounter it and through people like the laundrymen on board, how they may have understood what was happening.
It's through those moments that, I think, chinks, and the vulnerability of Americans in this period, come through. There is a deep anxiety about the fitness of this arising nation to assume a global role. And this might loop back a little bit to your earlier question about agents of empire. That's important because these students on board will, in the post-war period, in the period of American empire, take on those roles of leadership. This is the generation. And this is why it's important to focus on the interwar period.
This is the generation that will lead America, and will lead the world in small and large ways in the post-war period. And just a very quick example of that is Howard Marshall. Howard Marshall is one of those soccer stars that is resoundingly beaten and is sort of troubled by that. Now, people may not know who Howard Marshall is. But he goes on, as an old man, to marry someone called Anna Nicole Smith, which might —
EVE DUFFY: It might ring some bells.
TAMSON PIETSCH: It would. But he also — and she was a playmate of the year. He also becomes a 17% shareholder in Koch Industries. And there we are. There is one thread of American power in the second part of the 20th century. He begins as a Quaker, I might say. So it's quite a transformation.
EVE DUFFY: That's quite a long journey. It's interesting that you say that they — I think one of the reasons that, well, in the press it's selling papers, but these are representatives of American empire, right? So they shouldn't be cavorting. They shouldn't be smooching on deck, right? They should be representing American power at its finest during —
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, and that's the paradox, because on campuses across America in the '20s, this is exactly what students are doing. It's sort of no different, really. But there's something about the pseudo-diplomatic status of this voyage, or the way that the press, but also, I think, people like the American ambassador in Japan, see these students as representing the nation. That holds them to a different kind of standard.
EVE DUFFY: Yeah, so here's a question from an education researcher. And she, he, sees some parallels between the history you describe and contemporary trends in teacher education, enrollment. Those numbers are decreasing — and the cultural delegitimization of teachers most broadly. Do you see these as related phenomenon? Why or why not?
TAMSON PIETSCH: The parallels being with — sorry, you've just read a question. So you can't —
EVE DUFFY: I'll go back — the parallels between the history you describe and, basically, the loss of legitimacy for teachers and the declining enrollment. Is there something about the way K through 12 teachers have lost their legitimacy in the public sphere that has echoes in your work, I guess, is the question. To be clear, I'm wondering if you see the history of the floating university and contemporary delegitimization of teachers and teacher education as related?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, I mean, I think that is very possibly true. The floating university is delegitimized by universities, on the one hand, who want to own knowledge creation, and by the press on the other, who think that experience doesn't equate to knowledge. And this is — misbehavior is the opposite of education.
And so, I think the delegitimization of primary and high school teachers K to 12 is possibly coming from a different place, and may be wrapped into ways we value people that care, that do the work of care because I would put it alongside the ways nurses and other social care professionals have also been devalued. And I think that connects more to some of the earlier things I was saying about AI, and experience, and bodies, and environment, and where I think just. And, sorry, I've got sunshine streaming in.
EVE DUFFY: You're good. How dare you have sunshine in the morning.
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yeah, it's 7 a.m. here in Australia — comes from. But they are probably connected, in so far as expertise, which gave K to 12 teachers status in the 20th century — can now be derived from other sources, or knowledge. Information certainly can be, information can be derived from other places. And so, for me, rehabilitating and returning social status to teachers, and care workers, generally, comes from emphasizing their role, their physical and experiential role, rather than the information that they pour into students' heads.
EVE DUFFY: Jocelyn [Olcott] here at Duke has a really broad international network on the care economy, which is really fascinating work. So, this is back to liminality. Liminality is at the core of library frameworks now. Is there a partnering role for librarians in rethinking the academic experience in the information age? What might that look like?
TAMSON PIETSCH: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I don't know if you know, I'm sure you do, the wonderful book by Bonnie Honig on public — called Public Things. And if you haven't read that, I would recommend it highly — that there are things, of which libraries is one in her book, but also public parks, schools, all sorts of things that we hold and own in common, and that they provide kinds of holding environments for us in moments of transition, and also in moments of crisis. And that is what we should be investing in. And libraries can absolutely do that work.
And you can see this in, for example, our cities. We're about to enter summer in Australia. It's going to be a very, very hot one. And our cities are going to be experiencing heat stress in lots of ways. And public libraries are heat refuges. They've got air conditioning. And now, they're being designed with that role very much in mind. So there's places that people can gather. And so, I mean, yes, is what I think. But also, bringing people not just to kind of offer services, but bringing people into an encounter with knowledge as opposed to just information.
EVE DUFFY: Well, and that goes back to the floating university, right? That's what that was, was — and going back to its lack of success, why do you think it didn't succeed? I mean, I know the answer to this. But I want you to answer it.
TAMSON PIETSCH: I mean, I guess part of what I try and do in the last chapters of the book is think about whether it did succeed. Like, against whose criteria is success and failure assessed? And that is the question we should ask about things, historical events, that are described as failures. They point us to who makes the rules of knowing. And who sets the norms and conventions?
And it enables us to see those norms and conventions as historical and political, not as natural. And I think it's important to do that. It's important to historicize expertise and to denaturalize it because we come out of the 20th century, in which it achieved, through historical processes, a monopoly over how to know. And that's not the only way that knowledge can be governed. And it's not even the best way that knowledge can be governed in the 21st century.
EVE DUFFY: That was a lovely note to end on. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much.
TAMSON PIETSCH: Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for everyone who came.
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