Review of "The Floating University": Author Puts Her DEI Thumb on the Scale of History

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I'm going to brag about my "reading challenge" on Good Reads -- only one behind!

And here's a review, which I seldom take the time to write. I got this book out of the Peter Cooper (Stuyvesant Town) community library, which is a very active little box on a pole with a "take one, leave one" ethos which is never empty and changes constantly. You can tell some people get review books which they dump here, or uncorrected proofs.

I could try to do more with this, citing more passages and how the politically-correct/woke posture so woven into academic life these days weighs heavy on every page, but just go sample it yourself and you'll see.

The subtitle alone gives the bias away: The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge

I personally think you have to read historical novels and studies without interpolating current norms (or God forbid, reprinting with "corrections") that would call out the white privilege, colonialism, antisemitism, Orientalism, etc. So you do read Kim (Rudyard Kipling) and Greenmantel (John Buchan) and take on board the setting of their culture and time and move on, and appreciate them as stories but not the entire key to understanding real Central Asian history.

And I think studying non-fiction history, you can't blast historical figures for not being aware and enlightened enough to be anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and checking their privilege on deck of a ship for which they paid young fortunes while people of colour sweat loading coal into the furnace below. The stories speak for themselves, you can supply an introduction and a frame (we're welcome to skip over those, and I sometimes do) but you don't have to intrude on every page to burn with righteous fury about American imperialism. (BTW, the Australians I met in the UN mission were never as far left as the international civil servant lifers at the UN, or even the NGOs, and would look puzzled about my queries re: new laws that would "break the Internet in Australia" (they didn't) -- although Australians on Twitter tend towards leftism and anti-Amerian as to be expected.)

 Nevertheless it is important to read this chronicle to understand more about the history of academe and current events today on campuses, and should be in every university library. That is, the author's intrusion is as much of an artifact of the study of "knowledge formation" as is the study of James Lough and his colleagues in their day.

 

href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62707971-the-floating-university" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge by Tamson Pietsch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was a very important work on a forgotten subject of how "study abroad" programs got started and the various theories of "knowledge formation" and the culture of universities through the centuries.

I gave it only two starts because the author could not get out of the way of her central subject -- a fascinating but flawed thinker and doer named James Lough who conceived the idea of the "floating university. He was sacked after he was found to have created conflicts of interests in the companies he formed around the "float" (a common issue today I've witnessed myself in academic institutions). While there are many fascinating elements to this tale which speak for themselves -- about the privileged whites in the top schools, about American imperialism and war-fighting abroad -- the author feels she constantly has to put her thumb on the scale and turn the book into a sort of Bunin's "Gentleman from San Francisco", banging away at the evils of Amerika at every turn -- in fact reinforcing the Amero-centric view and depriving the rest of the world of agency, including the agency of chosing American development.

So the all-white Dutch crew is excoriated for not even including the natives from their conquered territories. There is talk of 'gendered moral panic' because of engagements on board - but why can't parents justifiably worry about their daughters facing rape and unwanted pregnancy in isolation? The good old boys naturally use their connections to find friendly Americans or sympathizers abroad. Russia and China do the same thing, hello?

America's "university" had long since already floated abroad all over Asia and Europe and local authenticity isn't really explored. How could it be otherwise? The author skips over the trips to Germany, perhaps because it doesn't fit her theory, and after inserting her DEI theories into every paragraph, nevertheless includes a chapter praising one traveler's sketches of "folk life" and other "accomplishments" that by her lights she should have condemned -- just to have something positive to say before the boom is lowered on Prof. Lough for self-dealing.

The knowledge theory to which Lough adhered -- aquiring through direct experience -- might serve the author in continuing to study the communist uprising in China which she felt was "legitimate," although of course it led to mass crimes against humanity.

Normally I'd avoid an overly "woke" book on a subject but with so few books on this subject as I discovered, I read all the way through carefully and would re-read it again -- after I've tried some other book on this same topic that do exist such as Sydney Greenbie's 1929 study of the same trips.

I was fortunate that I was able to work at the USPS one summer doing many shifts for time-and-a-half and double time, and my grandmother donated her lifelong savings for me to go to study in the Soviet Union in 1978-1979, which at that time cost about $3500.  I did my undergraduate at St. Michael's College and the University of Toronto, where the tuition, by contrast with the US, is state subsidzed and cost about $1400 a year then. Study abroad (which included a brief time in Paris) changed my life, as did subsequent travel abroad all over. I have to wonder if the author ever studied abroad in a non-English speaking country. 

Today, "study away" at NYU has a wide variety from Abu Dhabi to Tulsa, OK (!) and a huge price tag of ~$50K making it still a bastion of the privileged.

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