Faculty lead alums in educational globe-trotting

Last March, astrophysics professor Ed Turner climbed on a plane with a group of University alumni and set off to see Cairo in the dark.

Led by Turner, a group of Egyptologists and amateur astronomers were on their way to Egypt to witness a solar eclipse. "Solar eclipses cause people to travel," he said. In this case, Princeton alumni and their families took a Princeton Journeys tour.

Turner said the trip was one of the most fun things he has done in his nearly 30 years at the University, and "it was very nice to get to know some of the alumni."

The Alumni Association has organized tours for alumni for many years but created Princeton Journeys in 2004, hiring a staff and expanding the program to 20 trips per year. The Alumni Association coordinates among alumni, professors and tour operators, who serve as the logistical liaisons for trip planning.

The trips generally last two weeks, taking participants to all corners of the world. The program is aimed at alumni but is open to current students and other interested travelers. Between 400 and 500 people participate each year.

Leslie Rowley, the executive manager of Princeton Journeys, said that robust travel programs at Harvard and Yale helped inspire the Alumni Association to expand the educational trips it offers. Before 2004, she said, trips were "few and far between."

"There was a time when we were just putting out one or two a year," she said.

Rowley noted that the trips are multi-generational but that the participants are usually older. "Traditionally, it's been more the retired [travelers] because they have the time to put toward leisure travel," she said.

Rowley explained that trips are often tailored to highlight one of the University's academic departments. As an example, she cited the program's upcoming Vanishing Treasures trip, which will coordinate with the Princeton Environmental Institute to take alumni to places like the Amazon.

Geosciences professor Lincoln Hollister, who led a cruise to Alaska in 2006, said he was struck by the diverse ages of trip participants. "The age distribution on the boat was from eight to 80 and was linear all the way through," he said. "Some of the groups use this as a family reunion."

Though the boat ride was intended to educate travelers about geological matters, such as plate tectonics, a naturalist from Alaska who joined the trip garnered the participants' attention as well, Hollister said.

He acknowledged that sometimes people were more interested in the naturalist's explanations of wildlife than his discussions of geology.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Hollister said his lectures strove for simplicity, adding that some of the people on board the boat went to school before plate tectonics was discovered. "You have to talk about really basic stuff that they had never really learned about [at] a level at which they could appreciate what they were seeing off the deck," he said.

Italian professor Pietro Frassica led a trip to northern Italy in 2006. Frassica prepared his alumni by giving them reading material about the culture of northern Italy and writings by authors from the region. "They appreciated this very much because they could see the relation between what we were reading, what we were saying, and what they were experiencing while we were there," he said.

Rowley said that one of her biggest challenges as manager of the program is to get professors to lead the tours, particularly because the Alumni Office tries to recruit professors who are "very popular."

"[The professors] are with alumni 24 hours a day for days in a row," Rowley said of the trips, citing this as a possible reason professors are often hesitant to lead them.

Turner acknowledged that the length of the trips can be a concern for professors. "[It is] a little difficult to be away that long during the term," he said.

But trip participants said they appreciated spending quality time with professors. Betty Leydon, the University's vice president for information technology, who went on Turner's trip, said in an email that the reading material Turner provided enhanced the travelers' understanding of the region they visited.

"It was a great learning experience and made everything we saw so much more meaningful," Leydon said. "All in all, I don't think you can beat a Princeton Journeys trip!"