Continents away, decades later

Princeton Journeys offers roughly 16 trips each year to alumni and their families through the Alumni Association’s education program. The association has offered educational trips since 1972. In 2004, the association expanded its offering and changed the name of the program from Alumni Colleges. Leslie Jennings Rowley, the executive manager of Princeton Journeys, added that Princeton Journeys works with local travel agencies to organize travel arrangements and amenities.

On the trips, University professors and alumni, called “study leaders,” share their knowledge of a region and related subjects with participants.

“The core mission of Princeton Journeys is to reconnect Princeton alumni to Princeton through the academic enterprise,” said Rowley. Instructors initiate some trips by proposing a destination, but the program also reaches out to potential instructors with a pitch for a trip.

In planning trips, Rowley said she asks herself, “What is the University’s priority at the moment? What would [President] Shirley Tilghman like to highlight?” The program then selects a destination that showcases the University’s faculty and resources.

Rowley said she also aims to offer trips off the beaten path. “Looking at the globe, these are the places we’re already going,” Rowley said. “What have I missed?”

This year, Princeton Journeys has already led a trip to Egypt and has trips planned for Japan, Turkey, France and South Africa, among other places. Rowley noted that the size of the groups varies from roughly 10 to 30 people, though the program has had fewer travelers since the recent economic downturn began. Among the 2010 trips, prices start at $2,990 per person for a one-week trip to Mexico for Day of the Dead festivies. Alumni must pay $23,990 per person for a 16-day “World Leaders Symposium in the Black Sea” that will feature guest speakers including former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union.

Alumni typically represent 40 percent of travelers, with trips targeted to multi-generational groups. This year’s study leaders include James Billington ’50, the Librarian of Congress, who will lead the Black Sea trip, and Michael Pratt, the Princeton University Orchestra conductor, who will lead a trip exploring Russian waterways.

While most Princeton groups travel alone, Rowley said they join with other universities’ alumni education groups for some larger trips, particularly those on boats.

Classics professor Joshua Katz, who led a trip to the western Mediterranean in 2005 and another to Egypt in 2009, said he turned his last trip into a “two-week crash course in hieroglyphics,” drawing material from a freshman seminar he often teaches. By the end of the trip, he said, participants could read some of the historical monuments. Rowley said that some alumni have already signed up for Katz’s next trip to Egypt in 2011.

The academic components range from lectures to precepts, with participants providing professors with “a nice, motivated crowd,” Rowley said.

East Asian studies professor David Leheny, who will lead a trip to Japan in late April, said that interacting with alumni was a main draw to the program. Teaching outside a lecture hall will give him a “better sense of how to work with a wider audience other than undergraduates,” he said, while meeting alumni from a broad cross-section of professions and backgrounds offers a “new lens on how people can live.”

Edgar Masinter ’52, who went on the 2009 trip to Egypt, said that Katz’s teaching was a highlight of the trip. “Katz added immensely to both the learning as well as the entertainment,” Masinter said, calling him “an absolute delight to be with.”

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Masinter called the trip “the full package,” adding that, “on a scale of one to 10, this was a 10-plus.”

George Webb ’54, who has been on three boat trips over the last three years — traveling from Prague to Berlin, from Normandy to Paris, and along the waterways of Holland and Belgium — said he and his wife have enjoyed “getting out to see places that either we haven’t seen before or haven’t seen through the same eyes, in an extremely comfortable way.”

Webb is not alone, Rowley explained. “We see a lot of repeat travelers.”