Ports of College : A Floating University Ships Students to Places They Study in O.C.-Initiated Semester at Sea

Jeremy Webb could be lulled into thinking it was just an ordinary campus: The accouterments were all in place--classrooms, desks, a bunch of students, a professor.

But when class ended, it always hit him.

“You walk outside, and you’re in the middle of the ocean, and people are lying out by the pool. People do their homework on the promenade deck as Taiwan goes by,” Webb said. “You have to take reality checks: ‘I’m on a boat going around the world.’ We went around saying, ‘College is really tough.’ ”

Webb, a 20-year-old USC student from Laguna Hills, has just returned from a semester-long field trip around the world aboard the S.S. Universe, an ocean liner that doubles as a floating university.

He was one of 526 students from 187 colleges and universities from across the United States and abroad taking part in the spring session of Semester at Sea, a program offered by the Institute for Shipboard Education and academically sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh.

The 100-day journey, split equally between ship and land, offers undergraduates an opportunity to experience other cultures while learning more about their own.

“It’s a full-service campus, believe it or not, on an 18,000-ton ship,” said Jean Grech, a housing director at UC Irvine who served as dean of students for the shipboard community on its fall, 1994, journey. The ship takes two trips a year, stopping in nine ports for three to six days in each. It’s run by 45 staffers and 195 crew members.

Since its maiden voyage in 1963, more than 28,000 students have sailed around the world with Semester at Sea. About half of the applicants--juniors with a 2.75 GPA and in good standing--are accepted. The $12,195 fee includes tuition, room, board and passage. Financial aid is available.

The program originated in Orange County, led by Chapman University--which was its academic sponsor until 1975--and shipping-line magnate C.Y. Tung, who donated the S.S. Universe to the program in 1971. “He had a vision that ships could be used for education,” said ISE director of admissions Paul Watson.

*

The classroom curriculum, which earns college credits at the University of Pittsburgh, ranges from anthropology to women’s studies, as well as required core courses that prepare students for the lands they explore. They may study environmental problems in Sri Lanka and the business climate in Vietnam, but nothing beats the fieldwork. “The education of seeing the world blows USC away,” Webb said.

“It takes education to a different level,” said 21-year-old Gabriel Speyer, a UC San Diego senior from Newport Beach. “You can actually point to what you read about in the book.”

After sailing the world, stopping in places such as Cambodia and Kenya, returning to Laguna Hills was “the biggest culture shock I’ve experienced,” Webb said. “I’ve been to Africa and India, and coming home, sitting around with Mom and Dad, has been the hardest thing to adjust to.”

Speyer, who traveled last fall, also felt differently about his homeland upon returning to Southern California. “It’s hard to adjust to regular society, to come back to America and think, ‘This is my home,’ ” he said.

When Speyer described his adventure, which ended several months ago, he spoke with the breathless enthusiasm of someone who had disembarked an hour ago.

“It was the most incredible experience of my life,” he said. “You’re forced to reconsider everything you’ve ever learned. You go to China and see people starving. It really changes your point of view, seeing all these incredible places . . . interacting with the locals.

“I met some people who had so little money, living in a shack made of old street signs. These people could be happy with so little,” Speyer said. “Why can’t Americans be happy with so much?”

What especially shocked Webb--more than a glass pagoda in Cambodia filled with skulls, more than learning that Pol Pot was still alive, more than traveling to Vietnam--was the racism he said he encountered in South Africa. With apartheid abolished and Nelson Mandela as president, he figured all was well in that country. “Sitting over here in the States, I was pretty naive,” he said.

Then he saw it for himself. “It was the most blatant bigotry I’ve ever been exposed to in my entire life. . . . Some people there were praising [the actions of the 19th-Century] Deep South. It was really bizarre.”

Webb was both surprised and disappointed by the Americanization of the world’s cultures. “We have such a huge influence on the rest of the world, and you really see it when you’re in these countries. In a bar in Africa, you can hear Kurt Cobain over a loudspeaker.”

But he said he got his money’s worth when the ship docked in India. “It was the furthest away from home I ever felt,” he said. “There were no toilets, just holes in the ground; no silverware, people just ate with their hands; religion is so enmeshed with the way of life . . . and you can’t find Nirvana on the radio.”

As strangers in strange lands--and fellow travelers cooped up for large stretches of time with nothing but water surrounding them--the shared experience brought the students close together.

“You form a close bond with everyone on the ship,” Speyer said. “Some of the friends I made were forever--the kinds of friends you meet when you’re traveling are really unique.”

Webb agreed with the assessment of an all-for-one attitude. In his case, the death of a fellow student early in the journey upped the intensity of personal bonding.

“I feel closer to some of the people on the boat than people I’ve known for my whole life,” he said. “Everything moves so quickly, and you move from one mini-life to the next. Bad things just pass, otherwise they would stay with whole community. Everything that happens works out . . . because it strengthens the community.”

Speyer said living on a ship can be “really trying. Other students go abroad, but it can’t be like what we go through. It’s a tightknit community--with the crew, the professors, the other passengers--whether you like it or not.”

The community included 40 elderly travelers, many of whom had made the trip before. “They’ve been to a lot of places you’re ready to go to, so they have a lot of insight and recommendations about where to go, what to eat,” Webb said. “It’s nice to be able to interact with older people who aren’t your professors and to dump your problems on them.”

In between the daily classes (“There’s no such thing as a weekend on the ship,” Grech said), students studied, mingled with fellow passengers or, according to Webb, “reverted to childhood,” playing games such as hangman and hide-and-seek. Some also took part in the time-honored, Equator-crossing rituals of shaving their heads or piercing their ears.

Mostly though, their thoughts turned to the next port. “The night before we’d arrive, lots of students would sleep on deck so that we could see the sunrise in the next country as we arrived. Some people even bought hammocks,” Webb said. “It was always really exciting to get our things together, hover around [the travel guidebook] ‘The Lonely Planet,’ and decide what to do.”

College is really tough.