CULTURE AS YOU CRUISE

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30668, 6 February 1965, Page 5

CULTURE AS YOU CRUISE

[By F

HAL HOLT

in the “Sydney

Morning Herald. Reprinted by arrangement.] it’s the professor, not at the breakfast table, but at the captain’s table. That’s where professors from the University of Hawaii will be during’ the cruise season. But not as guests. They’ll be working academics, lecturing to passengers on the liners.

The lessons the passengers (those of graduate or undergraduate standing) learn will be accepted as credits for a degree course at the university. The lectures will be at a proper academic standard and the passengers who wish to take university credits off them will have to face an

examination under rigid conditions nearing the end of the voyage. Some of the professors planning and delivering the lectures have Oxford and Cambridge associations. This “university on the poop deck” is the latest flowering of the growing cul-ture-while-you-cruise movement,.

Already passengers on Matson cruise ships in and out of Sydney have had practical courses on flower arranging (oriental, traditional and modern) bridge (run by Mr E. Blackwood, originator of the Blackwood convention,) golf tuition (with Australian professional Colin Campbell,) photography technique and navigation and seamanship (by men identified with America’s Cup contenders). The director of the Honolulu Academy of Art School, Joseph Feher, lectures right across the Pacific. And what

would look better in the passengers’ art show at the end of the cruise to win the course diploma than a painting of the Bridge? • These art courses are very popular. Every cruise that they are scheduled they attract more passengers. P & o—Orient tackled this art interest differently. On the Canberra’s October voyage they engaged an art critic James Gleeson to give 21 illustrated lectures on painting, sculpture and architecture, showing passengers how to get the best out of the great galleries when they get to Europe. For Investors The Matson Line has long recognised the value of practical study-courses as busi-ness-getters. Courses like the “first” they’ve planned for the Lurline next April. Matson have teamed up with a big American stockbroker in an “investors’ seminar cruise.” At Honolulu passenger-stu-dents will visit a big company and have its balance sheet entries translated into actual assets and liabilities. Matson’s South Seas Cruise University, sponsored by the University of Hawaii, is also a “first.” In the six-weeks cruise of the Monterey, beginning June 24, Professor Albert J. Bernotowicz will give 37 hour-long lectures on “Contemporary Highlights in Science.” Professor Bernatowicz, In 1960 a visiting scholar at

Cambridge University, s chairman of the Department of General Sciences at Hawaii, specialising in teaching the history of science in Arts courses.

Passengers who pass the examination on the 37-hour long lectures get a “threehour semester credit” roughly equivalent to half a year’s work in one subject in an Australian university. The courses for the other four voyages of this first year are all associated with the Pacific.

A summary of the first, native arts of the South Pacific, gives an idea of the scope of the treatment:

Stylistic and aesthetic characteristics of the arts of the South Pacific, including Micronesia, Polynesia, Melanesia, Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia; preview of the arts; forms, materials, and techniques: relation of the concepts of spiritual life to the arts in Pacific cultures: environmental limitations and advantages; overlay of geometric patterns on functional and ceremonial objects; form relationships and cross-cul-tural meanings in the arts; arts in paleolithic and neolithic cultures. The other courses are Geography of the Pacific Ocean Area; Contrasting Philosophies, East and West; Literature of the Pacific. For the university courses passengers pay extra. Previous instructional courses on Matson ships were free with the cruise fare.