Floating

The plan for a "floating college" (TiME, May 26), by which a group of Manhattan educators and laymen proposed to charter the Shipping Board liner President Arthur and take 450 students on a world cruise, last week received high praise from Leigh C. Palmer, President of the Fleet Corporation, and from T. V. O'Connor, Chairman of the Shipping Board. Said Mr. O'Connor: "It requires but a moment's thought to see that if groups of alert young Americans visit foreign ports in an American flagship, they will, by gaining first hand information on the handling of foreign commerce, come to realize how necessary it is for America to have her own Merchant Marine."

The plan, as fathered by Dean James Edwin Lough of the Extramural Division of New York University, was to take the students and a faculty of 40 on a year's round-the-world cruise, the while they were completing their year of college work.