Readers could be forgiven for thinking that PAW has been acquired by a highbrow travel agency. The September issue features a “Tiger Travels” section with articles like “Shirley Tilghman’s Travel Musts” and “Princetonians’ Guide to Paris.”  That’s in addition to the glossy, 24-page insert, “Princeton Journeys,” replete with eye-popping educational touring opportunities in all corners of the globe.

PAW can hardly be faulted for following the lead of the University itself and of higher education in general. Study abroad programs and even the establishment of university annexes in tourist epicenters overseas — Paris, Budapest, Lugano, Rome — are as basic to the 21st century American college scene as chapel and the freshman beanie were 75 years ago. Academia is playing the tune its customers expect. After all, travel is the currency of worth in society today, the sacrament of our restless culture. Just as people scroll, scroll, scroll on their phones, they book, book, book reservations to new places.

I only hope that Princeton doesn’t entirely abandon the centuries-old tradition of the university as a place of retreat for intensive learning and self-discovery, a temporary haven from the fraught world and its incessant demands and stimuli. 

My own travels abroad as a young man were beneficial and enriching, but their impact pales in comparison to the dynamite I took to the locked vault door of my own soul by reading and thinking for four years in places like Firestone Library, tiny dorm rooms, and under trees in Prospect Gardens — none requiring a boarding pass.