The first Alumni College met at the Princeton Inn College during the post-reunion week of 1970, and this on-campus meeting became an annual feature of the Alumni Council's program. Other Alumni Colleges, lasting from two to fourteen days, were gradually organized outside of Princeton, in response to alumni demand.
Unlike the Faculty-Alumni Forums, which are open to all alumni in attendance at reunions, Alumni Colleges are residential, and enrollment is limited in order to give participants more opportunity for interaction with their teachers and each other. The Princeton faculty usually comes from an assortment of disciplines and is sometimes supplemented by authorities in other fields outside the University. A typical program includes lectures, precepts, seminar discussions, films, field trips, and social and recreational activities. ``An open admission policy'' is followed, spouses, children, and friends being welcome as well as alumni.
By the mid-seventies five or six Alumni Colleges were meeting each year in the Far West, the Middle West, and at various places along the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida, exploring topics that ranged in time from the Middle Ages to the last thirty years in American history, and often matching the subject with the setting: ``The Yankee Spirit'' at Martha's Vineyard; ``New York: Profile of a City'' at the Princeton Club of New York; ``At the Edge of Wilderness'' at the Blairstown Education Center near the Appalachian Trail in northwestern New Jersey.
At the first Alumni College abroad, conducted at Rouen in the summer of 1976, a student body of thirty-five, representing classes from 1925 to 1965, engaged in an eleven-day study of modern France under the guidance of a faculty that included two Princeton professors of romance languages, an architect and a lawyer (both alumni, practicing in France), and the United States ambassador to France.
``Alumni who attend Alumni Colleges,'' the Alumni Council concluded after six years experience with the program, ``come to study and learn, and the Graduate Council, and they are not often disappointed.''