Archbishop Tutu joins faculty aboard UVa's 'Semester at Sea'

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 78, may be stepping away from the public spotlight during this season of his life but he is still very active. In fact, the Nobel Prize winner will be sailing around the globe with "Semester at Sea," and its 35 faculty members and 600 students.

He will be joining the world experiment in education at sea, which is an initiative by the University of Virginia, to inaugurate the first Desmond Tutu Distinguished Chair in Global Understanding position. Semester at Sea is headquartered in Charlottesville, and is the oldest seagoing comparative education program in the world.

As part of his shipboard duties, Archbishop Tutu is serving as senior statesman in residence. He will board the MV Explorer, a 590-foot passenger ship serving as Semester at Sea's floating university, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Friday and journey to Cadiz, Spain; Takoradi, Ghana; Cape Town, South Africa; Port Louis, Mauritius; Chennai, India; Singapore; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Honolulu, Hawaii, among other places, before returning to San Diego, California, on Dec. 13th.

The New York Theological Seminary is an institution dedicated to diversity, multiculturalism, social justice and religious freedom. The mission of the seminary is to train men and women for careers in ministry.