2,500 students. Two decades. One professor’s life work in Asia.

The conviction that became Wisdom Study Abroad started in 1973, on Jim and Shelley Hagan’s first trip to the Himalayas. Jim went on to live in India and Nepal for ten years, studying Tibetan Buddhism at Kopan Monastery, the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives in Dharamsala, and Ganden Monastery in South India. By the mid-90s he was teaching at Castleton University and Johnson State College of Vermont. Shelley — a Yale MFA sculptor with her own deep history of study across Asia and Europe — taught at University of Vermont and ran her own parallel art history programs to Greece and Italy.

Wisdom Study Abroad was the way Jim brought what he knew to American college students. Not semester abroad — two-week intensives, dense enough to count for six credits. Students lived among guides, scholars, and monks Jim had been in conversation with for decades, in some cases since before the business existed. They didn’t just visit monasteries — they studied inside them. They didn’t just observe — they volunteered. By the time the programs closed, more than 2,500 students had traveled with them.

The students came from everywhere. Castleton, of course — Jim’s home institution — but also UVM, Burlington College, Saint Michael’s, SUNY Purchase, University of Hartford, Rhode Island College, University of Colorado Boulder, and dozens of other schools. Wisdom Tours did the same kind of immersion for adults — smaller, less academic, but with the same heart.

We built the sites that found those students, recruited them, took the deposits, kept the parents informed, and gave faculty advisors a place to send their best questions. The sites worked. Year after year, cohort after cohort.

The first Wisdom Tours site went live in 1999, before Downhill Media existed as a studio. Wisdom Study Abroad followed shortly thereafter. Shelley’s Greece and Italy programs had their own sites for a time too. Over the years, the family of sites expanded and contracted as the programs themselves did — dedicated destination sites came and went; some were folded back into the main site once the audience knew the program well. There was no master plan; we built what each year needed, and rebuilt it when the year after asked for something different.

Some changes weren’t planned at all. Geo-politics has a way of rewriting itineraries — Tibet’s borders closed to outside travel more than once over the years, sometimes with weeks of lead time. When that happened, we’d swap the destination — Myanmar one year, China another, Italy when it had to be — and rush new collateral, new program details, and new outreach to the students already enrolled, asking them whether they still wanted to come along. They almost always did.

Across all of it, the sites were rebuilt many times. Two decades is enough time for the web to change several times underneath a project. Static HTML to content management. Desktop-only to mobile-first. Then accessibility passes, then platform shifts that come every few years whether you want them or not. I haven’t kept count of the rebuilds, and I’m not going to try. Each one was a chance to fold in what we’d learned about how Jim’s program actually worked — which pages students returned to, which questions parents kept asking, which destination details mattered enough to live above the fold. The sites got tighter. They also got warmer, because by year ten we knew the program well enough to write about it with the conviction of someone who’d watched it succeed.

The last trip went out in 2019. COVID came in early 2020, and the programs never came back. Jim considered a reunion adult trip — students he’d traveled with, all returning — but it never quite materialized. The website went quiet, and after a while it came down. That was the end.