While still based at Hartford, Buchman spent much of his time traveling and forming groups of Christian students at Princeton University and Yale University, as well as Oxford. Sam Shoemaker, a Princeton graduate and one-time Secretary of the Philadelphian Society who had met Buchman in China, became one of his leading American disciples. In 1922, after a prolonged spell with students in Cambridge, Buchman resigned his position at Hartford, and thereafter relied on gifts from patrons such as Margaret (née Thorne) Tjader.