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How Can We Reimagine Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change?

An interview with the founders of Gull Island Institute.

What might it mean to reimagine higher education in the face of climate change? How will colleges adapt, not just to environmental catastrophe but all the other challenges to civic life: from AI and increasing automation to deepening political divides and wealth inequality. The Massachusetts-based Gull Island Institute offers an education that attempts to answer some of these questions. Its mission is to prepare a new generation for democratic citizenship on a changing planet through place-based learning rooted in rigorous academics, physical labor, and student self-governance. To this end, students participate in seminars focused on Western and Indigenous traditions and the history and ecology of the region, alongside daily labor rotations including aquaculture, land conservation, cooking, and sustainable gardening. Tuition and room-and-board are free of charge to students.

The Nation spoke with Ana Keilson and Justin Reynolds, who founded the Gull Island Institute in 2022. We discussed the crisis of higher education today and how the Gull Island Institute seeks to provide solutions to it, as well as the long-term future of place-based education. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: What is the Gull Island Institute and what gave you the idea to start it?

Ann Keilson & Justin Reynolds: The Gull Island Institute is an educational nonprofit with a mission to reimagine the liberal arts for a changing planet. Our pedagogy is based in three “pillars” of rigorous academics, physical labor, and student self-governance; our faculty come from across the disciplines—the natural and social sciences, humanities and arts, as well as local business owners, tribal elders and representatives from the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes, and community organizers. We run two types of programs: The first is a four-week tuition-free program on islands off Cape Cod for eight to nine undergraduates selected from a national cohort; the second is our “Classroom to Island,” partnership programs where we incorporate our approach into credit-bearing courses at colleges and universities and community colleges. To date, we’ve run partnership programs with Yale, Wesleyan, Columbia Climate School, and the Cape Cod Community College.

The idea to start the Gull Island Institute came from a desire to reform higher education. We both received our PhDs in history from Columbia in the late 2010s and taught there and at Harvard for a number of years. As postdocs and teaching faculty, we experienced higher ed’s legitimation crisis early and from the inside. For us and many of our colleagues, it was clear that the institutions we called our own had become reckless guardians of intellectual life and the undergraduate experience, in particular. We witnessed firsthand how higher education prioritized capital growth, the casualization and exploitation of academic labor while expanding administration. We watched in dismay as the leaders around us incentivized research and specialization at the expense of formative education and meaningful teaching. We were both very involved in union organizing for graduate students at Columbia and non-tenure-track faculty at Harvard in the 2010s and early 2020s. In some ways, founding Gull was continuous with this work to make universities more accountable and truer to professed values of intellectual and personal formation.

The second point of departure for Gull Island had to do with climate change. Over the past 15 years now, we’ve been continually struck by how institutions of liberal arts learning—including leadership and many faculty—have failed to meaningfully reckon with what liberal arts should be in an age of climate change. Then, in 2020 when Covid hit, like so many other people, we really questioned what we were doing in the university, and why. We were fortunate to have the opportunity in the summer of 2021 to teach at Deep Springs College, where we were first exposed to the three “pillared” model of academics, labor, and self-governance. Not only did we come to think of that model as a key that unlocked the question of what liberal arts learning could look like for an age of climate change, but it also inspired us to “step out” on our own, so to speak, and imagine alternative possibilities for a learning and intellectual community that was not the “traditional” university or college. In the spring of 2022, we ran a weeklong pilot program on an island an hour off the coast of Cape Cod with some of our former students from Harvard and Deep Springs, and, well, here we are today.

DSJ: What is wrong with higher education today?

AK/JR: It’s hard to generalize across the sector. But a major problem is the disconnection of higher education from place. In one sense, any university true to its name will be in some tension with the truths that surround it—after all these are places you go in search of understanding beyond received opinion. But there’s a perception today that these institutions have discounted their role in local communities to mutual detriment. This is not just a question of town-gown conflicts and struggles over real estate; rather, it’s about whether colleges recognize the kinds of knowledge that sustain local communities as........

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