October 7, 2024 | By Meliha Anthony (A25)

Işık Tütüncü (A24) spent this past May and June reading books, harvesting oysters, and engaging in deep group discussions on a remote island in Massachusetts. 

Tütüncü, an Ahmet Ertegun Turkish scholar from Istanbul, Turkey, learned about the Buzzards Bay Term summer program for college students at the Gull Island Institute when a poster in the Annapolis campus coffee shop caught her attention. Intrigued, she did some research and decided to apply after learning more about its dual emphasis on classics and environmentalism.

The Gull Island Institute was co-founded by Justin Reynolds and Ana Keilson, former Harvard University lecturers who envisioned a liberal arts education that would “cultivate democratic citizenship for an age of climate change,” according to Keilson.

“They’re questioning how [education] should be,” Tütüncü says, “and they want students and institutions to question it with them.”

 Funded through foundation grants and individual donations, the Institute’s tuition-free Buzzards Bay Term received 60 applications for nine spots in 2024. Students selected to participate in the competitive program spend a month on Penikese Island off the coast of Massachusetts, located in the titular Buzzards Bay. They immerse themselves in nature when they’re not attending four group seminars per week; weather conditions determine their schedule. In class, their conversations focus on texts ranging from the Bible to Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Native American myths and origin stories.

The Buzzards Bay Term aims to provide a healthy balance between working in the classroom and the outdoors. Studying the classics is immensely fulfilling, but it does not always allow us to directly engage with the surrounding world.

 “It was not the theory but the lived daily experiences that really gave us that experience into … what place-based learning means,” Tütüncü says.

Tütüncü took part in the Gull Island Institute’s “three-pillared” approach, emphasizing the importance of place in education. Each day involved a careful balance between study, labor, and self-governance. She and the other eight students—all from other colleges—woke up between 6:30 and 7 a.m. each day, depending on who was on breakfast duty.

In addition to reading and domestic chores, the students spent their days harvesting, cleaning, and sorting oysters on the nearby Cuttyhunk Island or woodworking, gardening, and monitoring local bird populations on Penikese Island, a wildlife sanctuary that belongs to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is managed by the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife.

The question of how to “live well” lies at the heart of a liberal arts education, according to Keilson and Reynolds. They wanted to shift that focus to include location, transforming the question into “how to inhabit a place well.” The Buzzards Bay Term experience requires awareness of surrounding ecologies, which can be challenging on a traditional college campus, where Keilson notes that the natural world can be invisible due to development.

“It’s easy to go through a college experience without recognizing that you are part of an ecosystem,” Keilson says. “You’re inhabiting a space and that ought to carry certain responsibilities.”

In formulating the question “How does one inhabit a place well?” Keilson and Reynolds intentionally phrased it in such a way to involve non-human life forms, whereas a liberal arts education is typically human-centered. It’s important, Keilson says, that the students are “reading some of these classic texts that lie in the humanistic tradition, where the human is at the center of inquiry, in this context where the human is really being de-centered just through daily life.”

She recounts the common experience of dodging birds around the island as they flock and chatter and go about their lives. Keilson does not think of them as a hindrance to the students’ experience: rather, learning to coexist with birds and wildlife is an integral part of both island life and academics at Gull Island Institute.

With their work on the islands, students become stewards of the land—and of one other. “What would it look like for a greater institution of this size to have a model like that, of self-governance, labor, and seminar?” Tütüncü asks. “What can I bring back to my own school, and what would make sense to incorporate into my school?”

 The Buzzards Bay Term also inspired her to think about the relationship between intellectual work and external acts of service.

 “There seems to be [an idea] that you need to pick one certain path and stick to it,” Tütüncü says. “Gull Island is trying to go against that and say, ‘You can, and maybe you should, apply yourself in different ways, connecting the mind and body.’”

In an era afflicted with the climate crisis, the connection between thought and action is becoming increasingly important. To Keilson and Reynolds, climate change is a multifaceted problem, and the work required to combat it is interdisciplinary. Climate change involves not just science, politics, and technology, but the liberal arts.

“The kind of flexibility of mind and imagination required to move between different registers … that’s the kind of training a liberal arts education affords,” Keilson says. “Those are the kinds of citizens we need in the world today.”

Keilson understands the urgency and nihilism that many feel regarding the climate crisis. For both her and Reynolds, a liberal arts education is uniquely well-equipped to make sense of these issues.

“[Climate change] raises questions at the heart of the liberal arts, about how we should live and what our responsibilities are, not only to other human beings but to the ecologies and earth systems that sustain us and other species,” Reynolds says. “It may be that in a world of climate change, we should revisit the answers that we have to those questions.”

Tütüncü’s days on Penikese Island were busy but fulfilling. “There’s a certain restlessness I feel normally that I did not feel when I was there,” Tütüncü says.

Being on a remote island with no commerce, no access to the outside world via digital media, and a strict no-drugs or alcohol policy, the students had to be creative with how they spent their free time. Keilson describes an evening when, out of “sheer joie de vivre,” the students went down to the shore for a dance party, an evening which Tütüncü also cites as a favorite memory from the program.

“There was something beautiful about [how] … the camaraderie they had built up kind of spilled over into this display of joy,” Keilson says.

 After her month on Penikese Island, Tütüncü has developed her own idea of how to inhabit a place well. “Listening, serving, being patient … the land speaks to you,” Tütüncü says. “It’s just about being attentive to the particular land you’re on.”

And she hopefully won’t be the last Johnnie to do so: In 2023, former St. John’s College board members Richard Groenendyke and Steve Feinberg learned about the Gull Island Institute and its innovative approach to the liberal arts from their shared brother-in-law, Dr. Brad Shingleton. A college friend of Shingleton’s works with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts; when said friend mentioned the nearby Gull Island Institute to Shingleton, he ‘immediately thought of” Groenendyke and Feinberg—and, in turn, their involvement with St. John’s College.

When Groenendyke and Feinberg found out about the 2024 Institute’s Buzzards Bay Term, they pledged to fund the costs for participation by the first successful St. John’s College applicant. They covered Tütüncü’s stipend, and hope to do the same for future Johnnies who elect to attend a Buzzards Bay Term.

Learn about the Gull Island Institute by visiting their website and through upcoming Buzzards Bay Term informational sessions on campus.