Can Liberal Arts Education Meet the Climate Crisis? One Approach

All photos are from Gull Island's March 2022 pilot program on Penikese Island.

Ana Keilson and Justin Reynolds are co-founders of the Gull Island Institute, a place-based liberal arts institute that is currently running programs off remote islands in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. I wanted to speak to them about what possibilities they see within the liberal arts. Can the liberal arts help us inhabit the Earth well? In this interview we recorded in February and revisited in April and May, we also discuss philosophy as a way of life, the critique of canonical knowledge, and manual labor.

Katherine: Thank you both for doing this interview. I hope it is exciting and interesting.

Ana: Thank you!

Katherine: How is higher education ill-equipped to address the problems that are pressing on us today?

Justin: We are thinking of this question mostly in terms of liberal arts higher education. Liberal arts colleges are really great places to learn how to read and write well, explore intellectual interests, and form really transformative relationships and friendships that, if you’re lucky, will last for many years into your life. But they are not good places to learn how to live well in an era of climate change. We think they can be, and the work that Ana and I have been involved in for the last year aims to show how this might be done. One important move, we think, is reimagining the place where liberal arts learning takes place and equipping students with the skills and capacities to make places habitable. What existing liberal arts colleges are ill-equipped to do is to enable students to understand their civic relationship to the land and the life-sustaining systems around them, and then to develop a capacity to act on that knowledge.

Ana: It’s not just a concern for undergraduates. It’s something that concerns everyone. I think that our position is one that many people have, which is that the climate crisis is an everything crisis. It is a problem that requires rethinking a lot of assumptions we have, not just about how we relate to non-human life and the systems that sustain us, but the kind of social and political forms that are necessary to act in the face of really pressing need and change.

It is also the case that for years, for decades even, people have been claiming that higher education in general, and the liberal arts in particular, are in crisis. In the case of the latter, we are not totally sure what that means. But it is certainly the case that you will be hard-pressed to find someone who is involved in higher education who thinks that the status quo ante is going well. So there is an opportunity here for real change.

What that means for us comes in response to a lot of questions our students have posed and the ways in which we have engaged with our students and our colleagues over the years. For them and for us, college and university life is not a place where one can ask questions about how we should live, what we should value, how we should act in light of those values, or what our responsibility is to others and to ourselves. Historically, the liberal arts have been a home to ask those kinds of questions. Today, college is often a track for a career, to paying off debt, to supporting one’s family, and rarely is it a place for asking fundamental, often philosophical, questions about how to live. We think it can be.

Justin: That does seem to be an important background here. The purpose of a liberal arts education has, historically, always been up for grabs, and ours may be a moment of particular uncertainty. It’s a good time for experiments.

Katherine: What has gone wrong in liberal arts education? Or what was never there such that liberal arts schools haven’t been able to help us think through their places and make their places as habitable as they could be?

Justin: That is a great question. There seems to be two very connected questions at work there. One is about how the liberal arts might not be all they used to be. The other is how the liberal arts might need to be reformed in order to address problems that are new, that didn’t exist in the past. And I think in practice it is impossible to separate those two questions.

We have oriented the Gull Island Institute in the first place around a constellation of problems and questions that are coming into focus around issues of climate and ecological change and the way that these are transforming our world, the world that we share with others. At the same time, the effort to reimagine liberal arts education for this world that’s coming into focus is an opportunity to recenter some questions that have always been present or possible in liberal arts education but that haven’t been as much of a focus as they ought to be. These include the questions Ana mentioned—about how we should live, about value, what makes a life worth living? It may be that these very old and (some say) fundamental questions have a place if we’re thinking about how higher education can address the climate problem—it’s a case of the challenges of the present allowing you to access parts of the past that maybe people have become less attentive to or lost sight of. That has informed the way we approach the liberal arts.

One day, we had a seminar in which an early modern historian and a geologist who were both in different ways thinking about the question of “what is an island?” taught an excerpt from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis alongside a US geological survey map of the island we were on. The seminar was part inside around the table and part geological walking tour of the island.

Ana: There are very real political and economic circumstances that have caused over the past several years—even going back to 2008—a real reckoning with the value of a liberal arts education. Is it worth going into crushing debt for that education? I think the double meaning of the word “value” is significant here. These are questions students are coming to us with: Is college worth it? To what end/s? They aren’t just reasoning instrumentally either. There is a lot of important growth that happens and a lot of important social worlds that open up in college. We have seen that at Harvard which is an example par excellence of the fact that the kind of relationships you form enable a different kind of future for some people. But it is there that students have come thirsting for asking questions of meaning and value untethered from any particular ends.

I am also thinking of how historically a crisis of the liberal arts or a crisis of the university system might be perceived differently today than, say, fifty years or a hundred years ago when people were claiming crises in various forms. A lot of liberal assumptions about the capacity for choice and self-creation are being upended. I think that many students are also torn, and I would say faculty too, between this notion of believing in a meritocratic system of achievement, the possibility for becoming and self-fashioning using the tools you learn in a liberal arts environment, and facing the reality that this is not in fact possible, due to crushing structural conditions. I think that there is a different kind of tension and reckoning that is present now in a way that there might not have been in certain moments where the liberal promise seemed more possible, more accessible. 

Katherine: I want to ask about the students that you described, Ana, who are coming to you with questions about how to live and about what is meaningful. Is there something within the university system, or something they create themselves, to meet them? What is the place of these students and their questions?

Ana: Having taught in Social Studies now for six years, I have witnessed a pattern. Students show up, and they don’t always know what they are getting into. They don’t come for the reasons you just identified. They show up because it’s an honors major, it’s hard, their friends are Social Studies concentrators and they want to take our introductory social theory course. Then they discover through reading Hobbes and Rousseau and Du Bois and Nietzsche that these close encounters with texts unlock powerful questions in their lives. It’s magical to watch students realize that taking a class to fulfill a requirement can be an occasion to think deeply about how they should live, what is the meaning of the work they do, how they should spend their time, or where their values come from. There is something extremely powerful about a close encounter with a rich text. It unlocks questioning and makes questions live for students. And for faculty. It is a joy to teach in such moments, because it means that I get to keep asking important questions, too.

Katherine: I want to ask you about Gull Island now. What is the relationship between its mission [“to cultivate democratic citizenship in an age of climate change” – ed.] and what we’ve been discussing about the liberal arts?

Justin: Liberal arts education has always been about a preparation for citizenship apart from any specific vocational training. When we think about our work as a preparation for democratic citizenship, that is a fairly traditional definition of what a liberal arts education aims for (though there are others). But that there are new conditions of citizenship in an age of climate change is something unique, and that is a response to the sort of wrinkle we find ourselves in now.

Ana: We chose the term “democratic citizenship” in our mission rather than the more common phrase that comes up, which is “public service” or “serving the public good”, which are terms we use often when we think about what we are doing and what our aims are. In conversations with our current and former students, they often point out that there needs to be more legs on the conversation of what it means to make an impact on the public good or of what it means to serve the public. We also want to understand these things better. Democratic citizenship felt more concrete; it’s also tied, historically, to the purpose of the liberal arts as a training ground for individuals in a polity, as Justin mentioned. Finally, the expression emphasizes the degree to which climate is an everything problem that requires a reckoning with how we live and how we govern.

Katherine: Why are you committed to labor and self-governance in addition to academics?

Justin: These three pillars [labor, academics, and student self-governance – ed.] are not original to us. It is a pedagogical model we first encountered while teaching at Deep Springs College where the model has been in place for over a hundred years. The departure that we take is that these three pillars are not intrinsically valuable. There is not something about labor in and of itself that is important for a liberal arts education. Or even the practice of self-governance in the unique way that Deep Springs and these other institutions undertake it. What is important about these three pillars is the way in which they allow education to do something that it is not very good at doing right now, which is to cultivate an understanding of our place within the Earth’s life-sustaining systems and a capacity to act around this.

So the claim is that there is something about work, perhaps particularly (and this gets to the issue of location) agricultural and aquacultural work, that makes you a participant in biological and geological processes in a very tangible way. The work allows you a place both to practice a participatory role deliberately and intentionally and to reflect on the process. Such a role is taken off the table in traditional liberal arts education based largely on classroom instruction. The same goes for self-governance. When students and faculty have a responsibility for the well-being of the place where their education takes place, when they are invested in the flourishing of life there, that connects us to life systems in a way that is really not possible in traditional models of education. There is a claim about the different sorts of relationships that have to be built in order for liberal arts to make good on its promise as preparation for citizenship. Our three-pillared model is an attempt to provide those.

Another day we had a Mashpee Wampanoag food sovereignty educator, a political ecologist, and someone from the New York City Parks Department who does land management. The three of them together, again partly outdoors walking and partly indoors around the seminar table, were asking questions about what is this place, what belongs here, what is a “native” species, what is “invasive,” what does land management mean here?

Ana: The three pillars provide an excellent way to connect thought to action. The capacity to deliberate, to decide, and then to follow through on something is required for the flourishing of any kind of community in any capacity, let alone communities that have to adapt in pretty radical ways to changing geographies, changing ecologies, changing economies, or changing social structures. The pillars point us to more philosophical questions about place and the specifics of what it means to do place-based learning, including the broader “place” of the liberal arts in the world we live in.

Katherine: Woah. This is a pretty deep challenge, deeper than what we thought about before. Earlier in this conversation there had been such an optimism about what the liberal arts can be, even as it is typically practiced—I had a sense of optimism. But hearing that the good life is much broader than what we can talk about in the classroom? Now the problem seems much deeper.

Have you thought of your work in relation to Ancient Greek conceptions of philosophy? Or to the ideas of people invested in recovering something like that? I’m thinking especially of Pierre Hadot here.

Justin: I love all of that. Thinking about this in relation to classical conceptions of philosophy is extremely fruitful. There is a claim in our way of approaching this question of how to live a good life about the relationship between work and spiritual exercise (using Hadot’s term). This seems to be a live issue—for us anyway—as it wasn’t for Greeks. I think to have told a classical Greek philosopher that labor is part of a good life would be met with incredulity. But I am not sure that’s right. Even if Hadot focuses mostly on ancient philosophy, the tradition he recovers seems to offer ways of challenging some of the prejudices of ancient philosophers themselves on this score. There is something very powerful about philosophy as a way of life: understanding the truth is not a cognitive act, it is about how we conduct our lives in their totality. That seems absolutely right. It is also something that colleges have struggled with. What place does philosophy as a way of life have on campuses, beset by the requirements of employment afterward, the building up of social capital, and meeting your degree requirements? It doesn’t leave a lot of room for that conception of philosophy as rich and as valuable as it is.

Ana: I love that answer. We’ve thought a lot about place, and about the role of manual labor in a liberal arts education. Here, I keep coming back to Marx’s concept of “species-being.” Marx was a very close reader of Ancient Greek philosophy, and there is something deeply philosophical about the early Marx, certainly about the [The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] where he first outlines his conception of species-being. I thought about that manuscript often when we were in our pilot program [in March 2022]. The idea that through work we communicate something fundamental about who we are: that is Marx at his most beautiful and most philosophically poetic (or poetically philosophical), dare I say. It’s also interesting to think about, too, because for Marx, what distinguishes us from other species is our ability to inhabit worlds of our own making. Does this hold now, for us, at this moment of climate crisis? There’s a fruitful tension in thinking with Marx about this in the present.

Justin: I think it is important to say that our exploration on Gull Island is not responsible without an engagement with Indigenous knowledge traditions and understandings drawn from those histories and communities about what it means to live a good life, what it means to be free or sovereign. Apart from Ancient Greek and Marxist traditions, for instance, Native and Indigenous thinkers have framed rich modes of inquiry into how to live in right relation to the land and the non-human. That is a dimension that we are learning about from our faculty and partners in the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag communities, as well as other Native and Indigenous folks who are involved in our project and are actively shaping Gull Island and our curriculum. For us, this is one of the most exciting and meaningful parts of the project.

Katherine: When did it become clear that learning only the classics of Western thought wasn’t enough? Was that part of a critique of liberal education?

Ana: Roosevelt Montás has been a colleague and interlocutor of ours from the beginning. A lot of the way that he goes about thinking about canons has shaped our thinking. Canons are de facto about scrutiny and are continually subject to revision. That is sort of the purpose of them. It often gets lost, and it is something that we have talked about for years in Social Studies and at Columbia/ Barnard where we also taught, these hubs of great books learning.

There is also currently a very robust corner of scholarship that is thinking about the entanglements (often, through historical colonial encounters) of Indigenous and Western political, philosophical, and social thought traditions. That scholarship is showing that it is not just about a side-by-side treatment of Western and Indigenous knowledge traditions, but actually there are real discursive, historical entanglements that exist between them. In our core seminar, for example, we take the case of the Eliot Indian Bible, which in the 17th century was the first translation of the Bible into an indigenous language (Wôpanâak / Wampanoag) in North America. Not only is the Eliot Bible significant as a work of historical and archival evidence, it also served as very important source material for the modern reclamation of the Wampanoag language through the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project in the 1990s. Looking at how words were translated (and mistranslated!) we can begin to understand something deeper, conceptually, about, say, how land, places, or power relationships between people were articulated in different worldviews at different times. That is a point that we intellectual historians want to interrogate and think through how to put into practice in a core curriculum, something that our students are very interested in doing as well. Not just reading texts side by side, but understanding how they are entangled dynamically and dialectically.

Katherine: How do you choose which texts to study? And how do you read a text in light of place? This doesn’t have to be an abstract question, either. I’m curious about what you literally did.

Justin: One cool thing about the moment we are in now is that there are a lot of different groups of scholars trying to do place-based education in different ways. For some folks, such an education can mean a different way of relating to the communities that are geographically surrounding and supporting institutions of higher education. For others, place-based education can mean a way of doing hands-on or practical activities as part of schooling. We think all of this is exciting, and we are glad to be part of what might be called the place-based education movement. But our approach is also particular and has taken its inspiration from questions about climate and ecology and how you make a place habitable.

Making a place habitable is a constructive act and provides an interesting alternative to the critique of canons, Western traditions of philosophy, and of social theory—work the academy is pretty good at already. Well, I don’t want to say it’s necessarily very good at it, but it’s very invested in it, and it’s a very familiar thing, at least in the academic environments we’re familiar with. The critique of canonical knowledge, the critique of the colonial structures within traditions of thought is one, crucial part of a liberal arts education. But sometimes that critique can leave off another dimension of engagement which confronts the question, What now?

So you have taken a course which has prepared you to be critical in sophisticated ways of the texts that you’re reading, the world around you, and of the institutions you inhabit. That’s vitally important. But then what do you do with that knowledge? One of the advantages of placed-based education as we understand it is that it gives you a chance to dwell on that constructive moment. We wanted to develop a curriculum that would allow students to really ask the question of what we ought to do together as a student body, as a community, in this place. So we went about choosing texts that had some bearing on the history or ecology of the place of Penikese Island. And this turned out to be a truly interesting thing, because the history of Penikese Island is rich, complicated, and tragic in many ways.

I can give you some examples. Penikese was the site of the first school of natural history in the United States, founded by the naturalist Louis Agassiz, a towering figure in nineteenth-century geology and biological science. Also an extremely compromised figure: A defender of polygenesis, a racist conception of the separate evolution of different races, who trained his students to read off God’s hierarchies in the natural world, a bitter antagonist of Darwin’s concept of natural selection and a proponent of what we would now call a variety of “intelligent design.”

We wanted to read some of Agassiz’s texts when we went to Penikese to understand the ideas that passed through and helped to shape this island that we are on. We thought that that was important, because that knowledge confronts us with the question of, okay, given the uses to which this island has been put in the past, what do we do now? What is our responsibility to the place, to the future, and to one another by virtue of our being here? Being critical of Agassiz is not difficult. But thinking about what to do with the places that he helped make is important. 

If you read Agassiz, you can read Darwin to understand what was at stake and the time and perhaps today in their disagreements. Ours is a great place to read Origin of Species. It turns out to be a great place to read The Tempest as well, and not only because that is a text concerned with the political and imaginative possibilities of islands. There is a fascinating relationship between the travel accounts of early European explorers—including possibly of the Elizabeth Islands—and the writing of The Tempest. That is also an invitation to consider Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest, and the anti- and post-colonial reworkings of Shakespeare. Anyway, there are a number of texts you can engage inventively on the Islands, and to read them in place is to raise questions about constructive reading.

Ana: The idea of constructive reading and the question of what do we do now raises the question of what equips you to act. This is another moment where liberal arts learning becomes exciting. There is so much available to supply you with dynamism, momentum, and ideas to think about local capacities, your abilities, who you are, and to imagine the future. Some of that requires unsettling or disorientating yourself from your habits of mind and habits of action. The material that we study in our place of learning helps us to step out of an overly burdened mindset of critique to a different mindset where we begin to see the world a bit differently as something to make.

When we developed our first curriculum for the March 2022 pilot, we began with a dialogue with all the faculty. And we had faculty across disciplines co-teaching based on interests that we knew they had or that we had spoken with them about. Many of those interests and many of those texts were informed by the kinds of questions that this particular place, Penikese Island, asks of us. But then we gave faculty free (liberal!) rein to think through their interests.

One day, we had a seminar in which an early modern historian and a geologist who were both in different ways thinking about the question of “what is an island?” taught an excerpt from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis alongside a US geological survey map of the island we were on. The seminar was part inside around the table and part geological walking tour of the island. Another day we had a Mashpee Wampanoag food sovereignty educator, a political ecologist, and someone from the New York City Parks Department who does land management. The three of them together, again partly outdoors walking and partly indoors around the seminar table, were asking questions about what is this place, what belongs here, what is a “native” species, what is “invasive,” what does land management mean here?

Katherine: The idea of constructive reading makes me wonder about responsibility. Most of the understandings of responsibility I read deal with questions about what a state is responsible for or what a person is responsible for by virtue of being a citizen of a state. Hannah Arendt comes to mind especially. There seems to be something in that binary (state/citizen) that remains under-theorized when it comes to place. The place we are at makes a demand on us. Are only states or individuals the locus of responsibility?

Ana: Place-based responsibility is certainly not under-theorized in Indigenous philosophy!

Justin: There is so much to learn from Indigenous communities and knowledge.

Where does politics end, if human beings have become—as the concept of the Anthropocene suggests—a geological force, and divisions—between culture and nature, the human and the non-human—are no longer to be taken for granted? Conceiving of politics as specific to human beings is unnecessary and potentially dangerous in a world where human beings exert a dominant impact on planetary systems and where the natural world, in turn, has attained a kind of agency over our lives that is uncanny. It was seventy degrees here earlier this week and now there is an inch of snow outside.

Ideas of responsibility like Arendt’s or the Greek thinkers on which she builds are in need of revision. Yet you can also say that Arendt was ahead of her time in some of her conceptions, and I am thinking in particular about The Human Condition and the way she really does tie politics and the sphere of freedom that politics represents to life on Earth. She is writing in the late fifties after Sputnik has demonstrated the possibility of space travel, and she wants to say the human condition actually binds us to life on Earth and vice-versa in fundamental ways. That thought seems incredibly rich. It’s a question I would like to think more about, especially now that you raised it. It is true that the place she imagines is planetary, it is not, shall we say, local, but the fact that it’s terrestrial opens up possibilities that some of the other dimensions of her thought foreclose or don’t pursue. 

Ana: I’m glad you asked that question, because I want to spend more time thinking about it. I am reading Arendt’s Jewish writings right now. A lot of her thought there actually has to do with the historical and political specifics of place and the diasporic identity of individuals and community in the wake of displacement. This has broader resonances, historically, with the particular place that we are in—the Cape and Islands—especially if we consider the histories of its Indigenous communities or the liminal political status and exile of individuals who were effectively incarcerated on Penikese Island when it was a leper colony in the first decades of the twentieth century. Though obviously in a different context, Arendt’s writing in exile attunes us to issues of movement, displacement—how belonging and identity are shaped by very particular physical places, both near and far.

I’m drawing on one of my students here who is writing about this. What happens when you are relocated to a different physical place, potentially against your will, yet you maintain a philosophical worldview and political organization that are very much grounded in the specifics of place and your point of origin? The concept of “place,” as some thinkers like Aristotle have argued, is something bound, finite, and distinctly not universal. But for us moderns, this is really hard to grapple with! And I personally need more time to understand it (and Aristotle’s Physics) better. I like thinking with Arendt, because she enables us in our twenty-first-century cast of mind to dig into the particulars of Penikese while moving to some kind of broader universal. That is necessary for our students and our faculty if we want to make good on our mission at Gull Island.

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Reflecting on this interview, I was struck by the idea that revisiting our past in light of the problems of the present may help to shed light on each. Study that is responsible and empathetic attends to both the past and the present. What might past and present have to say to each other?

This is the last post of my mini-series, series five of Into Philosophy. Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Sidra Shahid, and I undertook an effort of attention to the most ordinary parts of our lives as well as to old traditions of philosophy. We tried to act with seriousness and care. The entire project sought what was meaningful, true, and loving. It lovingly butted heads with the institution of academic philosophy when it seemed out of touch with those qualities.

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Thanks for reading Starting Out in Philosophy!