Gull Island Institute

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Gull Island Institute

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Located on remote islands in Buzzards Bay, MA, Gull Island offers a new vision of liberal arts education for an age of climate change.

09/25/2026

Calling all Boston-area friends! Are you curious about the microcollege movement, beyond Gull Island Institute?

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 26th, our colleagues Jacob Hundt (Thoreau College) and Philip Francis (Seguinland Institute) will be presenting at the Harvard Divinity School’s 2026 Conference, “Belonging: Practices of Inclusion in Spiritual Communities, the Academy, and Society.”

The panel, titled “Place-Based Microcolleges as a Context for Cultivating Meaning and Purpose with Young Adults “ will take place from 1:30-3pm at HDS. For those interested in the work happening at Gull Island Institute and our peers in the microcollege movement, it’s sure to be a timely and engaging conversation.

Check out the conference website for registration information and more. (https://pes.hds.harvard.edu/belongingconference)

Event description:
Place-based microcolleges with intimate student cohorts and embodied, meaning-centered curricula are emerging as a unique and powerful strategy for addressing crises of belonging and purpose among young adults. In this presentation, two leaders of this nascent movement – Jacob Hundt, founder of Thoreau College in Viroqua, WI and Philip Francis, founder of the Seguinland Institute in Georgetown, ME – discuss how they weave together nature, work, art, spirituality, and community in their work with students.

Presenter Biographies:
Jacob Hundt is Executive Director of Thoreau College, a microcollege in Viroqua, Wisconsin offering immersive, holistic gap year programs. He attended Deep Springs College, the American University in Bulgaria, and the University of Chicago, where he received an MA in Social Sciences. He is the host of the Microcollege Podcast.

Philip Francis is Founder and Director of the Seguinland Institute, a microcollege in Georgetown, Maine, where he grew up - on a boat yard. He completed his doctoral work at Harvard Divinity School in religion and aesthetics, which resulted in his book, When Art Disrupts Religion. He is committed to advancing the emergent microcollege movement.

09/22/2026

Calling all Cape-based community members! There are only a few more days to register for our community workshop, "Stewards and Thinkers,” which will be hosted in partnership with Mass Audubon at their Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary on Saturday, October 3rd, from 9am-4:30pm!

Sign up for this free opportunity before Friday, September 25th, to reserve your spot. (Register here: https://bit.ly/4A9TNqz.)

More about the workshop:

This free, day-long immersive workshop will bring the Three Pillars model to the broader Cape community for the first time, engaging participants in land management projects, student self-governance, a collaborative seminar, and will feature a lecture by Dr. Nitana Hicks Greendeer about the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project in relation to the lands and waters of present-day Cape Cod. Lunch and refreshments will be provided free of charge.

This program is open to 15 participants from Barnstable County, ages 18+. Continuing education students are especially encouraged to apply! Sign up for the workshop while space remains! Registration closes Friday, September 25th.

Register here: https://bit.ly/4A9TNqz.

This program has been made possible with funding from the Mid-Cape Cultural Council, a local council of the Mass Cultural Council.

09/18/2026

Next Wednesday, the Gull Island Institute will be visiting The Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University for a lunch-hour roundtable conversation about place-based learning and Nunnian education. This conversation with Gull co-founders and co-executive directors Ana Isabel Keilson and Justin Reynolds is open to all Wesleyan affiliates, faculty, and students. The discussion will be particularly relevant to those interested in alternative models of liberal arts education -- and prospective students curious about Gull's programming, including the Gull Summer Term!

To our Wesleyan friends and colleagues in the area - we hope to see you there!

09/11/2026

Calling all Cape-based community members! We are excited to announce a new community workshop program, "Stewards and Thinkers," hosted in partnership with Mass Audubon at their Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary on Saturday, October 3rd, from 9am-4:30pm.

This free, day-long immersive workshop will bring the Three Pillars model to the broader Cape community for the first time, engaging participants in land management projects, student self-governance, a collaborative seminar, and will feature a lecture by Dr. Nitana Hicks Greendeer about the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project in relation to the lands and waters of present-day Cape Cod. Lunch and refreshments will be provided free of charge.

This program is open to 15 participants from Barnstable County, ages 18+. Continuing education students are especially encouraged to apply! Sign up for the workshop while space remains! Registration closes Friday, September 25th.

Register here: https://bit.ly/4A9TNqz.

This program has been made possible with funding from the Mid-Cape Cultural Council, a local council of the Mass Cultural Council.

09/03/2026

The 2026 Gull Summer Term marked an exciting transition to a new campus location on Martha’s Vineyard. As our flagship summer program for advanced undergraduates, the GST combines the three pillars of rigorous seminar, labor, and student self-governance. Here’s what one student had to say about their transformative educational experience at the GST:

“Gull Island is rigorous and also generously human–I’m not sure if I’ve been in an environment like that before. The three-pillared approach to education offers a lot to the student body: control over assignments, labor rotations, and discretion regarding an isolation policy. More radically, though, as L.L. Nunn writes in his letters, this education model doesn’t and shouldn’t simply give powers broadly, but believes “it would be the highest wisdom for [the SB] to acquire them.” I am of the mind that this power he writes about can be understood as responsibility.

Studying art, I found myself concerned that my siloed practice is at odds with a commitment to the good of the public–land, space, and people. I don’t think this has to be true. At Gull, I experienced an embracing educational totality! That is, an education necessarily more than strictly academic or artistic, that instead asks big, daunting questions with unfamiliar generosity: How does one live a virtuous life?

This past month, trying to “inhabit a place well”, trusting it and each other, and allowing ourselves to be our most idealistic and our most discouraged as a result, I am struck by the new responsibility I feel for my education, my relationship to land, and to my community.”

Carissa Chung, GST ‘26 Student, RISD ‘28

08/31/2026

Calling all Cape-based friends and community members! Join us tomorrow for the next installation of our community seminar on Plato’s Republic, hosted at the Woods Hole Public Library. This summer, we have been making our way through Plato’s Republic and the timely – and timeless – questions it raises about justice, education, democracy, tyranny and so much else.

If you are nearby, please join our next session on September 1st, for Books V-VII. If you were not able to join previously, you are still more than welcome to join in.

Discussion will be facilitated by our co-directors Ana Isabel Keilson and Justin Reynolds. Many thanks to the Woods Hole Foundation for their support of this series!

Please email [email protected] to request a .pdf of the reading.

08/13/2026

Check out a recent interview on NPR Cape and Islands () with Dan Martino, founder of and 2026 faculty at the Gull Summer Term!

This summer, students had the opportunity to work with and learn from Dan and his crew at Cottage City Oysters during aquaculture labor rotations. Aquaculture is one of the long-standing labor rotations in our programs, and we are excited to see that the important local work of oysterfishing is being highlighted in this feature.

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.capeandislands.org/show/the-point/2026-08-05/the-oyster-book

08/12/2026

Exciting news! A panel entitled “What Can Universities Learn From Microcolleges?” is being considered for the 2027 SXSW EDU conference. We need your help to get this panel on the official SXSW agenda!

Proposed panelists would include Laura Marcus (), Joel Schlosser (Bryn Mawr), and Ana Keilson (Gull Island Institute), with Tommaso Bardelli of Ithaka S+R moderating.

We hope this panel will help raise awareness of Microcolleges and all the great work going on in this field. Please consider “voting” for the panel at the link below. Creating a SXSW account is necessary in order to vote, but it takes just a minute. Community voting is open until August 23rd!

Here's the link to vote for our panel:
https://participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sxsw27/community-voting-edu/page/community-voting/session/1784988841612001nyky

08/11/2026

Our friend and colleague Frank Eccher’s piece on Nunnian education and Microcolleges was recently published in (in which Gull Island receives a few mentions!)

We are grateful as always to share insights on this moment in higher education with our brilliant colleagues in the Nunnian education space. Frank’s piece is a timely and thoughtful perspective on the promises and challenges lie ahead for those working to give higher ed a more vital future.

Read the full article, “A Vital Education,” here: https://thepointmag.com/correspondence/a-vital-education/?utm_source=Newsletter+%26+Subscribers&utm_campaign=4fb2446b41-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_23_06_07_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b585916701-4fb2446b41-&mc_cid=4fb2446b41&mc_eid=UNIQID

07/30/2026

Nunnian Education and the Microcollege movement are back in the news, again!

In addition to our interview with the Nation that was released in July, Gull was recently featured in an article in profiling the work of our friends at and the growing microcollege network. As the landscape of higher education continues to shift rapidly, this network continues to offer what conventional institutions struggle to deliver: purpose, orientation, and deep engagement in place. Many thanks to Kerry McDonald for engaging us in this piece.

Read the full piece here: https://us.list-manage.com/1721_Yh_si7?e=c14013bffb&c2id=0e5bab296965e935daa7d10dfec89e72

Address

17 Dusty Miller Road
Falmouth, MA
02540

Telephone

+19176567147

Website

http://www.gullisland.org/

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