Glacier Bay Semester

Academics

If you want to change the world, you first need to learn about it.

Our seminar discussions are fueled by the close reading of political theory, scientific research, literature, and ethical and environmental thought — Tidelines students are called to encounter the world beyond the limitations of their experience, and challenged to live their answers to the questions they find there.

We see the liberal arts as the general education that a person needs in order to become a citizen, steward, and leader. Education at Tidelines, while rich in opportunities for personal contemplation, is not for your benefit alone— we seek students who are called to be of service to humanity and who have the courage to come to grips with the crises of our time.

To that end, our curriculum is organized around four crises:

Governance & Democracy – How do we balance conflicting goods? How do we allocate scarce resources? How do we arrive at a shared understanding of a problem and imagine and implement workable solutions? What are democratic norms and what has contributed to their recent erosion? The governance & democracy unit addresses these and other fundamental questions of democratic governance, both through political theory and practical case studies.
Justice & Equality – In this unit, participants will explore a major contemporary issue pertaining to justice and equality. A few examples include income inequality, climate justice, systemic racism, and Alaska Native politics. Regardless of the particular issue, this course takes an intersectional approach, exploring the ways in which matters of justice interact with one another.
Climate & Environment – With its tidewater glaciers, old growth forests, and largely intact ecosystems, southeast Alaska provides an ideal setting for study of the natural world. Employing both western and Indigenous approaches, this unit uses the Alaskan landscape as entry point for thinking about human relationships with the land.
Meaning & Purpose – Splashy headlines in the press have diagnosed our culture as suffering a “crisis of meaning.” From the personal to the global, students in this course wrestle with the big questions of epistemology. How do we find meaning in our own lives, and how do we act on it? In an era of “alternative facts,” how do we find shared understanding and purpose across boundaries of difference?
All students also take a fifth, place-based course on the Nature & Culture of Southeast Alaska

There is a great temptation for the intellect to specialize— but we must resist this. The aforementioned crises are deeply entangled with one another; they cannot be understood separately. And responses to these crises take the form of lives, which must be good lives if they are to be sustained; all convictions need to be nourished as well as forged. Our students cultivate habits of reading, writing, discussion, and personal reflection that sustain them long after they depart from Tidelines.

Interlocking crises demand a holistic education.

2026 Courses

Note: all Glacier Bay Semester courses are accredited through Western Colorado University. You will be able to access a transcript listing your grades for the following courses the January following the end of the program.

Governance & Democracy

“Friendship and Democracy” (POLS 397)
Joel Schlosser, Bryn Mawr College

This course brings friendship to imaginative and critical inquiry, examining the meaning of friendship, what it demands of us, and what kind of politics might emerge through practices of friendship. It seeks to illuminate the value of friendship for philosophical and political thinking while also pursuing friendship at the level of pedagogy and discipline. The course examines how classical authors and contemporary feminists have thought about the virtues and practices of friendship, and how contemporary political theorists characterize the politics that emerge from friendship. Readings will include theorists of virtue such as Aristotle; contemporary political theorists of identity and race such as Danielle Allen; storytellers of friendship like Toni Morrison; and sociologists like Francesca Polletta considering friendship and its role in political change.

Justice & Equality

“Climate Justice: From Knowledge to Action” (ENVS 397)
Zachary Brown, Tidelines Institute

Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. This all-encompassing crisis touches every aspect of our lives: where we live, how we work, the food we eat, water we drink, and air we breathe. It also touches (and exacerbates) all other social justice issues: systemic racism, gross inequality, poverty, hunger, housing, finance, transportation, public health. This four-week course will introduce students to the fundamentals of climate science, climate justice, and climate action.

Climate & Environment

“The Nature and Culture of Southeast Alaska” (ENVS 297)
Natalie Dawson, Tidelines Institute, & local guest instructors

Alaska is a land of contradictions. It has more intact ecosystems than any other state in the country, yet at the same time, its economy is highly dependent on the extraction of ore, timber, and above all, fossil fuels. It is the state most impacted by climate change, yet with some of the nation’s largest carbon sinks. It is the most sparsely populated in terms of people per square mile, yet also is home to vibrant and thriving Indigenous communities. In “The Nature and Culture of Southeast Alaska,” you will explore some of these tensions both through classroom-based and experiential learning. The course includes three significant field experiences, all mandatory. The first is a 10-day sea kayaking trip in Glacier Bay National Park, the second a visit to the Tlingit community of Hoonah, and the third, a stay at our Inian Islands Campus, surrounded by the Tongass National Forest. During both, you will explore and participate in the contemporary lifeways of rural Alaskans, lifeways lived by necessity in close conversation with the land.

Meaning & Purpose

“Education, Self, and Society” (SOC 397)
Laura Marcus & Tanner Horst, Tidelines Institute

Those with the freedom to pursue higher education will wrestle with the work of self-cultivation. For those without the scaffolding of creed or tradition, self-cultivation requires you to put forward provisional answers to questions like– Who are you? What you need? What do you want? In this seminar, students will learn many possible answers to these questions through inquiry into works of philosophy, fiction, and non-fiction that constitute different vantages on self-cultivation. Questions will include: What role should friendship and community play in the often-individualistic pursuit of education? How do we make plans for our lives, that is, gain sufficient self-knowledge to know what we can or should want for ourselves? What is the role of exercise, structure, and discipline in the process of self-cultivation? And how should the experiments that are our lives relate to tradition and what has come before?

The Self-Governance Pillar

“Self-Governance in Theory and Practice” (POLS 297)
Joel Schlosser, Laura Marcus, & Tanner Horst

Part seminar and part practicum, this course gives students direction for building the capacities of self-governance, informed by the theories and texts encountered in the classroom. Self-governance is one of the three “pillars” of the Tidelines Institute educational model, running throughout the program. By the end of the semester, students will have practiced, reflected on, analyzed, and grown in the three key capacities: the capacity to live in community; the capacity to discipline oneself; and the capacity to build and use power effectively.