At this year’s Clunan Lecture, Woodard spoke of stories that connect Americans. The lecture itself was part of another story — the legacy of two people whose idea became a lasting MDI institution.
Sep 23, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Viridian Law.
BAR HARBOR—There is a quote that Acadia Senior College sometimes uses in its programs.
“Sometimes, a strong institution exists in ‘the lengthened shadow of a single person,’” the college (ACS) writes.
A portion of that quote comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, as does the intent behind it.
Acadia Senior College grew from the idea of a couple: Dorothy and Jim Clunan who were foreign service officers. Jim first came to Mount Desert Island when he was young and because he was delivering a horse to one of his Seal Harbor relatives.
The couple retired here. When they did, they brought their ideas and their energy and their intellect with them.
According to a program for the Clunan Lecture that featured NYT-bestselling historian and journalist Colin Woodard, former ASC president Bill Dohmen said the college began with Jim.
“ASC was conceived during the intermission of a 1999 production of The Tempest at the College of the Atlantic. Jim summarized the senior college concept, and in response, Dorothy essentially challenged him to give it his best, which, with her enthusiastic support, he did.”
The idea, the work, the enthusiasm blossomed and grew. Friends were recruited, grants and start-up funds acquired, locations to meet found, instructors enlisted.
“I call it the bonus that we got from the medical profession,” Jim Clunan told the Bangor Daily’s Misty Edgecomb in 2001. “In the generations before mine, you worked hard, retired at 65, and didn’t last much longer. I want to see myself, and people like me, using their brains.”
Since 2000, there have been 850 courses taught at Acadia Senior College. That’s not all though. They’ve had “Coffee Clashes” where controversial subjects are debated; they’ve had “Food for Thought” lunches where people might meet an idea that they’ve never met before.
“You’ve got a lot of people who have been scientists or professors, and with retirement, the mind hasn’t slowed. They just have more time to spend,” Moorhead “Mike” Kennedy of Somesville, an Acadia Senior College instructor told Edgecomb in that same article. “This is a natural opportunity to come in, get to know people, expand your horizons.”
Though the island has lost some of the people who have started the college, the college itself hasn’t changed.
Underneath the intellect and the learning, there’s a beautiful core component to the work of the senior college. Every interaction is a chance to become more. It’s an opportunity for friendship, an opportunity to learn; it’s an opportunity to connect while educating or just having fun; it’s an opportunity to find ways to make lengthened shadows of their own.
Other than its office administrator and bookkeeper everyone is a volunteer.
Those volunteers often make the almost-miraculous happen like putting together a standing-room only lecture year after year.
AN OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN: COLIN WOODARD AND THE CLUNAN LECTURE
Colin Woodard has spent his career writing, thinking, reporting and building. He founded the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center, where he studies the regional cultures that have shaped American life and the stories Americans tell about themselves.
That was the subject of ACS’s Clunan Lecture this year.
Woodard explained his understanding of the United States as a country made up of distinct regional cultures, each carrying ideas and habits handed down from the people who settled them. Those differences, he argues, can still be seen in the ways Americans vote, worship, think about immigration and public health, and understand the country itself.
Woodard told the overflow crowd at the lecture where board members volunteered to be in the overflow room, “The regional divides are real. They are persistent.”
The question, then, was not whether those differences exist.
The question was what holds a country together when people can look at the same place and see such different things.
Woodard went back to the beginning.
The colonies that became the United States had a common enemy. The British threat gave people a reason to stand together. But an enemy, by itself, cannot carry a country forever. Eventually, something else has to do that work. Founding documents do some of that work.
But a story, Woodard said, that’s what really does the work.
It has to be a story people believe, a story they can see themselves in, and a story they can dream toward.
For Woodard, that story begins with the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and there was something fitting about that argument being made in a lecture named for the Clunans.
That’s because the Clunan Lecture is itself part of a story about what people choose to carry forward. This year, Rick Bernstein chaired the lecture committee and Acadia Senior College President Jeff Dunn welcomed the guests, but both men were quick to thank all the people, sponsors, volunteers, and the Parking Committee of No Name who made it happen.
Many years ago, Jim and Dorothy had an idea. Other people believed in it. They gave their time to it. They taught in it, organized it, raised money for it, welcomed people into it.
Then those people handed it to the people who came after them, people who still believed and gave time and welcomed.
That is how an idea becomes an institution and an institution becomes a story.
AN OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE THEIR OWN LENGTHENED SHADOWS.
Maybe what a “lengthened shadow” really is has nothing to do with applause or even recognition. It’s not about a statue or an award. It’s not having your name attached to a building. It is an idea that keeps moving after you have stepped away from it.
Jim and Dorothy Clunan could not have known, in the intermission of The Tempest in 1999, what would become of their conversation. They could not have known there would eventually be 850 courses, lectures filled beyond their expected capacity, coffee clashes and lunches and classrooms full of people still asking questions. They could have dreamed it though.
While the Clunans couldn’t predict the future, they could only do the next things. They had an idea, tried it, asked others to help, and then kept going.
That is what Acadia Senior College volunteers do now. Volunteers help make the phone calls. They organize the classes. They find instructors and rooms. They greet people at the door. They put out the signs and the chairs and, when necessary, wear the orange vests of that No Name Parking Committee.
It is easy to call that work “volunteering,” as if it were a small thing done around the edges of a life. Institutions—particularly local non-profits—are made of such things.
They are made of people who decide that something matters enough to give a little of themselves to it. Then somebody else does the same. And somebody else.
The shadow lengthens.
Maybe that is the most enduring lesson of the Clunans: that a life does not have to end at the edge of one’s own years. An idea can outlive its originator. A kindness can become a tradition. A room full of curious people can become a community.
And every person who gives their time, teaches a class, asks a question, welcomes a stranger or helps keep the doors open gets the chance to leave something behind, too.
A continuation.
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR FRIENDSHIP
The continuation that occurs in unexpected ways is exemplified in the Acadia Senior College’s band Glass Half Full.
“Twelve months ago, the fall course listing for Acadia Senior College included a class with an intriguing title: ‘Folk Singing for Those Who Once Did It and Would Like to Do It Again,’” Fred Benson explained this week.
The six-week session drew “eight talented and eager participants.” There are a ton of talented people involved at the college is various ways. Something different happened this time, though.
“When the course ended, the singing didn’t,” Benson explained. “A year later, the group continues to meet every week and has built a lively, multi-genre repertoire of more than 100 songs.”
Members of the group include Mark Soulliere, Bob Thayer, Andrew Trotter, David Chapman, Nancy Mckay, Annette Nicolas, Peg Olson, and Fred Benson.
“Now known as Glass Half Full, the group has become a continuing musical community fueled by enthusiasm, friendship, and a shared love of singing,” Benson said. “Among the group’s extensive repertoire are three original songs created by members Andrew, Annette, and Bob—a testament to the creativity that has emerged along with the singing.”
Glass Half Full serenaded the attendees as people gathered for the lecture at MDI Bio Lab. There was toe tapping; there was chatter and joy. Volunteers in orange vests ushered people to appropriate parking spaces on the lab’s campus.
According to its website, “Acadia Senior College began as a community project to provide ‘intellectual stimulation, practical knowledge, social interaction and fun’ for older persons in the Mount Desert Island Region.”
Those older people are just over 50 and their friendship was apparent.
Underneath the intellect and the learning, there’s a beautiful core component to the work of the senior college. Every interaction is a chance to become more. It’s an opportunity for friendship, an opportunity to learn; it’s an opportunity to find something you maybe did not know you were even looking for.
What Jim and Dorothy Clunan were really giving people all those years ago wasn’t just a place to take a class, or a lecture to attend, or another line on a calendar. They were giving people a reason to keep wondering.
And so the idea they carried with them when they retired to this island has outlived them. It lives in the classrooms and the Coffee Clashes, in the questions asked after a lecture, in the friendships that begin because two people happened to sit beside each other and discover they were both curious about the same thing.
That is how a place grows old without becoming old.
The Clunans gave Acadia Senior College its beginning. The people who came after them have given it a life. And somewhere in all those years of learning—850 courses and counting—there is the quiet proof of an idea that was never really about retirement at all.
It was about what comes next.
All photos: Carrie Jones/BHS
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America.
Acadia Senior College website.
There are more photos on our Facebook page from the event here.
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