Night School Bar and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research offer alternatives to traditional academe.
by Ariannah Kubli | February 14, 2024
As Lindsey Andrews prepares to teach, she searches for a misplaced HDMI cord. “If I can’t find it, I’ll just summarize the video I was going to show,” she tells the couple of students who arrived early.
Andrews stands next to a portable whiteboard on which she’s written in large letters: “It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” She faces half a dozen tables, not yet full but getting there. Behind her, a bartender mixes drinks under the low glow cast by sconces and pendant lights. Exposed ductwork, a worn brick wall, and polished concrete flooring lend an industrial feeling to the space.
While patrons sip cocktails at the bar, Andrews shuffles through her backpack. Soon, a few more students appear, and eventually so does the HDMI cord. Meanwhile, a young man sporting a flannel shirt and beanie compliments a classmate’s laptop background — a photo of a dog — and the two strike up a conversation. A few minutes before class time, the rest of the students shuffle in, but they don’t enter through the main door. Instead, they move into the classroom from the bar, carrying their drinks with them.
“We’ll get started shortly. If you haven’t had a chance to grab a drink or a snack, you still have a few minutes,” says Andrews. Not long after, she closes the large metal sliding doors that separate the classroom from the bar.
Despite its familiar attributes — an instructor with a terminal degree, finicky technology, and the words of a renowned critic (Fredric Jameson) scrawled across a whiteboard — this classroom and the students inside sit about three miles from the nearest college campus. Night School Bar, in Durham, N.C., is not affiliated with a university. This independently run program offers pay-what-you-can arts and humanities courses to interested adults, no application or prerequisites required. Founded by Andrews in 2020, Night School Bar originally operated on Zoom, attracting students from across the country and around the world.
In the early days of the pandemic, Andrews’s desire for connection with other people led her to offer a free online class, “Art & Illness,” to the general public, which she advertised via Twitter. The topic of the course felt relevant to current events, while also allowing Andrews to draw on her expertise as a scholar of science, medicine, and literature. “A lot of people signed up for it, and that let me know that people wanted to have access to this kind of education, and that there were obviously barriers in place to keep them from doing that otherwise,” Andrews says of that first class. “From there, I formalized the program.”
Although Night School began with courses on Zoom, Andrews intended from the start to ultimately host the program at a bar. While a graduate student at Duke University, Andrews moonlighted as a bartender, and in 2015, while teaching at North Carolina State University, she co-founded Arcana, a bar in downtown Durham. At Arcana, her conversations with patrons revealed their interest in her academic pursuits. “As I was talking about a class I was teaching, they’d say, ‘I want to take that class,’” she recalls. So, Andrews decided to bring those classes to them. By drawing on her scholarly and pedagogical expertise as well as her bartending and management experience, Andrews could create an alternative space for study with a built-in revenue stream. She could also act on her conviction that the humanities need not be confined to traditional institutional spaces. “We’re really very interested in saying that study is not a specialized thing you do in a specialized place,” she explains. “It’s a thing that’s for everywhere, and every conversation that you’re having can be a kind of study.”
After three years and some 3,000 students, Night School Bar opened its brick-and-mortar location in Durham last October. The bar sits on a commercial block of the historic Old Five Points neighborhood, just northeast of downtown. Night School Bar’s faculty — 11 experienced instructors with terminal degrees — still teach some courses on Zoom, but now locals can gather in person to discuss ideas and build community. The program offers reading groups on novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Nella Larson’s Passing, creative-writing workshops with themes such as “The Language of Loneliness” and “Black Feminist Paths to Freedom,” and five-week seminars on subjects ranging from “U.S. Fiction and the Literary Imagination” to “Post-Capitalist Ecology.” The demand Andrews saw in 2020 hasn’t lagged as other social spaces have reopened, either. “We have people who sign up for one class and then immediately sign up for five or six more,” Andrews tells me.
On the evening of my visit, the group has gathered for a one-day seminar, “How to Talk About the Problem with Capitalism,” not to fulfill a curricular requirement, but to satisfy their curiosity. As class begins, students share their varied motivations for attending. One man, a manager at a distribution center, wants to introduce more leftist ideas into his workplace. The local at the next table over wants to work on envisioning what society ought to be rather than accepting what it is. Others wish for help finding the words for phenomena they experience but can’t describe. “Even though I think about issues with capitalism all the time, I feel like trying to talk about it always leads to frustrating conversations,” explains the woman sitting next to me. “I’m hoping this class will help me when those situations arise.”
Developing an understanding of a complicated topic like capitalism — its history, its terminology, the critical discourse surrounding it — would typically require upper-level courses in philosophy, history, and political economy. Night School Bar’s seminar offers the chance to begin that process for working adults without the means, time, or energy to re-enroll as traditional university students.
Night School Bar is a recent addition to a growing list of organizations dedicated to expanding access to college-level courses beyond the traditional university. As inspiration, Andrews cites the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, an established program with a similar structure. Founded in 2012 by a cadre of Columbia University graduate students — Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Abby Kluchin, Christine Smallwood, and Michael Brent — the Brooklyn Institute hosts in-person and online college-level classes throughout New York City. In-person classes take place not only in the institute’s office-turned-classroom space in Brooklyn, but also at cultural centers, bookstores, and other partner institutions. After meeting in a pedagogy seminar, the four early-career scholars bonded over a mutual love of teaching, Kluchin tells me. They hosted the first Brooklyn Institute class, “Plato and Aristotle: Politics of the City,” in the backroom of a local Brooklyn bar. “That was more than 10 years ago and now we have more than 50 faculty, and we teach more than 100 classes a year,” says Kluchin. “There’s this whole population of people who can’t put academia or study at the center of their lives but have this hunger for it, and we tapped into that.”
Like Night School Bar, courses at the Brooklyn Institute recall those encountered in a conventional graduate program in the humanities, offering such courses as “Fichte: Freedom, Philosophy, and the Self” and “Poetry and American Modernism: Reading William Carlos Williams.” “They’re very much liberal arts-style seminars,” Kluchin tells me. While not pay-what-you-can like Night School Bar, the Brooklyn Institute’s $335 fee per course makes these seminars just as financially accessible as local community-college options while offering access to the type of specialized study usually reserved for master’s and doctoral students.
Both the Brooklyn Institute and Night School Bar strive to keep their courses accessible — the latter’s slogan is “Arts and Humanities, For All” — without sacrificing seriousness and rigor. “We do a lot of pedagogy training, we have internal pedagogy summits,” Kluchin explains. “There’s a really big emphasis on meeting students where they are and knowing that there’s going to be an incredibly wide range of backgrounds.” Andrews and her colleagues also keep the goal of accessibility in mind as they develop materials for their courses, like the reader Andrews shared with her seminar students before class time. This document provides succinct definitions of important concepts and outlines a brief history of capitalism, before offering students 30-some pages of representative excerpts from the writings of such thinkers as Rosa Luxemburg and Angela Davis. “We think really carefully about how to select key readings and also offer lots of summaries and information to people so that we can discuss ideas together without requiring tons of outside of class time,” says Andrews.
In these unconventional settings, instructors and students can study the material together without worrying about exams, essays, or grades. This means no one is at a disadvantage for not coming from the income bracket that produces “good test takers,” nor do full-time workers have to carve out hours from their busy schedules to write essays. “We’re not in the business of assessing or evaluating students at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research,” says Kluchin. “Students are setting their own goals for what they want to get out of the reading and conversation; they are taking the course for a whole host of reasons of their own.” The absence of standardized assessment shows potential students that they’re welcome in these spaces, no matter their educational background.
Back in Durham, Andrews discusses the history of capitalism with her students. When she comes to the enclosure of the commons in medieval England, she emphasizes that this act of privatization — something that ought to be a public good, like land or the internet, becomes privatized for the profit of an individual or a corporation — is a central function of capitalism. “Capitalism always finds new things to enclose for someone else’s benefit,” she tells her students.
One of those things, implied in the very existence of Night School Bar, is higher education itself. As Andrews and her colleagues explain in a post on Medium, “The university is now prohibitively expensive for those who want to study and prohibitively exploitative for those it would employ, too.” Much has been written about the corporatization of the university, the student-debt crisis, and the rise of the university’s unsustainable reliance on adjunct labor — all interrelated problems that programs like Night School Bar and the Brooklyn Institute are deliberate about not reproducing. In contrast to the typical four-year institution of higher education in the U.S., where student loans average $28,950 per borrower, Night School Bar’s sliding-scale tuition model eliminates the need for loans, as does the Brooklyn Institute’s low $335 fee. As for those who can’t afford the $335 tuition, Kluchin tells me: “We offer scholarships in every single class. People are not turned away.”
These ethical commitments extend to the faculty, as well. While more than two-thirds of faculty members at colleges and universities in the U.S. work without the security and benefits of the tenure track, and a quarter of those contingent faculty members qualify for at least one public-assistance program, these programs prioritize paying instructors fairly for their work. The Brooklyn Institute, for example, commits to paying instructors a full 70 percent of tuition revenue, typically about $4,221 for a four-week course. By comparison, the average pay for an adjunct university instructor in 2020-2021 ranged from $2,979 to $5,557 for a 15-week course. “We are not just replicating the adjunct model,” Kluchin insists. “We are compensating instructors for their intellectual labor.”
While faculty members at both programs support efforts across academe to improve conditions for workers and lessen the financial burden for students — both Andrews and Kluchin have worked as non-tenure-track instructors — they also recognize an urgent need for educational opportunities beyond the traditional classroom. “When I went to college, there was still a sense that it’s a reasonable thing to believe that you can live the so-called ‘life of the mind’ and also pay your rent, and I think increasingly that people are accurately perceiving that that may not be the case,” says Kluchin. “But that doesn’t mean that people should have to sacrifice the vital human experience of learning together in a way that is deeply about community, about building emotional and intellectual bonds as well as developing the self and learning about the world.” In another essay published on Medium, the faculty of Night School Bar echo that sentiment: “Our dream is to move study out of the university, and into the commons: into the spaces in which we already create social life together.”
Moving study into the commons means welcoming a wide array of students into the classroom, rather than just those students who can navigate the often-confusing college-admissions process, afford tuition, and commit themselves to years of coursework. “These tend to be the most diverse classes we have ever taught in terms of student demographics,” Andrews tells me. “We see people from all over the world, all different ages, races, genders, abilities, backgrounds.” Kluchin notes the wide array of students in the Brooklyn Institute’s classes, too: “We’ve had students without a high-school degree, and we’ve had students with two doctorates, so it really runs the gamut. And it really runs the gamut in terms of forms of employment. It’s not just a space for white-collar professionals.”
Instructors witness firsthand the intellectual benefits of such diversity. The interesting and unexpected conversations enabled by the varied perspectives of Night School Bar students make instructors feel like students again, too, Andrews explains. When teaching a class semester after semester to traditional undergraduate students, Andrews began to anticipate their responses to the material. But when teaching the same class at Night School Bar, “I don’t know what experiences people will be coming with, what ideas they’ll have, what they’re going to observe about the material.” The diverse viewpoints and life experiences brought to these classes call to mind courses at community colleges and regional public colleges across the country, where students tend to be older and more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and class. As at Night School Bar, the low barrier to entry of these often relatively affordable institutions encourages a student population more representative of the wider community. Rarely at a community college, though, do students have the chance to take classes like “Anti-Imperialism in the Contemporary Literary Imagination” or “Feminist and Anti-Racist Philosophies of Love.” Working with tight budgets, strict requirements for state funding and accreditation, and — in the case of many two-year colleges — the goal of offering transferrable credits, such institutions are not often in a position to offer the specialized courses found at programs like Night School Bar and the Brooklyn Institute.
Another difference between a para-academic institution like Night School Bar and a community college? Night School Bar doesn’t, and doesn’t plan to, offer college credit for courses completed through the program. While hoping to provide interesting, affordable classes to a wide range of adults that don’t reproduce the barriers around traditional higher education, Night School Bar refuses to participate in the prevailing focus on credentials seen in the university today, Andrews tells me. In a Gallup survey of over 86,000 adults, 58 percent cite career outcomes as their main motivation for attending college, while only 23 percent cite a desire to learn for its own sake as part of their decision. These statistics are reflected in the high percentages of business, tech, and pre-professional majors across colleges and universities in the US: in 2020-2021, just four fields — business, the health professions, biological and biomedical sciences, and engineering — constituted nearly half of all bachelor’s degrees conferred.
Since so many students see college as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, they choose courses of study they feel will lead most directly to a preferred career (despite evidence demonstrating that liberal-arts majors fare just as well on the job market). Universities themselves embrace this role, touting grads’ employment rates and starting salaries to prospective students. “It feels pretty hard to think of what is currently called ‘higher education’ as something that is actually interested in study anymore,” Andrews says. “It’s really become a factory for credentialing.”
Kluchin holds a similar view. “Student-loan debt is so enormous, you’re paying however much for this for decades of your life, so you need to have a return on your investment as a college student,” she tells me. “Whether or not we want it to be that way, it’s how it is.” In this environment, the pursuit of advanced intellectual exploration for its own sake becomes increasingly rare. “I think the non-market-driven version of that is like, ‘Let’s read some books and take them really seriously and come and talk to each other about it, and see what emerges,’” Kluchin says. “And that is fundamentally something you cannot measure. It’s going to happen differently in every class. I think it’s increasingly difficult to make that happen in a traditional college or university.”
These programs are part of a longer history: their commitment to offering opportunities for communal study outside the university follow in the footsteps of other free or low-cost, non-credentialing, extra-institutional spaces for study, which date back over a century. As the political theorist Eli Meyerhoff details in his book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, communal study outside the university has a long history. Anarchist schools like the Escuela Moderna and the Ferrer Center, founded in the early years of the 20th century, sought to create a microcosm of anti-authoritarian social space. Later, these projects influenced the influx of experimental colleges and free universities in the 1960s, which appropriated university resources for the purpose of increasing access to collective study, while also advocating for the development of ethnic-studies and Black-studies departments within universities. Similar programs emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Experimental College of the Twin Cities, with which Meyerhoff himself was involved.
Other organizations have appeared in recent years, as well. Profs and Pints, founded in 2017 by the former Chronicle reporter Peter Schmidt, organizes lectures in nine cities across the country; venues include breweries, restaurants, and bars, and tickets typically cost $13.50 in advance or $17 at the door. Forthcoming lectures in Washington, D.C., their main location, include “Emily Dickinson’s Love Life” and “Race and Fast Food.” In Chicago, the Newberry Library offers four- to eight-week courses such as “Silk, Silver, Amber: Ancient Trade Routes and Eurasian Civilizations” and “The Lady Detective: From Victorian Sleuth to Feminine Noir.” Class fees vary, but none exceed $300. In these programs and others like them, adult students engage with ideas, texts, and one another, while faculty members earn fair compensation for their labor.
In a climate in which universities continuously disinvest from the arts and humanities, programs like Night School Bar and the Brooklyn Institute encourage us to ask a provocative question: What could communal study look like beyond the confines of institutions increasingly apathetic, if not openly hostile, to our work? For Andrews and Kluchin, that portrait centers a diverse, deeply invested community of learners. “It feels energetic, it feels purposeful, it feels a little like an adventure,” Kluchin says of a typical Brooklyn Institute class. Andrews describes Night School Bar’s classes similarly: “You often leave the classroom buzzing with ideas and thoughts and connection. There’s a real sense that people are getting a need met that they maybe didn’t even know they had.”
The enthusiasm for the humanities seen in these unconventional spaces adds a refreshing countercurrent of hope to an otherwise perpetual discourse of crisis. Night School Bar and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research demonstrate that the university is not the only — nor perhaps even the best — space for humanistic study. This doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the traditional institutions that many of us depend upon for our livelihoods and our means of continuing our intellectual work (although the number of those who can depend on an institution of higher education for stable employment is shrinking). Advocating for systemic change undoubtedly remains crucial. But so does the cultivation of alternative spaces where teaching and learning can take place. “My hope,” Kluchin says, “is that we see more and more places spring up that understand that doing intellectual work together is a deep human need.”