Where you can go to grad school without going to a grad school
Institute serves adults seeking intellectual rigor, less commitment
NEW YORK — Say you’re bored by your 9-to-5. You’re intellectually understimulated, and you want a challenge beyond your book club, which, it turns out, is just you and your friends gossiping around a lukewarm charcuterie board.
What are your options? You could apply to graduate school, if you have the ambition, money and time. Or you could start smaller and enroll in a class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
The Brooklyn Institute is a nonprofit education center that offers evening and weekend courses for adults, catering to those who want the rigor of a liberal arts seminar but at a more modest commitment. The unaccredited classes are held for three hours each week for a month and are led by lecturers with advanced degrees.
Although adult learners can enroll in massive open online courses or extension school programs, the institute differentiates itself with more niche and left-field topics: the novels of Clarice Lispector; the history of trauma; transgender Marxism. The best part? No grades. Andres Begue, 32, discovered the organization this year after casually searching for continuing education opportunities online.
“It’s nice to be able to go into something that I have no context for and learn something new,” said Begue, who works in technology support at a software company. He was intrigued by a course about 20th century Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard.
On an evening in October, Begue joined 17 other students around a long wooden table at the institute’s white-brick office space in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo.
The group read texts like Woodcutters and Heldenplatz while snacking on corn chips and sipping boxed wine.
Lauren K. Wolfe, an associate faculty member who specializes in Austrian and German literature, guided discussions of the writer’s hectoring prose and disdain for Austrian culture as the group engaged with larger questions about literary critique, political memory and translation.
“At our core is the conviction that the idea that people are anti-intellectual is false,” said Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the institute’s executive director. “The idea that people don’t want to critically engage, that they just want five-minute sound bites, is false.”
Founded in 2012, the Brooklyn Institute began modestly, with a dozen or so people discussing Plato’s Republic over cheap pints at a bistro in the brownstone-filled New York City neighborhood Boerum Hill. Chaudhary, then a graduate student at Columbia University, had dreamed of an alternative to traditional academia while preparing to teach Columbia’s core curriculum. He was at a local bar and noticed interest from nearby patrons.
“People have always been like, ‘Oh, what’s that? I always wish I got a chance to study, you know, Aristotle or Plato,’ ” Chaudhary said.
The institute now has about 60 faculty members, five of them full-time, and offers around 20 courses a month, both virtually and in person. Instructors earn approximately 70% of revenue from what they teach, or about $3,500 per course — often a better deal than what they would make as adjunct professors.
“There is a structural problem in higher education,” said Nara Roberta Silva, a Brazilian sociologist who previously lectured at Lehman College.
In addition to teaching courses on social movements and postcolonial theory, she heads the institute’s “praxis program,” which provides workshops to labor unions, nonprofits and other public-interest organizations.
“I feel I’m a much better scholar because of this stability,” she said.
Particularly devoted learners can sign up for more bespoke services at a higher premium. Last year, the institute created a certificate program that’s essentially a yearlong master’s degree and also established yearlong intensive language courses in ancient Greek and Sanskrit (Arabic, Hebrew and Latin classes are in development for 2024).
Having hosted courses in London and Philadelphia, the institute expanded this month to Chicago, offering an introductory seminar on the Frankfurt School, a cohort of 20th-century German Marxist intellectuals associated with the organization’s namesake, the Institute for Social Research.
Hank Vandenburgh, 78, used to travel four to five hours from Palatine Bridge, N.Y., to attend classes on subjects like sadomasochism and the philosophy and politics of love.
“Because of the unusual specific topics the Brooklyn Institute has, I don’t think I’d be able to get those at a university around here,” said Vandenburgh, a retired professor. Since the institute introduced digital instruction in 2020, Vandenburgh has taken courses remotely, including one starting this week on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Although the change has diversified the institute’s pool, bringing in students and instructors from countries as far afield as China and Mozambique, the clientele skews white-collar and college-educated.
The institute, whose classes cost $335, provides a limited amount of pay-what-you-want scholarships. But even at a discount, some students may find it more cost-effective to join more casual reading groups elsewhere in New York City.
Swathi Manchikanti, 35, who took two urban design courses, said it could benefit the institute to advertise more widely.
“We’re reading all of these papers from all of these philosophers or architects who are talking about what the working class deserved, but I felt like we’d never really had a representative voice of a working-class member,” she said.
Still, Manchikanti appreciated how the courses opened up her thinking as a climate-adaptation and health expert at a United Nations agency.