The university is in crisis. Across the country, academic freedom is under attack. Decades of corporatization have hollowed out the humanities. The labor that keeps higher education running is increasingly performed by adjunct faculty—highly qualified scholars paid poverty wages, cobbling together courses at multiple institutions with no job security, no benefits, and no academic freedom. Meanwhile, students take on crushing debt for an education shaped almost entirely by market logic.

Serious intellectual life deserves a better home.

The Brook Farm Institute for Critical Studies (BFI) is an independent, non-degree-granting educational venture offering rigorous, discussion-based seminars (both in person in Boston/Cambridge and online) on topics spanning the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Our faculty include scholars with active research programs who are compensated fairly. BFI intends to offer the space, structure, and intellectual community for serious engagement with ideas beyond the neoliberal university.

In our name, we draw inspiration from the Transcendentalist utopians who founded the Brook Farm Institute for Agriculture and Education in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts—a motley crew of "pious professors and Infidels," as one contemporary observer joked.

To bring our seminars to a large audience, we need your help spreading the word. Funds raised here will support promotion, outreach, and rental space, ensuring a steady stream of students that will keep our doors open. This is a chance to help build something genuinely different: a vibrant community of learners, a fair home for scholars, and proof that intellectual life can flourish outside the walls of the neoliberal university.

Thank you for believing that it can!

***No raffles, sweepstakes, giveaways, or returns on investment are offered in exchange for any donations made to this GoFundMe.***