Virtual humanities: their study gains steam online. From the article:

Throughout the pandemic, versions of this close-reading conversation have taken place week after week. Organized through new nonprofits and small startups including the Catherine Project, Night School Bar and Premise, they bring together adults who want to spend their free time talking to strangers about literature and philosophy.

It sounds at first like an ambitious book club—except for the fact that many of these seminars are organized and led by college professors, some so eager to participate that they do it for free.

“Mostly it’s a way for them to do a kind of teaching they can’t do at their regular jobs,” explains Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project and a tutor (faculty member) at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland….

Concerns that have plagued other new online education operations—how to grade student work at scale, how to link learning with college credit—are the very questions that leaders of these programs reject. Instead, they ask what relevance grades, credit or credentials could possibly have to Greek mythology or feminist philosophy. And they raise new questions, about who should read those works, and how and why.

“A lot of people feel like they don’t have access to a place to share critical thought. Their daily lives and jobs don’t incorporate that,” says Lindsey Andrews, founder and director of Night School Bar, which is based in Durham, North Carolina. “People like to read, they want to talk about books, and they want meaningful relationships with other people. I think the arts and humanities gives us a site for doing all of those things.”

With fewer and fewer undergraduates studying English, history and philosophy in college, the site for such conversations may be shifting away from campus. Yet the rise of Zoom seminars pokes holes in predictions that these disciplines are in decline.

Maybe the humanities will be just fine. But what about the universities they leave behind?….

Prior to the pandemic, Andrews had considered opening a bar with a classroom in it, and she already owned the internet domain nightschoolbar.com. She repurposed the website and name and used them to organize a few more virtual courses with fellow literature scholar Annu Dahiya. In the past year and a half, Night School Bar has taught 750 people through 60 courses, funded by student donations that go to support instructors (currently paid about $1,200 per course). Some teachers are former Night School Bar students, others were actively recruited, and still others signed up after hearing about the mission, Andrews says: “The humanities are for everybody.”…

These three virtual seminar programs draw from different libraries. The Catherine Project, influenced by the Great Books curriculum of St. John’s College, teaches works including ancient Greek classics, Russian novels and German poetry. Night School Bar often tackles texts on queer theory, anti-racism and feminism. Premise arranges its courses around “enduring questions” informed by books and films both classical and modern that have some substance to them. As [Mary] Finn puts it, “I want people to feel they’ve eaten a healthy meal, not a junk food snack.”….

Disentangling discourse from grades is also a way to free it from universities. That’s not accidental. Some seminar organizers view their experiments not just as alternatives to academia, but as antidotes.

They worry not only that higher education limits who can access the humanities, but that institutions may also diminish those disciplines, even abuse them, by severing them from what [Chad] Wellmon calls “intellectual desire” and contorting them to answer questions they were not meant to satisfy—about job skills and starting salaries and career tracks. It’s common for universities to tout data about how liberal arts degrees are valuable for long-term earnings and highlight the ways literature, philosophy, history and the arts teach “soft skills” sought after by employers.

But students staring down decades of tuition debt don’t always seem convinced by this rhetoric. The number of graduates majoring in the humanities fell for the eighth straight year in 2020, while enrollments in business, engineering and health care are on the rise…..

Night School Bar is not shy about critiquing all this. “We believe education should enrich you, not exploit you,” its website proclaims. Its “Smash the University” course description doubles as a manifesto about the ills of higher education. It asks, “how and where can we study today?”

The implication is that it’s not only possible to study outside of academia—it may be impossible to study within it. And if the university has grown inhospitable to the humanities, perhaps scholars can smuggle them out, book by book, one affordable seminar at a time.