It's hard to get what you need out of school. These days higher education is more about credentialing and management than study. But what about those of us who want to learn about our world, make it a more just place, and use our creativity for meaningful connections in community? What’s missing from higher education is exactly what we offer! We specialize in primarily online arts and humanities courses that emphasize socially-conscious, anti-racist, and feminist learning and encourage ethical engagement with our world, the environment, and each other. And we do so all on a pay-what-you-can donation basis, while remaining committed to paying our faculty a living wage. This is why we need a strong scholarship fund!

Since formalizing our program in November 2020, we have taught 60 classes to over 750 students across the globe. Of these students, over 70% take a partial-tuition scholarship of some kind, with 30% taking a full-tuition scholarship. This means we’re continuing our mission of making the arts and humanities accessible to everyone, anywhere. But, we’ve been facing a critical funding shortage. In order to continue offering affordable courses with scholarship options for all, we need your support.

Every dollar helps us become more sustainable, continue to pay our faculty fair wages for their labor, and offer even more affordable courses open to all. With your help, we can reach our goals in the new year!

In addition to our donation-based courses, we also offer one-off programming through our Patreon, including teach-ins on topics like critical race theory and Marx, works-in-progress workshops for academic writers, general lectures, and more. Going forward, we will be making this programming free to the public! Your donation also supports this effort to build a community of scholarship, which broadens our reach to those who may not have the time to take a full course. Our free, public programming will continue to center the essential arts and humanities topics covered in our courses, including anti-racist studies, feminist and gender studies, labor and capitalism critique, arts and writing, and more. 

Today, it is more important than ever that we all have access to a robust humanities education in order to understand and make meaning of the world we live in. History and anthropology allow us to see how our world changes through time and across cultures; philosophy gives us critical tools for understanding and opposing the systems of domination under which we live; literature and the arts allow us imagine new meanings and increase our experience of fulfillment; writing and creative workshops give us tools for self-expression and engendering social change. And yet, across the country, arts and humanities programs are being eliminated from higher education, and higher education more broadly has turned its focus to business while raising tuition to prices that exceed what most students can ever expect to pay or repay. Higher education is broken. But folks still want to study. That’s why we started Night School Bar: online and in-person evening classes in the arts and humanities, in a welcoming and supportive environment, open to all on a pay-what-you-can basis.

Please consider donating—and sign up for a class at nightschoolbar.com, too, to see what we’re all about!

In study & care,

Lindsey & Annu