n 19th-century West Roxbury, a group of New England intellectuals pooled their resources to create the Brook Farm: a utopian community where thinkers lived, worked, and learned together, free from the constraints of conventional society. While the original experiment collapsed within a decade, nearly two centuries later, a new Brook Farm is trying again — this time in Cambridge.

The Brook Farm Institute for Critical Studies, which launches its first seminars next month, is a non-profit institute offering online and in-person courses on the humanities and social sciences.

The institute’s upcoming seminars include courses in a wide range of subjects, such as “Plato’s Republic: Justice and the Good Life,” “Death, Desire, and the City: Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil,” and “Artificial Intelligence: Labor, Machinery, and Capital.”

In its mission statement, BFI labels the onset of “techno-capitalist dystopia” as one reason for the institution’s founding.

BFI faculty echoed this sentiment, naming three particular threats to humanities scholarship: the commodification of education, artificial intelligence, and funding cuts.

The institute’s founder, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton, created BFI in response to the increasing hostility universities direct towards the humanities and social sciences. Pressured by mounting college tuition and a tightening job market, he thinks students seek coursework with a clear “return on investment,” making them less likely to explore the humanities. “If it’s not directly relevant to their career goals, it’s somehow not very important,” Petersen-Overton says.

BFI professor Mónica Isabel Rey similarly understands that many students feel they must optimize coursework for future financial output. She does not blame the students themselves, but rather a capitalistic model of the academy that warps students into clients who purchase post-grad posterity.

For Emilio Porras Vergara, another faculty member, this problem with engaging in the humanities and social sciences extends beyond time spent in traditional university. He finds that post-graduate adults have neither time nor venues to satiate their hunger for humanities education.

“You have to just do the grind that you’re nine to five, or if you’re a freelancer, you have to spend all your time looking for clients,” Porras says. “There is very little opportunity to work in that more of a cultural, spiritual, intellectual development that the academic life offers.”

However, according to BFI faculty, these intellectual appetites do exist and can be fed at the Brook Farm Institute – even in the age of artificial intelligence.

“It’s actually a novel idea that you would sit down and just read an important foundational text in moral and political philosophy — just read the whole damn thing,” Petersen-Overton says, referring to his upcoming seminar on Plato’s “Republic.” “That seems almost foreign to our model of education these days, when you have administrators increasingly pushing for AI summaries, pushing for AI assistance.”

He wonders how many Harvard students enrolled in political theory courses simply upload documents to ChatGPT and wait for the tool to generate broad summaries, missing the experience of reading and processing the original text. “It’s just a total misunderstanding of what the humanities are.”

Meanwhile, Vergara, who will teach the seminar “Artificial Intelligence: Labor, Machinery, and Capital” in July, approaches AI from a historical angle. His course connects artistic and economic anxieties about the technology, tracing a line from the spinning jenny of the Industrial Revolution to large language models of today, asking participants to reflect on who bears the costs of AI and who reaps the benefits. “I hope to show people that what goes on in one part of life is also going to be felt in a different one,” he says. “There is an underlying scheme of material realities that will affect AI throughout the world.”

Rey expresses concerns over not just AI usage but broader consequences of the digital age. She reminisces on her own computer-free, Millennial upbringing and fears that members of Gen Z, habituated to the ninety-second reel, cannot revere the novel.

BFI profits from these online structures. The institute advertises virtual seminars, free livestreams, and courses from its Instagram page.

Petersen-Overton even recruited BFI faculty from social media, finding that a number of people reached out — many just interested in following along with the project.

Many humanities scholars struggle to find employment at all due to funding cuts. Despite having a PhD in political science and a list of publications, Petersen-Overton could not find full-time employment in the Boston area. “For new PhDs, especially in the humanities and social sciences, it is not just competitive. It’s virtually impossible to find any kind of stable employment,” he says.

And even if hired, compensation is not always fair. “Conventional academia thrives on exploitation of professors’ labor,” Petersen-Overton says. He further cites the lack of institutional protections for academic freedom, particularly for non-tenure track faculty. BFI’s alternative model commits seventy percent of tuition to the instructor, with the remaining thirty percent channeled towards rental fees, promotion, and other administrative costs.

BFI instructors also own all course-related intellectual property and retain full autonomy over classroom content. As a gender studies professor, Rey highlights how this model grants instructors unusual freedoms, since faculty at traditional institutions sometimes shy away from teaching about more controversial topics.

But free inquiry does not translate to free-of-charge. BFI requests a $335 tuition for each month-long seminar, with two out of the twenty available seats on negotiable scholarship.

BFI identifies myriad poisons corroding universities. Per Rey, the status quo in academia cannot hold. “The revolution is happening,” she says.

The BFI academics see an urgent need to be a part of this revolution. This urgency is not new. The intellectuals who founded the original Brook Farm utopia also saw rot in the institutions of its time, and for six years, they tried to build something different. In 1846, however, a fire tore through their newly-finished residential building, and their dream went down in flames with it.

Their ideas, though, proved more durable than timber. Nearly two centuries later, Petersen-Overton is sifting through the ashes — and he thinks he found something worth saving.

Correction: April 22, 2026

A previous version of this article misspelled the surname of Brook Farm Institute co-director Kris Petersen-Overton. In addition, the surname of colleague Emílio Porras Vergara was misspelled as “Porres.”

— Magazine writer Olivia Jimenez can be reached at [email protected].