Various

Free University of New York Spring Catalog (1966)

New York, NY: Free University of New York, 1966. First Printing. Stapled Wrappers. "The Free University of New York was founded by Allen Krebs, Sharon Krebs and James Mellen on East 14th Street in July 1965 as America’s first educational institution of the New Left, and its organisers, a mix of radical intellectuals, bohemian artists and community activists, found the inspiration for it from previous educational activities such as the Freedom Schools in the Southern Civil Rights Movement and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. It differed from the latter, however, by arguing that the issue was no longer ‘free speech’ but the ‘free student’, and that the university should be organised as a ‘separate’ rather than ‘parallel’ institution. It also differed from the majority of Free Universities that sprang up in its wake across America by charging fees for courses (it therefore wasn’t, in one sense at least, ‘free’), and in its explicitly political, primarily Marxist, orientation. Allen Krebs defined the Free University as “a community of scholars” and “confederation of intellectual cockroaches”, and the term “cockroach” later became the visual symbol for FUNY. It appears on the front covers of two of the catalogues in this collection, designed by the painter, Nancy Colin. In 1966, New York State ordered the Free University of New York to stop using the title of university because it did not meet the standards required for an accredited university, and from the Summer term “The Free School of New York” became the official name that appeared on its course catalogues, although most people still called it the Free University of New York or FUNY. FUNY closed in the winter of 1968, in part due to internal conflict between its organisers (co-founders Allen and Sharon Krebs moved to London after the Chicago Convention in August 1968), and in part as a consequence of the Left’s transition away from solidarity with national liberation movements in Vietnam and elsewhere towards political, philosophical and personal liberation closer to home. A year earlier, some FUNY faculty members had participated in the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London, with two of them, Allen Krebs and Joseph Berke, together with David Cooper, subsequently using their experience of FUNY’s structure and organisation to create the Anti-University of London (Krebs reportedly requested a loan of $1000 from FUNY to help set it up). Years after its demise, in May 2012, ‘Occupy’ movement activists re-imagined FUNY with a free radical outdoor educational event that featured over forty workshops and two thousand participants in New York City" (Andrew Sclanders, "FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK"). As our friend across the pond, Andrew Sclanders so voluminously makes clear, The Free University of New York was a particularly resplendent manifestation of the Free University Movement, which exploded throughout America and Western Europe in the 1960s. This course catalog, from the key year in the movement worldwide, is a glorious testament to this. From the collection of Robin Eichele (b. 1941), noted Mimeograph Revolutionary & co-founder (with John Sinclair) of the Detroit Artists’ Workshop. In remarkably fine condition with only minute-to-moderate shelf-wear, light bumping & moderate-to-enunciated age toning throughout, otherwise clean. Very Fine. [Item #7080]

Price: $80.00