Rochdale: The Ultimate Freedom

Abstract

It's not easy to get grip on Rochdale College. I hope this isn't taken entirely as plea for sympathy for the writer, which partly it is. But Rochdale doesn't lend itself to polite discourse or even, really, to print. Rochdale is an experimental, residential free university, run by students and housed in $5.8million, student-owned, eighteen-story building in downtown Toronto. Of the more than three hundred free universities on this continent, Rochdale is perhaps the most ambitious. It opened last year with good press, high ideals and its building unfinished. It now houses about one thousand persons fewer than one-third of them original residents of unusual diversity, especially in dress, background and education. Little formal learning is taking place there. The reality of Rochdale the graffiti, the open use of drugs, the sounds, smells, conversational styles and way of life shatters most conventional yardsticks by which colleges are measured: degrees offered, faculty renown, quality of student clientele, facilities, course descriptions. It will, if it survives, be measured in part by the attainments of its alumni, criterion also applied to conventional universities. Otherwise it is the antithesis of their image. Unconventional dress is the norm; bizarre behavior is tolerated; until recently chaos was honored over any substantial rule. (How else explain that one head of security for the Rochdale building was biker [a motorcycle gang member] addicted to pink shirts and tough talk?) Some writers have rummaged deep into Kandy Kolored incense-filled urn of psychedelic modifiers in an attempt to zap their readers with Rochdale. I was asked to write a tough, concise portrait of Rochdale and its student-faculty cli ntele. After year's acquaintance with Rochdale, I still haven't one of those. Rochdale rej cts labels as faulty vending machine rejects coins. Rochdale does not comprise hard story. The place offers no degrees, cannot be said to be recognized academically (although two students were given credit for their Rochdale work at department of Simon Fraser University), has no faculty and few courses which last very long. Programs for screening applicants come and go. One scheme was to have one person, by more or less common consent, do all the interviewing and use his judgment. The day I talked with him about his criteria, in an offcampus attic with eighteenth-century atmoBarrie Zwicker formerly covered education for the Toronto Daily Star. He is now on the staff of the Province of Ontario Council for the Arts.