Item #39695 FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.

7.

FREE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1965 through to Winter (January) 1968.

8vo. Stapled wrps., 8pp.-12pp. (two with mimeographed inserts detailing last-minute course additions and changes). Each catalogue prints the FUNY’s Statement of Principles (the original version of which had appeared in the 1965 Summer catalogue) and provides details of courses offered and information on the faculty (the number of whom exceeded one hundred in the three years [eleven terms] of the Free University’s existence).

The catalogues are:
i) Fall 1965; ii) Spring 1966; iii) Summer 1966; iv) Fall 1966; v) Winter 1966; vi) Winter 66-67; vii) Spring 1967; viii) Fall 1967; ix) Winter 1968.

Among the scholars, activists, and artists appearing in the catalogues are the names of: Stanley Aronowitz; Joseph Berke; David Caute; Nancy Colin; Hollis Frampton; Dan Georgakas; John Gerassi; Paul Gershowitz; Allen Ginsberg (Fall 1965 term only); Calvin Hicks; Paul Krassner; Allen Krebs; Sharon Krebs; Tuli Kupferberg; Jackson Mac Low (‘Mousike’); David McReynolds; James Mellen; Carolee Schneemann (‘Collage’); Ed Sanders; Susan Sherman; Irwin Silber; AB Spellman; Peter Stafford (‘Hallucinogenic Drugs’); Walter Teague; AJ Weberman; and Robert Anton Wilson (‘Anarchistic and Synergetic Politics’).

The range of courses they offered, which increased in number from thirteen in the first term to more than forty in Fall 1965 to Winter 1966, before decreasing in 1967 and 1968, included subjects demonstrating FUNY’s emphasis on topics such as Marxism, the Third World, racism, Freudian psychology, radical politics, film, and poetry (though not the still embryonic fields of gender politics and environmental studies).

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.

Each of the catalogues in the run bears a typed or handwritten mailing address to the back cover (all to the same recipient); one of them has a 5cm. closed tear to the front cover; o/w condition overall Very Good plus to Near Fine. The run lacks the catalogues from Summer 1965 and Summer 1967. Individual FUNY catalogues occasionally appear on the market, but seldom in an almost complete run, as here.

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