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11.
FREE UNIVERSITY OF BERKELEY. A group of nine semester catalogues, beginning Fall 1968 through to Spring 1972, together with Steps - Journal of the Free University of Berkeley #1, and an illustrated handbill for People’s Park calling for volunteers and announcing “a Free University Community Gathering” at the FUB office.
Formats and sizes vary. Illustrated with photographs, psychedelic drawings, cartoons and comic strips.
i) Fall ’68. 4to. Stapled wrps., 16pp. Lists a course on Jack Kerouac taught by Barry Gifford (“Up Your Ass With Mobil Gas”), and prints “A Brief History of FUB” by Jeff Lustig (3pp.);
ii) Spring ’69. 4to. Stapled wrps., 16pp. + Spring Supplement (8vo. Stapled wrps., 16pp.). Among the courses advertised are “Astrology As Encounter” and “Digital Computers: Know Thy Enemy”;
iii) Summer ’69. 4to. Stapled wrps., 24pp. Courses listed include “Infinity: Can You Ever Get There?”, “Computer Programming To Make Bucks”, and “Methods of Sexual Expression”;
iv) Fall ’69 - The Adventures of FUB. Underground comic format. 48pp. The index lists courses, among many others, on “Experimental Psychodrama” and “Kissing”;
v) Spring ’70 - Son of FUB. Underground comic format. 56pp. Course titles include a “Seminar in Group Dynamics”, “People’s Architecture”, and “Wilderness Living”;
vi) Summer 1970. 4to. Stapled newsprint wrps., 30pp. Advertises classes titled “Scientists Can Be People” and “Computers & Society”;
vii) Fall 1970. Tabloid newspaper format, folded. 18pp. Courses listed include “Beatles, Dylan, Logic & Child Psychology”, “Women’s Lib-Men’s Lib Encounter”, and “Ecological Living Workshops”;
viii) Fall 1971. 32mo. Stapled wrps., 64pp. (incl. cover). Illustrated. Printed in different colours throughout. Includes sections on communal living, female sexuality, radical psychiatry, erotic filmmaking, occult history, and “Sexadrama”. One of the most visually appealing of all the FUB catalogues, and in unusually nice condition.
ix) Spring ’72. 8vo. Staplebound booklet, 58pp. Cover has a cartoon depiction of Yosemite “drewed by Michael J.” Classes range from founding a new utopian commune to exploring Berkeley’s streets at 4am;
x) STEPS #1 (Berkeley, CA: December 1966). 4to. Stapled wrps., 64pp. Illustrated throughout. Ed. Frank Bardacke, James Glass, Jeff Lustig, Larry D. Spence, and Buddy Stein. Contents include essays on the Free Speech Movement and “The Idea of Student Freedom”; the Robert Scheer campaign (Scheer was an unsuccessful congressional candidate and one of the main figures in both the HUAC and Cuba demonstrations); Bob Dylan (by the political activist and author, Frank Bardacke); and the Old and New Left; plus poetry by David Fields and Robert Haas. The first of only two issues published;
xi) “Gatherings”. A handbill announcing “Good news! The people are building a park which needs work and care… Come Sunday, May 11 (or whenever you can) to work to smile to love”. Bluish text and two photographs on yellow field; FUB mailing info to verso, with recipient’s address typed out. 28x21.6cm. May 11 (1969) would have been the third Sunday of the park’s construction. The handbill also announces news of “A Free University Community Gathering to talk, drink wine, and take care of business” on Sunday May 18. It’s not clear if the gathering took place as it was scheduled just three days after Governor Reagan sent the California Highway Patrol and Berkeley PD into People’s Park to destroy much of what had been planted. In the subsequent demonstrations, on what later became known as ‘Bloody Thursday’, police fired shotguns loaded with buckshot at protestors, injuring many and killing a student visiting from San Jose, James Rector, who had been watching from the roof of a bookstore when he was shot.
The Free University of Berkeley (FUB) was established in the Fall of 1965 in emulation of the Free University of New York, and grew out of the free classes held in Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement (FSM) sit-in at UC Berkeley. Following the success of the FSM, in which students had organised for the right to campaign for political causes on campus, various activists, among them Stew Albert, Michael Rossman, Jeff Lustig, Bob Mates, Brad Cleaveland and David Goines, rented facilities on nearby Telegraph Avenue, where the first twenty courses of FUB were offered. Handbills were distributed around Berkeley to advertise it, and catalogues given to those who were interested.
By 1966 the number of courses had risen to thirty, and by 1969 FUB had 119 courses on offer. It specialised in innovative courses unavailable at the University, with subjects such as “State and Society: The Dialectics of Alienation”, “Social Thought since the De-Stalinisation Congress of 1956”, “Community Organising”, and “Revolutionary Thought and Action”. By Fall 1968 the range of courses offered had expanded to include personal growth, with titles such as “Dynamics of the Tao”, “Racial Encounter Workshop”, and “Gestalt Encounter Group”, while the Spring ‘69 catalogue announced courses on everything from “Psychedelic Psychology” and “Bliss Consciousness” to “Bob Dylan”.
The same catalogue also offered a course titled “The Erotic in Western Religion”, taught by Tony Nugent. He described a follow up, “Turning on the Church”, advertised in comic form in the Spring ‘70 catalogue, as “a workshop on confronting the white racist multi-billion $ ecclesiastical corporations with their own radical traditions of Jesus, the Prophets and the beloved community.” The accompanying comic art, filled with graphic sexual imagery, mostly of penises, includes one of a woman lying prostrate with the speech bubble “Fuck Me”. Widespread protests followed and more than 1000 copies of the catalogue were destroyed due to its portrayal of women as sex objects (Nugent claimed that he had no choice in the cartoons associated with the description of his course).
All items Very Good plus or better; the handbill has three old folds for mailing, slight creasing and a short, 6mm. tear to lower edge. A near complete run of FUB catalogues, and rare as such.
