Item #39713 ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.
ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.

25.

ALTERNATE U. A group of course catalogues: NY: Fall (October) 1969, Winter 1970 (December 1969), and Fall (September) 1970.

Three broadside sheets, printed offset, one side of each featuring a poster design (two of them credited to Su Negrin) incorporating a quotation (from the I Ching, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh respectively), and the other side providing details of the courses offered. Folded twice, each measuring approx. 55x43cm. when unfolded (21.5x27.5cm. when folded; originally folded twice more for mailing, though all three have been stored flat). Together with a mimeo sheet and postcard.

The Alternate U., which grew out of the Free University of New York and ran courses by several of those who had taught there, was founded by political activist Tom Wodetzki in Greenwich Village in 1969. In an open letter to academics, Wodetzki wrote that his intention was to provide for “the alienated youth-hippie element, the growing number of education drop-outs… who know they are not getting the whole story.”

An introductory statement, appearing in the first two catalogues here, emphasises “learning as a process of heightening awareness, deepening involvement and commitment, and transforming the individual and social self”, an approach reflected in the range of courses offered. These included regular leftist courses on Basic Marxism-Leninism and Anarcho-Communism, but, in a shift to the ‘personal’, they also encompassed Radical Psychology, Ecology Action Workshops, Communes, Squatter Movement, Hatha Yoga, Sex Roles and Class Variance in the Light of Women’s Oppression, a Men’s Group, and a Gay Liberation Workshop (the Gay Liberation Front was formed after initial meetings held at the Alternate U. in July 1969, a month after the Stonewall rebellion, and the GLF used the Alternate U. for many of its activities through to December 1970, including weekly dances [the first post-Stonewall gay and lesbian dances were held at the Alternate U.’s dance studio on West 14th St., previously occupied by The Living Theatre]; the GLF also put together their newspaper, Come Out!, at the Alternate U.).

By September 1970, the Alternate U.’s statement of aims, as printed in its Fall catalogue, had adopted a more militant tone, revealing the ideological distance “revolutionary education” had travelled since the formation of the Free University of New York in 1965: “A few years ago alternate education was almost solely the theoretical, abstract, isolated experiment of a few intellectuals. This reflected the state of the Movement itself. But today the Movement is broad, potent and real. Because our movement is real and growing, and because the Amerikan state is crumbling, the state is attacking us - no longer just through the media and the courts, no longer just with clubs and gas, but with bullets: murder. War. The white movement is learning what other peoples subject to the Amerikan state have known for a long time: that, as Huey Newton said, ‘An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.’ ”

Also included is a mimeographed sheet printing news of a collective “of 8 women and 8 men” formed “to pull together the whole community’s creative energies” (June 1970), and a postcard from December 1970 announcing: “This postcard is the Alternate U. catalog for next term. It lists no courses because internal contradictions have left us no structure in which to have courses. Alt. U. can be a revolutionary alternative to being programmed into a sexist, racist and classist, capitalist society. But only if enough concerned people pool ideas to resolve personal and political conflicts, to re-organize A.U. into a working structure.” The lower edge prints the slogan: “If peaceful revolution is made impossible - then violent revolution is made inevitable!”.

In 1970 Tom Wodetzki and Su Negrin co-founded Times Change Press in New York City, publishers of a series of radical pamphlets and books, as well as 16 posters, most of them designed by Negrin, including several for the Gay Liberation Front. Sometime after the demise of the short-lived Alternate U., they moved west to live at Salmon Creek Farm, a rural commune in Mendocino County, northern California.

Mailing addresses written out (all three to the same recipient), and date stamped; slight offsetting to Fall 1970 catalogue; o/w Very Good plus.

(5 items).

Sold