Peter Turner

Have we forgotten Rochdale? : There Can Be No Light Without Shadow, 1971 It is somewhat unusual to find oneself writing a book review of a scarce 40-year old, highly limited circulation book, extensively (and strangely!) referenced. However, this exposition is of enormous social importance not only to education in Canada but education everywhere. The most incisive and informed commentary on the deeper meaning and underlying and evolving philosophy of Rochdale College was the only book ever published at Toronto’s iconic free school. Rochdale President Peter Turner’s gold-embossed “A Rochdale College Publication 1971”, There Can be No Light Without Shadow (a quotation from Camus) was a 430-page, single-sided typescript delving into the minutiae of way the building operated and its denizens, and noted on its rear cover, “Bound and published in Rochdale College by mindless acid freaks”. The top half of Page 265 has been blanked out—what did it say that the author did not intend? The book also contains an 80-page study by UofT anthropologist Kent Gooderham who lived in a Rochdale Zeus with his wife and six children who were sent to local public schools. He found about one-third of Rochdale residents to be young expat Americans, a rather light percentage. However, his survey of Rochdale residents provides hard proof of the benefits of free education. [Please let me know if this study ever had a title.] I have thus far been stymied in learning how many copies of Turner’s book were printed, for whom they were intended, their method of distribution or even the book’s intent or purpose! Rochdale College was named for an incident in England in 1844 in which 28 workers in the little town of Rochdale “formed one of the world’s first consumer cooperatives and developed a philosophy for its operation” called the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. Our College also became home to a generation of “equitable pioneers”. Rochdale College was established by law in the Ontario Parliament under a private member’s Bill Pr14 which was passed as The Rochdale College Act, 1964. The bill merely ratifies the law of corporations 1939 to include “cooperatives” and “students” and names Howard Adelman, William Michael Rothery, and Howard Staats [where are they now?] as Rochdale’s first students. All property of the college was to be “exempt from every description of taxation”, a bonus of $10,000 a month. The act also mentions “The objects and purposes of the College are the advancement of learning…but do not include the power to confer degrees”. Of course, this was next: Hippie College Sells Bogus Degrees! Rochdale’s degrees were a satiric and theatrical fundraising tool printed by Stan Bevington’s Coach House Press. My own degree is bordered with marijuana leaves and the Queen’s image is two-faced. Its union notice bears a beaver wearing a mortarboard surmounted above the legend, “PRINTED IN CANADA / ON CANADIAN / PAPER / by mindless acid freaks”. Degrees were purchased by graduates in Canada, the United States, England, Ghana, and Rhodesia; some 6,000 were were purchased in their first week of offering in 1970. The bill was promulgated by MPP “Mr. Lawrence (St. George)” about whom we have been unable to unearth further information. Rochdale’s proposed budget was $223,750 which could convincingly be raised by fees, fundraising and magazine sales, to pay for the College’s 850 residents. Admission was open to all, though Dennis Lee was in charge of “Acceptance”. The College’s location adjacent to the University of Toronto was described in December 1966 in the Rochdale College Bulletin, Vol. 1 No. 1, as “building a botanical garden next to an abattoir”. The College’s educational component was researched by Ken Drushka in 1966 with a grant from the Company of Young Canadians; Drushka subsequently was appointed Rochdale’s first Education Director. The Rochdale College building at 341 Bloor Street West in Toronto was designed in the postwar Brutalist architectural style by Elmar Tampõld and John Wells. Rochdale cost $5.8 million to build at the corner of Huron Street and Bloor Street West, bankrolled 90% by the Federal government’s newly-established Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Our mortgage payments were just over $31,000 a month. In 1973, CMHC forced Rochdale into receivership, ultimately leading to its closure in 1975; many of us still think this was certainly a politically-motivated decision. Rochdale was mercilessly persecuted by politicians, police and straight society, and vilified in the popular press. However we lived, Turner points out Rochdale had punitive health inspections every second week from 1969; we never failed one! Of course, rabid politicians and media were our best advertising. A Toronto alderman in the Telegram described Rochdale as “a college of promiscuity, drug- taking, and defiance of the law and good government”. Sounds like fun, no? And not unlike any other institution of tertiary education. This pol also opined that “hippies can be cured by hockey rinks”. We thought the best games were the ones played by the Rochdale Roaches against the Metro Police 52 Division! Rochdale College’s proposed seminar topics included “Nothingness”, “Living in the Present”, “Social Reform”, “Dead Dogma?”, “Human Rights”, “Participatory Democracy” and “Revolution” as well as the more conventional subjects of Rhetoric, Literature, Satire, Civilization [sic], Radical Theology and Cinema. Rochdale’s faculty resources were drawn primarily from the UofT but also from the Canadian Labour Congress, the Company of Young Canadians, the Anglican Church, British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University which itself had only been established in 1965, the National Indian Council, California’s International Institute for Advanced Studies think-tank, the Dominican Catholic Order, Hamilton’s McMaster University and Toronto’s York University. Its educational premise was, “there is something wrong with the presents methods of education and nothing substantially wrong with…the subject”. And, of course, there was always the S.C.M. (Student Christian Movement) Bookroom on street level. Peter Turner describes Rochdale as a “Protean” society and its residents as the prophetic Proteus of Greek mythology, struggling to free himself from the fetters of the past and discover his new identity. The author described the building as bearing the positive Protean attributes of versatility, flexibility, adaptability. Of course, the mythical, mutable Proteus lives for today, and changes it all tomorrow! Thus Rochdale was unintentionally modeled upon the Oxford common houses of the 11th to 16th centuries. 100,000 visitors arrived at Rochdale by 1969, 4,000 of them staying a month or more, primarily between the ages of 16 and 24. The Rochdale Free Clinic treated 6,000 patients, compared to the Alcohol and Drug Addiction Research Foundation which treated only one-third that number on a nine- million dollar budget. Rochdale College housed nearly 5,000 students over its seven year life. Turner sees Rochdale teaching “manners” to the young, and “the full meaning of freedom, including its requirements and responsibilities”. The author engages an erudite discussion of the practical definitions of freedom and licence as elucidated by educator and theorist A.S. Neill in his volume, Freedom Not Licence. Rochdale’s enforcement of social education also comes under examination. “Rochdale takes everybody and turns them inside-out.” The Evictions Appeals Board, sometimes called the Court of Appeal, was composed of one permanent chairman (myself, for more than two years) and five resident members, rotated every ten weeks. This timeframe proved by trial and error to be long enough to ensure justice could be served through knowledge and experience with generous compassion and second chances, precisely opposite to the straight world’s courts of just-us, predicated on revenge, and short enough to deter corruption. The Board taught socialisation to the benefit of both the errant resident and the rest of us. It is most interesting, in the the context of Rochdale 1971, that Turner argues for compassion towards transients—‘crashers’. He maintains that if Rochdale truly is a ‘free school’, in every sense, then crashers must be tolerated and accommodated. He proposes to establish a “Crasher Co-op” to find employment and withhold from wages for rent in the building. Turner begs the question “What is a relevant education?” and expresses the philosophy, “Society has failed. These are children; be friendly to them”. The author also points out that, in the Toronto of that period, 1,000 drug busts occurred every month. Rochdale was hardly unique in terms of ‘drug culture’. Dope was normal everywhere. Turner estimates three-to-four percent of Rochdale’s population to be “drug” dealers. Few Rochdale dealers were dealing for the money: they were dealing for its outlaw cachet. They just wanted to be heroes. And many were. Rochdale College was a true Utopian community in every contemporary and historical sense. We had no burning desire to prove ourselves to outsiders. We were proving ourselves to ourselves and to one another. The average age of Rochdale residents was 22! To be a member of our Governing Council one had to be 21 but to live in the building without parental supervision was only 16. And we were gleefully coeducational long before anybody thought of gender equality. “The residents in Rochdale had come out of a society that was committed to the concept of individual liberty, never realizing that freedom is a profoundly social concept.” Nothing was “extra-curricular”. The author characterises Rochdale as both cripple and giant. We were certainly crippled by society in our time and giant to those who lived there to remember and honour us. One of Rochdale’s posters read, “We feel more like we do now than when we first got here”.

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