 |
Rochdale: The Runaway Collegea social historyby David SharpeToronto: House of Anansi Press, 1987 |
go to homepage | other publications
Students became owners of a
six million dollar college
by walking through the door.
The college was the
largest free university
on the continent.
Students had
complete self-government
with their own police force,
court,
monarchy.
They organized classes, communes, businesses.
Some of them organized drug-dealing.
Rochdale College became an eighteen story
fortress in the middle of a city,
target of police invasions and mass evictions,
and symbol of a decade.
It survived seven years.
|
Rochdale: The Runaway Collegea social historyby David SharpeToronto: House of Anansi Press, 1987 |
In the late-Sixties, young idealists and rebels, eight hundred at a time, were given full control of an eighteen-story highrise in the heart of English Canada's largest city. Rochdale College it was, an untested, bold idea on Bloor Street at the edge of the University of Toronto campus, a ten-minute walk from the Ontario Legislature. Rochdale College, a twin tower of raw concrete and straight lines in its second year of operation in 1970, the largest co-operative student residence in North America, the largest of the more than 300 free universities in North America, and soon to be known across the country as the largest drug supermarket in North America.
Toronto's Rochdale College began as an experiment in living and learning, and ended as a symbol of the flower-child Sixties, a financial and social controversy. David Sharpe now tells the fascinating story of the college's seven year rise and fall in this entertaining and well-researched book.
Sharpe examines the contradictions of the Age of Aquarius squeezed into one stark skyscraper on Bloor Street. He looks at the financing and the internal government of the college, as well as its creative achievements over the years and its contribution to the community. For the first time, Rochdale: The Runaway College provides us with a balanced, detailed picture of the day to day life of the college residents: the peace parties and joyful live-ins, as well as the police raids and the drug overdoses of the dark days.
Enter "Rochdale College" in
 |
 |
 |
|
Rochdale: The Runaway College is also available from Specialty Books in Athens for $16.00 U.S. (plus shipping).
If you use fax or e-mail, you should provide Specialty Books with a daytime phone number -- or a return fax number -- so they can get credit card information. If you visit the Specialty Books website, you can place your order there. You can also order direct from House of Anansi Press for $15.95 Canadian (price is subject to change and does not include GST):
|
go to beginning of
this document
homepage
Revised July 25, 2000.
Please email comments or suggestions to sharpe@write-sight.com
© 2000 David Sharpe