[NEW LEFT] [EDUCATION] Midpeninsula Free University: Fall 1968 [course catalog]

(Menlo Park, CA): The Free You / Midpeninsula Free University, 1968. First Edition. Staplebound. Very good. Quarto, 60pp., illustrated. Very good in the publisher's stapled wraps, with even soiling/foxing to the wraps and some curling to the corners, but mostly clean internally, apart from some neat inked checkmarks on the course selection page. A scarce and vibrant course catalog for the Midpeninsula Free University, an experiment in radical education which lasted a few years in the late 1960s in the Bay Area. Among the fundamental drivers of the New Left counterculture in the mid-1960s was the critique of higher education as a mere tool of the ruling class to exploit the minds of young people for their own ends. The MFU was one of the more successful experiments in the movement, although it fizzled out by the early 1970s. Many dozens of courses are explained herein, and they range from the very serious and political ("Marxism-Leninism and the American Revolution") to the groovy ("Advanced Group Loving"). Overall the courses tend toward the latter example. An advertisement for the MFU newsletter, "The Free You," is laid-in. OCLC records just a handful of holdings of various course catalogues; we found none that specifically note the Fall 1968 issue. A scarce and delightful example of the possibilities explored on the radical fringes of American education during the 1960s.