Rochdale

By David Sharpe

The fascinating story of Toronto’s experimental Rochdale College’s rise and fall, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

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. In his well-researched and entertaining account, David Sharpe tells the fascinating story of the college’s seven-year rise and fall.

Sharpe examines the contradictions of the Age of Aquarius squeezed into one stark skyscraper on Bloor Street in Toronto. 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. Rochdale: The Runaway College provides a lively, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 1987
• ISBN: 9781770891708

David Sharpe

David Sharpe is an instructor in the English Department at the University of Ohio in Athens, Ohio.

Book preview

9781770891708_cover.jpgTitle page: Rochdale: The Runaway College by David Sharpe.

Copyright © 1987 David Sharpe

Except as otherwise note, all photographs are copyright © 1987, Alex MacDonald

Introduction copyright © 2019 Stuart Henderson

First published in 1987 by House of Anansi Press. This edition published in Canada in 2019 and the USA in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Rochdale : the runaway college / David Sharpe.

Names: Sharpe, David, 1949- author.

Description: Originally published: Toronto : Anansi, ©1987.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20189067063 | ISBN 9781487006648 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Rochdale College—History. | LCSH: Free schools—Ontario—Toronto—History.

Classification: LCC LE3.T5692 S53 2019 | DDC 378.713/541—dc23

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930412

Series design: Brian Morgan

Cover design: Patrick Gray

Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council logos.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

The seven years of Rochdale took seven years to bring into print. I was supporting a fiction career by working as a security guard at the Royal Ontario Museum when I began the book in 1980. The project first involved a year of interviews and research, notably a day-after-day sifting through the archives in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, helped enthusiastically by library personnel Luba Hussel and Margery Pearson. The book itself went through three versions — each one made possible by the patient and vital assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The final version was completed during summer break while teaching creative writing at Brown University and Connecticut College. The project would have died after the second rewrite if not for John Robert Colombo, who helped find the right publisher at last.

The people I contacted for information about Rochdale were all intent that the story be brought into permanent and comprehensive form. As representatives of those many sources, I would like to single out Aulene Maki and Mark Buckiewicz, who offered photographs and friendly conversation. Essential to this one treatment of the story is material generously provided — in the spirit of Rochdale — by Alex MacDonald. Though I have tried to be even-handed, the subject of Rochdale College cannot be exhausted by one book and one perspective. Wherever this story is inadequate or confused by the jumbled, contradictory records, it points towards further accounts yet to be written.

If not for a teacher-and-student who influenced me greatly during my undergrad years at the University of British Columbia, who polished my interest in alternative education and thus, indirectly, turned my eyes in 1968 to the runaway College halfway across the continent, I would not be able to say:

Dedicated to Father Gerald McGuigan, teacher-and-student.

Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Rise

1: The Seven-Year Itch

2: An Ideal Beginning

3: The Rock

4: The Rochdalians

5: The Changeling

Part Two: The Tyger Burning Bright

6: Pass / Fail

7: Govcon

8: Dismanagement

9: Independence

10: The Money Mess

11: Hipheaven

12: To Serve and Protect

Part Three: The Eighteen-Story High

13: High Society

14: Under the Rock

15: Arts Daily

16: Business Unusual

17: A Symbol on Bloor

Part Four: The Rocking Cradle

18: The Fan

19: Danger Zone

20: To the Wall

21: Drug Pros and Cons

22: The Great White Fathers

Part Five: The Fall

23: Invasion

24: Sirens at the Rock

25: Eviction

26: Afterwords

Endnotes

Index

Introduction by Stuart Henderson

From 1968 to 1975, a brand-new Toronto high-rise was taken over by a couple thousand hippies, draft dodgers, dreamers, intellectuals, Vietnam vets, drug dealers, free lovers, addicts, artists, anarchists, and runaways.

For seven turbulent years, Rochdale College served as perhaps the largest drug distribution warehouse in Canada, a home to untold numbers of drop-outs from the straight society, a complex and multifaceted experiment in alternative living, and a never-ending orgy of partying, sex, and invention.

I am, let’s say, a fan.

I first learned of Rochdale College almost twenty-five years ago, when I picked up a copy of the book you’re now holding. I recall being utterly entranced by David Sharpe’s reconstruction of the story of this improbable building, its confusion of residents, its shape-shifting community of communities. The idea that a place like this could have existed at all, let alone survived and even thrived for so long, captivated me. Full of youthful idealism, a reflexive respect for the counterculture, and a healthy interest in drugs, sex, and hedonism (I mean, I was seventeen), Rochdale loomed large in my imagination. It has ever since.

Sharpe’s great accomplishment in this book is that he imposes a structure on what is inherently a structure-free story. To relate the history of a building — comprising multiple floors, each themselves comprising multiple rooms, each filled with a mutable collection of individuals — is a daunting task. But to reckon with all of the competing narratives in this building — a revolving door of thousands of people, agendas, experiences, perspectives — is to impose order on chaos. It takes a keen imagination and a dexterous hand to make sense of this pretty mess.

Truth is, for many Rochdalians, the key to understanding the high-rise is that it began as a mess. As an always already unfinished space. A place that was, every day, being built, rebuilt, and built again.

After a summer of construction hassles and strikes, Rochdale College opened its doors in September 1968, when it was only barely fit for habitation. The noble idea that it was to be a progressive Free School, a kind of antidote to the multiversity system, was imperiled rather immediately. The simple fact that the building was still in some ways a construction site may have deterred many of the students who were attracted to the idea of the hip, alternative education envisioned by its founders, torpedoing the raison d’être for the enterprise on day one.

Toronto’s hippies were undeterred by the dust and debris. Following the month-long hepatitis scare that had swept through their nearby Yorkville scene and looking towards the long winter to come, they weren’t exactly picky. They poured into this apparent haven by the hundreds. Overcome by crashers (non-paying residents), increasingly menaced by hard-drug users and dealers, and burdened by thousands of tourists dropping in at all hours looking for an endless party, the whole Free School idea fell apart within the year. The garbage piled up, rent was hard to collect, and, increasingly, disorder reigned. A group of core residents attempted to institute some structure, establishing a governing council. But nothing really calmed things down until they made the politically tricky decision to evict the heavy-drug dealers, ban amphetamines and most narcotics, and crack down on non-permanent residents.

That’s why 1970–73 is the period that has always interested observers of the College most. Sharpe dives deeply into these years, elucidating the sustained attempts at building the truly functional alternative social structures, communities, and facilities that characterized the period. Residents, realizing that they were edging towards a kind of separate society right there in the building, founded a health clinic (where babies were born!), a library, a range of food services, a child care centre, an in-house radio and TV station, a vibrant newspaper, and a series of floor-wide communes. It is often claimed that some inhabitants didn’t go outside for weeks and months at a stretch, since they could access everything they needed right within the building.

There were feminist contact sessions, Black Power meetings, and Marxist book clubs. For a time, there was a Hare Krishna community on one floor, a group of evangelical Christians on another, and much cosmic spiritual exploration throughout the building. Of course, there was also a lot of sexism, macho male posturing, and bad behaviour. To pretend that this community was anything other than a microcosm of the wider society would be a mistake. Rape, addiction, unwanted pregnancies, violence, mental illness, casual racism, and sexual exploitation were all part of the Rochdale mess. As Sharpe demonstrates, Rochdale may have approached its problems differently than other communities, but it clearly did suffer the same problems. This was no utopia.

Through the early 1970s, it may have looked to residents like things could work out — that maybe Rochdale really could be sustained. But new people kept coming to party, and they were sometimes underage or unwell, and it was always hard to control their numbers. And then came the numerous drug overdoses, bad trips, and several deaths by suicide — particularly by way of people jumping from the building’s windows. The relative quiet was shattered as media and police attention intensified. Sharpe carefully reconstructs this dark chapter, and reminds us at every turn that education — the original idea behind the building — never really disappeared from Rochdale. It had certainly taken on a new and more amorphous character, but this was always a space filled with hungry minds, open learners, and creative energies alongside the revolving door of partiers, runaways, and tourists.

By the end of 1974, the writing was on the wall, and Rochdale had entered its period of decline. Out of money, and struggling through complex legal battles, the governing council was exhausted. Surrounded by Green Meanies (green-jacketed security guards put in place by the receiver of the building), hundreds of Rochdalians tried to maintain their community, to rebuild yet again out of this new muddle. But it was getting harder. As the evictions ramped up, the building began to empty, and the end came into sight. Rochdale would be cleared out, shut down, scrubbed, repurposed. Its once boundless energy dispersed into the wind.

Thanks to David Sharpe’s efforts, you have an opportunity to dig into the rich history of one of the counterculture’s most extraordi­nary creations. Fifty years on, as we continue to negotiate hegemonic approaches to community, sexuality, living arrangements, property, identity, and education, we could do worse than to consider what was learned on these eighteen floors, over seven wild years.

---

STUART HENDERSON is an award-winning Canadian historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, and musician. He is president of 90th Parallel Productions, an independent film and television production company based in Toronto, and the author of Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s.

Part One: The Rise

1

The Seven-Year Itch

In the late Sixties, young idealists and rebels, 800 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, this 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.

At that point in the decade, social gestures had become broad. Youth was a movement; the Americans were at war. The young idealists and rebels in the heart of Toronto had said they wanted to change — even revolutionize — education, but when the federal government gave them the money to do it, what they tried to challenge and change was society itself.

In August 1970, police staged a series of well-publicized raids against the College. Immediately, the public confirmed a suspicion that this was no ordinary building. Although there were many perfectly normal, responsible citizens within those walls, some of the young people there were holding a festival of dreams that the public didn’t share, couldn’t share, and they were holding those dreams in a fortress. Nothing short of an armed invasion — or a long war of attrition — would get them out. It was a set-up that surprised everyone, including the people who found themselves set up. It had never happened on that scale before, and — judging by the furor it caused — it will never happen again.

Rochdale College could have begun only in that experimental decade. In the Sixties, society had become, like a marriage, tired of itself, and Toronto, like a fretful spouse, searched for a lover. The city was feeling a Seven-Year Itch, a sort of menopause in which the pasture dries up and husbands seek new wives or runaway affairs. When Rochdale College arrived, it was as if Marilyn Monroe had moved in down the block.

By popular mythology, the Itch recurs every seven years. But with Toronto, it came only once — and lasted seven years. Indeed, for the seven years of its lifespan — from September 1968 to September 1975 — Rochdale became the itch that Toronto couldn’t scratch.

Through all the twists and turns of the story, the times took Rochdale seriously. The College received detailed press coverage, with frequent, impassioned letters to the editor. When Rochdale diplomas became available, payments came in the mail from all over North America, and some from Europe. Reports entered national magazines and national TV news, and as the word of mouth and media spread, young people loved what they heard. At least 5,000 lived in Rochdale at some point in their impressionable years. They came from, and went to, all parts of Canada. And in the States, Rochdale was an address contemplated by young men with draft-dodging or deserting on their minds.

The following pages document the way both the larger society and the Rochdalians themselves turned a community into a symbol and destroyed it. The Rochdale story has features which lift it from the local, Toronto scene into the continent-wide examination of the Sixties which has begun in the Eighties. Many in the group now holding positions in the social and business establishment were exposed to the ideological challenges of the Sixties and decided either for or against the social protest, the radical conservatism seen in health foods and communes, the killing of categories, the drugs. Rochdale played out a pure form of those challenges-in-action. The reader will find that, if he thought the Sixties were good, they were better inside Rochdale, and if he thought they were bad, inside they were worse.

Much of the following has been taken from internal publications, papers, and interviews — material not carried by the public press. However, looking behind the scenes carries some consequences. Surviving collections of internal publications, for example, are disorganized and partial, and the incidents recorded in the publications are just as disorganized and partial. Items in the internal newspaper, the Daily, are often anonymous and almost never representative of anyone but the writer. In general, the Daily staff printed whatever was submitted. Unattributed quotes, of which there are very many, come from the man in the elevator. Both spoken and written language often break into erratic fucks like flatulence. I’ve saved some for atmosphere, and deleted many for the sake of the air. Likewise with errors in typing, grammar, and spelling. Once the material is seen to be so loose that it hangs over all the edges in the English language, little is gained by reproducing every slip.

Unavoidably, interviews and scattered source papers select, almost randomly, some participants, and ignore others. The people who affected the community often did so without having any definable position, and often without having a name they cared to release. Rochdale prided itself on its brand of urban anarchy and its blunt democracy. This combination of anarchy, democracy, and secrecy allows no orderly retrieval of events, and permits no tidy history of leaders and individuals.

As well as de-emphasizing leaders, I have often had to leave aside another demand commonly made by a history: an accuracy that will stand up in court or classroom. Rochdale refuses to co-operate. As an example, Alex MacDonald, an articulate, alert former resident whom you will hear often in the pages to come, replied to a question about medical facilities by saying there was a big — not one of those damn hippie street clinics — a fully functioning, three-room, eight-doctor clinic. Eight doctors? That seems a lot. MacDonald shrugged: I invented that number. Lots of doctors.¹

And when inventing doesn’t play with the facts, impairment might. As one interviewee put it: I’ve destroyed my memory cells with acid and whiskey. A good combination.

I am saved from one form of distortion, however, since none of this book is memoir. In 1973, I bought a loaf of raisin bread in the Etherea store at ground level as I passed through Toronto on my way to Europe, and that was as close to the living Rochdale as I came. For me, Rochdale did not need to be more than an idea. During the two years that I attended an experimental program at the University of British Columbia, Rochdale was the remote, full-scale example of what we were trying by half-steps.

Despite all the full-scale pain and confusion we are about to see, Rochdale was one of the brightest mindgames in a decade of mindgames, and none of it makes sense without a sense of fun. As longtime resident Bill King said, It’s impossible to understand Rochdale without the boogie.²

---

1

From an interview with the author. All subsequent quotes from original interviews will appear without footnotes.

2

notes,

FRB

2

An Ideal Beginning

The founders wanted a reputable name for a co-operative. They chose Rochdale in honour of an enterprise in 1844 in Rochdale, Lancashire, England. In that long-ago Rochdale, twenty-eight weavers, disciples of Robert Owen, had formed a co-op grocery on the ground floor of a cotton warehouse in Toad Lane. This prototype extended its alternative system into retailing, wholesaling, insurance, and welfare, all within twenty years.

The twentieth-century Rochdale might have lived twenty years as well and would be operating in Toronto today if the Rochdale building, as in the original plan, had become nothing more than a highrise housing students. The scale of the project was unusual, true, but large as it would be, it expected only to become a sober — and co-operative — university residence. Instead, in a moment of innocence, the building welcomed a passing spark, a quickening germ.

A new kind of college, found mainly in the heads of educational idealists, was looking for a home — and found this spacious one in the early, ovum-sperming stage of a plan. The Rochdale Affair began by the coming together of a college on a residence, an ideal of education finding and occupying a structure that would be wonderfully concrete. While the residence was being raised, it became unique by the raising of its consciousness.

In the forefront of that consciousness was educational idealist Dennis Lee, in his late twenties and in the early years of a teaching career at the University of Toronto. At this point, Lee had written challenges to the education system published in small-circulation journals, and had not yet achieved his success as a writer for children and a poet.

It had taken Lee a long time to decide what was wrong with the university system. In the mid-Sixties, he realized that the university had replaced liberal education with other goals: It was this shift of focus that had stymied me for so long — the shift to recognizing that the university was functioning quite adequately, but in a different educational universe from the one I thought it occupied. I had kept on asking why no one shot the puck, but it was easy: we were all playing basketball.³

Lee proposed a return to hockey. He wanted a renewed liberal education, but one that would not lack structure or rules. Under Lee, a student would be encouraged to steep himself so deeply in a discipline — philosophy, say, or economics or theology — that his mind and imagination came to recapitulate the structures and categories and models that inhered in that discipline; at that point his mind had a new order accessible to it — not as an object of study, but as itself. ⁴

The purpose of the new ideal, as it came to be expressed in the Rochdale College Calendar of 1967–68, was to create an academy: a place where men and women who love wisdom can pursue it under the forms and by the avenues which seem best to them. By Dennis Lee’s vision of a liberal college, Rochdale would provide an idealized Oxbridge education — immersion in the subject, testing conclusions against the mind of a tutor, re-immersion in the subject by which that initial liberation could be repeated and extended as he pushed into new disciplines or deeper into one which became his vocation.⁵

This was not new. As Toronto Life pointed out: Lee is in fact describing the constant academic dream. It is not far removed from the raison d’etre and functioning of some medieval universities, and describes the same aspirations of nineteenth-century educationist Cardinal Newman.⁶

Rochdale was said to derive from eleventh-century Oxford and Cambridge Common Houses. If it worked, Lee said, Rochdale would be a place where people of a particular temperament could do the university’s work better than at the university.⁷

Such a dream could be entertained in the prosperous times of the mid-Sixties, and seemed to be the answer to a suspicion that was circulating among the most skeptical of academic minds: experience could be richer than study, the suspicion whispered; knowledge may not be wisdom. Teachers with the most suspicion decided that they were students as much as their students. Whole fields of knowledge were being questioned, and as a consequence, the owners of dubious knowledge became roughly equivalent to those who had none at all. To these newly humbled educators, education became a sharing of poverties, rigorously democratic, in which everyone was, in a relative sense, wealthy. Like mendicant monks, the members of the new order would sacrifice expertise for the possibility of wisdom.

The first vow of these monks of wisdom was to despise job-training. Education should promote a disinterested curiosity. In terms of disinterest, the monk resembles the aristocrat; the one is free of gain by wanting nothing, the other is free by having wealth already. The style of education being proposed was aristocratic, the style that wealthy nineteenth-century landed gentry could pursue, when an amateur was as serious an expert as a professional. Charles Darwin was one such amateur, developing over decades his theories while secluded on his estate. For the educational idealists of the Sixties, the society had become rich enough to support amateurs, and democratic enough that anyone could aspire to become one. Conveniently, because of the residence being built on Bloor Street, at least one set of these gentry would become landed in the twentieth-century, in an eighteen-story estate.

Within this new order of education, anyone could be a teacher since the subjects for teaching had expanded to embrace whatever special learning one had picked up. If origami wasn’t better than linguistics, it was at least equal. A person became a teacher if at least one other person reciprocated and became, temporarily, a student. That would happen only if the teacher earned, moment by moment, the student. Certification, qualifications, none of that mattered if the teaching didn’t work. With the doubts being raised about expertise, it was a small step to cross the usual academic disciplines and adopt a generalist instead of a specialist approach. Biology could be tied to economics, number theory to novels and sociology.

The experiment in an experimental college was a deliberate and risky rejection of control, and in this, academic experimenters shared attitudes with young people who were furthest from organized education. The one ideal that overshadowed the others, and seemed to be universally held by the generation, was an ideal of the Open. If one is sufficiently open — by rejecting the imperfect, unhealthy controls of the current society — one could begin again, perhaps without the mistakes. This ideal hinged on a trust in natural and human forces, a reliance on a white kind of anarchy, an anarchy assumed to be, ultimately, gentle. As such, the people involved in setting up Rochdale, as well as the people who inherited it, had the innocence associated with the young. The effort to establish the new College was not unlike a Children’s Crusade, and just as the medieval Children’s Crusades were too gutsy and mortal to be slighted, what later proved to be naivete should not be dismissed. The cradle being set up would try to nurture something vulnerable, messy, and new.

One control had been identified and labelled for extermination, and that was labelling itself. Rigorously, the new thinkers took the forms that molded thought for practical and approved ends and made them anti: anti-category, anti-status, anti-name, anti-hero, anti-establishment. To be pro was to be locked into what was being promoted; to be anti was to be released to continue to look. Skepticism had reached a new worth, with the greatest skepticism applied to the boundaries of law and convention.

Curiously, because religion often finds itself outside the modern categories, the new education discovered allies in priests who wanted a paring back to essentials that they trusted would be, if not holy, at least respectful. A Basilian Father co-founded the experimental program I attended at the University of British Columbia; Rochdale College had, at the beginning, a Dominican and an Anglican. Though the steps being taken were called forward ones, they stepped far back — at least to the medieval, perhaps to the early church, to a less-organized, more mystic time.

From all the possible ways to step out of the contemporary style of education, the experimental programs that found homes established a rough consensus — in a typical free university, classes were replaced by meetings or seminars, subjects were multidisciplinary, assignments were replaced by voluntary projects, testing was rejected as irrelevant, and no syllabus was pre-planned. What Rochdale is all about is having a system flexible enough to fit people, all kinds of people, rather than trying to make people fit a structured system inherited from somewhere and someone else. It is a place where people must create their own environment, make their own decisions, learn to face themselves — because the basic truth everyone must face is about himself — and learn to live and be complete, rounded people.⁸

Or so Dennis Lee put it. Lee serves in the Rochdale story as a figurehead for the many heads who contributed. Dissatisfaction with the standard university was neither new to the region, nor patented by Lee. A student survey at the University of Montreal, for example, called 43 percent of the faculty unfit for teaching, and student leaders at Toronto’s Glendon College were calling for a month of people-generated classes.⁹

The times were encouraging action for whatever causes seemed right, and not only intellectual ones. In addition to the anti-war, civil rights demonstrations of the post-graduate, non-graduate world, tents were being pitched in battle at Queen’s University in Kingston and at the University of Toronto to protest a shortage of student housing.

Meanwhile, the highrise student residence in the heart of Toronto was being prepared to ease that shortage, initiated by an experienced group called Campus Co-op. Campus Co-op began the adding of education to co-operation, College to Rochdale, by incorporating Rochdale College in 1964 as an educational institution and electing a Rochdale Council in April ’66 to oversee preparations for the highrise. However, whatever educational ambitions the Council might have begun to entertain were modest compared to the larger forces that were at play. As Rochdale co-founder Howard Adelman relates (in his book, The Beds of Academe), the student anti-nuclear movement of the early Sixties had scaled down to the Student Union for Peace Action (

SUPA

) by mid-decade. "Remnants of

SUPA

approached Rochdale Council and offered to develop a radical educational side to the new co-op. At first, they were rebuffed for their arrogant and undiplomatic manner," but later, with help promised by the Company of Young Canadians (a federal social service program), the Council agreed to research the possibilities.¹⁰

Chosen for that research was Company of Young Canadians worker and University of Toronto lecturer Dennis Lee.

Late in December ’66, Rochdale Council decided to pursue that research by opening a preliminary version of its college, to establish Rochdale College as an operative institution beginning this fall, a year before the College proper opens.¹¹

The planners of this continuing educational laboratory felt a mixture of nerve and caution. The committee spoke of the risky and demanding task of front-line experiment, and reminded themselves that their expensive asset demands stability and sobriety.¹²

Quite naturally, they wanted a year to try out a smaller version.

The smaller version began as