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Displaying logic similar to that which created San Francisco’s famed free store in the 1960s, the City by the Bay apparently now has a free university.
According to an article by Reyhan Harmanci in the New York Times:
In an age of escalating college costs… the Free University of San Francisco — which resides in the basement of Viracocha, a store in the Mission District — has one very large thing going for it: no tuition fees.
Conceived by Alan Kaufman, 59, a poet and former instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, the Free University is an oh-so-San Francisco experiment in divorcing education from commerce. “We don’t need walls, we don’t need desks to impart knowledge,” Mr. Kaufman said. “The idea of a free university is that it’s monetarily free, free of constraints, free of any kind of administration.”
On March 6, the university will begin a cycle of seven five-week classes. After that, Mr. Kaufman said, students can expect both 5- and 10-week courses.
Technically until the 1970s San Francisco used to boast several virtually free universities (Berkeley, San Francisco State, UCSF) but the California tax revolt put an end to that experiment.
While the new school might be free, its status as a university is a little ambiguous.
FUSF, which offers classes like “Abolishing Corporate Personhood to Create Authentic Democracy,” isn’t really a college at all, any more than Beck University, Trump University, or the nearby Oaksterdam University, a school entirely devoted to the cultivation of marijuana.
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Free University of San Francisco on March 06, 2011 1:29 AM:
The mission of The Free University of San Francisco is to serve as an ongoing class in human freedom. We are not a vocational school to empower students to till the fields of their corporate masters. We teach intellectual disobedience, political empowerment and social rebellion.In a recent article about us in the New York Times, we are compared to The Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement of the Nineteen Sixties. Indeed, we are the Civil Rights Movement of Higher Education. We are for the student first and foremost, and are committed to the liberation of those who have been trained by the educational system to obedience and indenturedness. We stand firmly opposed to the privatization of Higher Education and regard the classroom experience as an anti-heirchichal dialogue between teacher and student in which each learns from the other so that both are enriched.
We are a democratic open Collective without leadership. The only requirement for membership is a desire to teach or to learn. Unarguably, an important aspect of our undertaking is the restoration of the liberal arts to a place of primacy in education, as the Corporation has discredited fields of intellectual and artistic pursuit, replacing them with purely technical or administrative tasks central to their profit-making motives.
We do not believe that the way forward for education or America is to find ways to work with or within the corporate state. We do not believe that mass-manufacturing wordprocessing clerks and sales reps for whom there are no jobs serves diversity. Rather, it further promotes the lies fed to students by private institutions that jobs await them on the outside. They do not. If job-training is to serve the current employment market then Starbucks Coffee Barista is a more realistic job training. We are for the replacement of the corporate state with social and political democracy of an egalitarian and collectivist nature.
We are most of all for the restoration of the human spirit in a population that is tired, feels crushed and sees no hope ahead. We feel that hope lies in the free exchange of knowledge, that immersion in art and literature, law and history, social and natural sciences opens unconsidered avenues to liberation and purposeful action. We do not believe, with you, that color condemns one to a vocational career path. Rather, it ought to, if anything, lead, in the present condition, to an education path of personal transformation and social and political revolution.
Alan Kaufman
Founder and Co-Dean, Free University of San Francisco