“This Quiet Revolution”

One of the most revolutionary movements in the history of US universities—the Third World students’ strike that shut down San Francisco (SF) State College for five months in 1968–69—had a key precursor in the Experimental College (EC), which supported student-organized courses, including the first Black studies courses, at SF State. The EC offers inspiration for creating infrastructures of radical imagination and study. The EC appropriated resources—including spaces, money, teachers, credits, and technologies—for studying within, against, and beyond the normal university. The EC facilitated courses with revolutionary content, and they fostered modes of study in these courses that were radically alternative to the education-based mode of study. Contributing my concept of “modes of study,” I offer guidance for revolutionary movements on the terrain of universities today. Through analysis of archival materials and interviews with organizers of the EC and Black Student Union, I found that the EC organizers’ potentials for supporting revolutionary study were limited by their romanticizing of education, which was coconstituted with subscriptions to modernist imaginaries. Rejecting the education-based mode of study as bound up with liberal-capitalist modernity/coloniality, organizers today can appropriate their universities’ resources for alternative modes of study and world-making.

When Experimental Was Mainstream: The Rise and Fall of Experimental Colleges, 1957–1979

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, dozens of experimental colleges were founded across the United States. While these institutions are usually remembered as either a fringe movement of the 1960s or a niche for nonconformist students, this essay argues that their genesis was markedly mainstream. Drawing from popular trends, higher education leaders in the late 1950s designed the institutions to be the most efficient means of educating a rapidly growing population into an open-minded, liberally educated citizenry. Despite initial growth, by the end of the 1960s, rifts emerged between students and experimental college leaders. These conflicts, combined with a broader loss of material and ideological support, led the movement to lose its legitimacy as a mainstream reform. By highlighting the history of experimental colleges, this essay prompts a reconsideration of this movement's importance and its connections to larger trends in undergraduate and general education in the mid-twentieth century.

A Community Far Afield

This chapter examines Black Mountain College, an experimental college of exiles—cultural, political, and social, who created a utopian Appalachian avant-garde art community that emerged in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1933. The author examines the history, social ecosystem and legacy if this innovative and short-lived college that played host to the likes of R. Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.

Interpersonal Orientation and Living Group Preferences: A Validity Check on FIRO-B

Construct validity of Schutz's FIRO-B was tested in terms of correlation with a Living Group Questionnaire developed to assess the interpersonal preferences of 123 students in an experimental college. After controlling for the intercorrelation of FIRO-B subscales, some Living Group Questionnaire items still appeared to tap more than one dimension of interpersonal need, but sex differences were found to account for the overlap. Results were seen as generally substantiating the validity of the FIRO-B.