The Baltimore Free University (the BFU) has been gone as long as it was around. It lasted 16
years closing down in 1984. It’s been gone since then, and so has much of its history. It is
unclear how many people really missed it, but it is clear that several of the people who go back to
its 1968 start are still active, enthusiastic and helping with its reincarnation.

The idea of the free university grew out of the student movement of the middle to late
1960s. It’s necessary to appreciate its context to understand what it was all about–and why it was
so exciting to so many people. The war in Vietnam came to campuses, first through teach-ins in
1965, later through a staggering number of new left groups, and eventually because of the draft.
The Black liberation movement, especially the Panthers, had arrived on the scene. Everything
was a “scene” in those days. The women’s movement was reborn, proclaiming that there would
be no liberation without women’s liberation. Everything was not only a scene, but it was also a
liberation movement. On campus, there was even such a creation as the “sociology liberation
movement,” although many of its members were not very liberated.

The culture of the times was not just a counter culture. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll may
never have gone out, but there had been a decided absence in the 1950s. The fifties were known
as “the silent generation,” and the sixties were a true revolt, at least on a cultural level.

The free university was a response to its time. Students and a smattering of younger
faculty were as dissatisfied with the university as they were with the other institutions of middle
class society. The call, at the time, was for a “new university,” and one of the major campus anti-
war movements was appropriately called the “New University Conference.” The student
movement was in protest against the arbitrary and concentrated power of the faculty and what
they saw as an outdated, racist and sexist curriculum. The students demanded “power,” but
above all they demanded RELEVANCE. Faculty, the charges went, were not teaching what
students needed to know. Like the curriculum, they were irrelevant.

Enter the free university. At some major universities, the “Free U” was an alternative
structure in which students designed the course offerings and taught the courses, or at least got a
sympathetic faculty member to do so. In a few places, they were able to get course credit for
some of the Free U’s classes, but in most places it was a noncredit program, and often quite
political.

Johns Hopkins was one of those early Free U’s. Not quite radical, but, as some of its
participants say, “definitely anti-establishment.” It was the work primarily of JHU’s ‘fighting
chaplain,” Chester Wickwire. Wickwire was active in the civil rights movement and in the antiwar
movement and his office had become a significant resource not only for students but for the larger
antiwar community. Dick Flax, then a member of the founding group, said of the early days,
perhaps too politely, that JHU was “not excited” by the BFU. In 1984, when Wickwire retired,
the JHU administration retired the project as well.

For its first ten years, Bill Tiefenwirth told IMC, the constituency for the BFU was mainly
students and faculty from JHU and nearby colleges, but by the late 1970s it became more
inclusive. It was not unusual for a catalog to list 110 -120 classes and have most of them actually
be given. Still heavy with counterculture students, it began to attract a more diverse enrollment
and hundreds of students would line up for registration.

Tiefenwirth, who joined the Chaplain’s office in 1979, is now director of the JHU Center
for Social Concern. In May, he convened a planning committee to consider the rebirth of the
BFU. It was a go. BFU will accept proposals for courses from any one qualified to teach what
they want to offer. “The only course we would turn down,” Tiefenwirth insisted, “would be
something that was destructive for the community.”

For a ten-dollar registration fee, students will be able to sign up for as many courses as
they choose. The initial catalog may be kept small, but like much about the BFU that’s a tentative
decision. ( You can send proposals to btie-AT-jhu.edu) Some of the courses already accepted are
American Filmaking, Zen and the Art of Time Management, Preserving Rare Books, A Walking
Tour of Literary Baltimore, and Labor Studies. Following the pattern of the original, registration
will be held on a single night in mid-September with most of the instructors available to discuss
their course offerings. Classes will meet evenings and weekends on campus locations, in
instructors homes or studios, and at branches of the Enoch Pratt Library.

The BFU will not only offer a catalog of classes, but it is already planing to sponsor
appropriate events. In October it will host the Third Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Book Fair.

Tiefenwirth sees himself as the steward of the new BFU. Adhering to a popular slogan of
the sixties that if you weren’t part of the solution you were part of the problem, he hopes that the
new BFU will express a social concern blurring the boundaries between teacher and student and
bringing people together.