Mid-peninsula Free University

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The Mid-Peninsula Free University was a free university that emerged in Palo Alto, California out of the burgeoning counterculture scene of there in the 1960s and 1970s ^[1]. It offered classes on everything from sand-casting candles to community organizing. It was formed as a reaction to the growing influence of the military-industrial complex on American universities.^[2]

One famous event organized by the Mid-peninsula Free University was a debate between LSD-proponent Timothy Leary and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver in 1967.

In 1968, it was one of the targets of a series of bombing. ^[3]

In 1969, Larry Tesler and Jim Warren volunteered make the university's course catalog. Both had been involved with computers then, and thought that computers could be used to make publishing much easier. It was through that experience that Jim Warren would later go on to develop cut, copy and paste functionality at Xerox PARC.

There was also an associated newspaper, the Free You. The journalist Phil Trounstine got his start writing for that paper.

By the 1970s, a rift had developed in the university between the Pacifists and the more militant Maoist newcomers.^[4] For example, Phil Trounstine starting working with Venceremos to take over the Mid-peninsula Free University with the aim of turning it into a recruitment forum.^[5]