May 15

Moved into my dorm room on the seventh floor of Tartu College this morning. Over the winter it’s eighteen floors of sparse residence near Bloor and Spadina, for science and engineering students at the U of Toronto, with six rooms to a unit. In the summer, it’s a low-rent option with strong student vibes overlooking Bloor Street and the northern edge of the university campus—$600 for a rudimentary bed, desk and Internet connection, and plenty of free time left over after paying the rent to practice guitar.

No toilet paper in the bathrooms, but I assume that’s just because the former residents timed it to run out exactly when they moved out after exams—scientists will do that, just as a point of pride. The kitchen garbage is overflowing too, but again, they probably just left in a hurry. No big deal.

So I took out the garbage, and made a mental note to pick up some toilet paper for my new roomies when I go out shopping for bedsheets, a blanket, and a bath towel.

The building was named after the city of Tartu—the intellectual and cultural hub of Estonia. Home to the University of Tartu—the “Heidelberg of the North”—founded by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632. About half of all peer-reviewed publications by Estonian scientists are written by academics at Tartu University.

Impressed?

I keep thinking of an old Dilbert cartoon: There’s two “Fourth World” Elbonian men, one of them with an upside-down cardboard box over his head and a large, square-ish hole cut in the front of the box for his face. The other guy is working on one of the flaps as if it was a QWERTY keyboard.

And the man in the box says, “Tomorrow, you be the computer.”

Tartu College has an equally tall, equally cement-brutalist “sister building” more or less across the street: the Senator David A. Croll apartments. It’s now mostly housing for seniors, but back in 1968, as Rochdale College, it was the largest co-op residence in North America, at the cutting edge of alternative education.

“Alternative” meaning a free university at which there were no profs, and students evaluated themselves for their success in the informal discussion groups that were held instead of structured classes—on topics from magic to revolution to flying saucers and the history of Atlantis.

The most visible of Rochdale’s fund-raising schemes was the infamous Rochdale Degree.... You could order a B.A. in “Life’s Tosses and Turns,” an M.A. in “Absenteeism,” and a Ph.D. in the venerable art and science of “Mind-Fucking.”

The poet Dennis Lee was actually one of the “Resource persons” employed at Rochdale College. He later won a Governor General’s Award in 1972, composed the theme song for Fraggle Rock in the ’80s, and collaborated on many of the other songs for that Muppet-based television series. His most famous work is the book of children’s poetry, Alligator Pie.

Eastward down Bloor Street toward Yonge, in the 1960s, the Yorkville area was the coffeehouse launching pad for the careers of folk-music icons from Neil Young to Joni Mitchell to Gordon Lightfoot to Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins.

City Hall deliberately turned Yorkville from a drug-laden “Haight-Ashbury of the North” into a shopping mall, boutiques, and other high-priced real estate in the late ’60s. So most of the hippies, squatters and bikers from that neighborhood wound up in ... yes, nearby Rochdale. Along with a whole whack of American draft dodgers and assorted Marxists.

Not coincidentally, in the summer of 1970 the chartered “Festival Express” train carried Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, The Band, and a whole lot of drugs and alcohol across the Canadian prairies. The occasion? A traveling jam session interrupted only for historic concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary—the first and only Trans Continental Pop Festival.

The booze ran out around northern Saskatchewan, prompting Janis to stop the train and lead a classic “liquor run,” with Jerry close behind, to the nearest government liquor store ... coincidentally, just outside the Saskatoon hometown of the archetypal California-blonde songstress. You know, the one who “plays guitar and cries and sings”—Joni Mitchell. (Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were very sweet, for a time, on Joni and her prominent cheekbones.)

What the hell does that have to do with Rochdale College? Quite simply, it was the M4M radicals at Rochdale who organized a series of protests directed against the “capitalist exploiters” funding the Festival Express tour. (“May 4th Movement”—the date of the Kent State shootings.) Their demands? Free admission to the shows, along with “free dope and no cops.”

As one of the promoters of that tour remarked after meeting with the leaders of the Rochdale-and-street-people coalition: “These people have a loose grip on reality.”

So that’s our sister building.

The other thing about Rochdale is that it was a “clothing optional” environment.

Well, if any of that groovy ’60s philosophy has rubbed off on Tartu, and I happen to see a cute coed or two walking down the residence halls as god and nature intended, I’ll be sure to let ya know....