completed floor by floor, a practical decision was made to make the building available to "people who walked in right off the street." As the small group of founders later stated: "[w]e were sealing the fate of the Rochdale that most of us had wanted to experiment with. And since there were very few rules about how the place would be run, we were in effect handing the building over to people very unlike ourselves." "If the new residents were a problem to the resource people, non-residents were a problem to everyone," says Rochdale chronicler and Ohio University Lecturer David Sharpe. "As Rochdalians claimed floor by floor in the fall of 1968, transients discovered wide open areas on the upper floors and moved in – and out and in and out. As those areas became permanently occupied, the transients continued to wander and squat and wander again. Meanwhile, word of mouth, word of press, called out: A free college! A college so unlicensed that it offers, not freedom or license, but both. Freedom from parents, freedom from rent, freedom even from an address. Thousands of visitors and interim residents came from the roads and the suburbs. Metro had a little school Its name was black as sin And day and night the Metro kids Were screaming to get in." (Rochdale Daily) Educational ideals In the late 1960s, universities were centres of political idealism and experimentation. Rochdale College was established as an alternative to what were considered traditional paternalistic and non-democratic governing bodies within university education. Conversely, Rochdale's government policy was decided at open meetings in which all members of the co-operative could attend, participate in debate, and engage in consensus decision making. It was the largest of more than 300 tuition-free universities in North America, and offered no structured courses, curriculum, exams, degrees, or traditional teaching faculty. From humble beginnings in seminars on phenomenology and a Recorder Consort that performed with the London (Ontario) Symphony Orchestra, it became a hot bed of freethought and radical idealism. Rochdale College never used traditional professors or structured classes. Posting notices on bulletin boards and in a student newsletter, groups of students coalesced around an interest, and "resource people" were found with various academic and non-academic backgrounds, who led informal discussion groups on a wide variety of subjects. Resource persons of note included an Anglican priest, Alderman and later Member of Parliament, Dan Heap,