Alfred de Grazia - Later Career

Later Career

In the early 1970s, de Grazia founded the "University of the New World" in Haute-Nendaz Switzerland, as an unstructured alternative to American universities. He invited Beat author William S. Burroughs to teach at it. In his biography of Burroughs, Ted Morgan described the students that it attracted as "drifters and dropouts on the international hippie circuit"; he suggested that this resulted in a culture clash with the "prim Swiss", and that the university lacked adequate facilities or a sound business model.

In 2002, de Grazia was appointed "visiting professor" in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, Computing and Applications of the University of Bergamo. He has previously been a visiting lecturer at the University of Rome, University of Bombay, University of Istanbul, and University of Gothenburg.