Rochdale College - Transition

Transition

The originally intended tenants for Rochdale were screened. Screenings were handled by residents of the Rochdale Houses, a precursor “dry-run” to Rochdale conducted at Campus Co-op owned houses, and they chose people who were by and large going to be associated with the University of Toronto. However, a construction strike in 1967 that delayed the opening of Rochdale by half a year changed Rochdale's population from what was supposed to be a carefully selected one to a completely random one. The screened applicants, most of whom had commitments to the university, could not wait for Rochdale to be completed and many found new accommodations. When the college was slowly 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 realized: “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.”