War and Peace at the American University

At American universities, administrative bureaucracies too often deny students a voice in their own education; for the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson puts a spotlight on the opposite extreme. Tolstoy College was founded at SUNY Buffalo in the late 60s as something in between a department and a group of anarchist separatists. Wilson describes the radically alternative behaviors that characterized Tolstoy’s culture—classes held in trailers full of sofas, an upper limit of A-grades that students assigned amongst themselves—before the program was finally shut down in the Reagan era.