Communiversity

The idea for Communiversity came from political science professor and YMCA board member Steve Douglas, who borrowed it from his father, a Kansas State University professor who had founded a similar program there. The Y tried it out in 1974 with a series of low-cost mini-courses on subjects such as bicycle repair, car care and photography. In 1975 a student group called the Learning Exchange formed at the Y, inspired by the national free-university movement, to match people who wanted to teach or share a skill with people who wanted to learn one.

Out of these efforts, Communiversity began in the spring of 1977. Built on the idea that anyone can teach and anyone can learn, it offered non-credit, non-graded classes to the public every semester. It was a success from the start: by 1983 it ran more than 70 classes a semester with nearly 1,000 students. When the Y spun off its community programs to other agencies in 1984, Communiversity was the only one it kept. It had shrunk by the mid-1990s, to about 300 people a semester in an average of 45 classes, but it remained the anchor of the Y's community work when Scott Peters wrote his history in 1997.

Source: Scott J. Peters, The Promise of Association (1997).