[1] Like other free universities, it featured an open curriculum—anyone who paid the nominal membership fee ($10) could offer a course in anything—marxism, pacifism, candle making, computers, encounter, dance, or literature.
[4] The MFU sponsored, Be-Ins, street concerts, a restaurant, a store, and was actively involved in every aspect of the flourishing counterculture on the Midpeninsula, including the anti-war movement at Stanford University.
[7] Later, as its courses and interests expanded to include the full range of 1960s counterculture—especially the burgeoning human potential movement—the MFU adopted a revised Preamble reflecting a more expansive vision[8]—a document which one commentator characterized as "a compelling and almost classical manifesto" of the aspirations of 1960s counterculture.
[14] The MFU brought together in classes and at meetings the diverse, overlapping and sometimes divergent, strains of the local counterculture—artists, crafts-people, writers, leftists, pacifists, dissatisfied liberals, disaffected street-people, environmentalists, people involved or interested in mysticism, computers, encounter, drugs, rock music and sexual freedom.
[22] While all that was happening, the MFU—along with Kepler's Books, the local Kennedy Action Corps headquarters, the Resistance, and the home of a Palo Alto Councilmember who supported gun control—became the target of a series of firebombings, conducted by a right-wing group calling themselves the Society of Man.
[25] It also published original work by well-known writers and poets[26]—Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Thom Gunn, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman.
Some were well known and some were prominent visitors: Paul Goodman was the principal speaker at an early organizational meeting; Herbert Marcuse taught a seminar; Joan Baez lectured on non-violence; Norman O.
[31] While the MFU model was egalitarian, much of its success was due to a core group of leaders and a dedicated staff, all of whom taught classes and most of whom held elected positions: Robb Crist, Vic Lovell, Robert Cullenbine, Kim Woodard, Larry Tesler, Marc Porat, Jim Warren, John McCarthy,[32] Graham and Rene Lewis, Tom Reidy, Roy Kepler,[33] Kathy Kirby, Tom Crystal, Gail Teel, Grace Olsen, Mark Jensen, Docey Baldwin, Dorothy Bender, and Jim Wolpman, to name a few.
[35] Bob Palmer was its master printer; Nina Wolf, Joan Larimore, Emil Pierre, Lee Reeves, and Phil Trounstine were responsible for most of its graphics and much of its photography.