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U.C. IRVINE'S LOST COMMUNE AND ITS SAMOAN CONNECTION

You read that right. Irvine -- that bastion of staid, putty-colored suburban respectability -- was home to a commune of sorts in the late 1960s, albeit a short-lived one. The Farm, as it was known, was a social-studies experiment established by UC Irvine in 1968, in which members of indigenous groups from Samoa, Mexico and Guatemala were invited to inhabit the old Irvine Ranch buildings adjacent to the campus so that they could teach scientists and university students about their ways of life.The freewheeling atmosphere (there wasn't much Irvine in Irvine in those days) attracted students and a crew of hippies, who took up residence in old chicken coops and dilapidated school buses, to share in the experience. (This was back when nearby Laguna Canyon was occupied by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and their LSD-distribution machine).The history of this unusual experiment/encampment, which lasted only for an academic year (1968-69), was resuscitated, in part, by a pair of UC Irvine doctoral candidates researching the university's archives, Robert J. Kett and Anna Kryczka. In 2012, the pair created an exhibit based on archival material at UC Irvine. And this spring the pair published a book with everything they dug up: \Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft