Letter recently received from Shimer

Hello.... is there anybody out there? I received the following e-mail from Shimer College today:

June 7, 2016 Dear Laura, As you have heard, Shimer now faces a great opportunity: to move from unsustainability to sustainability through an affiliation with North Central College in Naperville. The Boards of Shimer and North Central have endorsed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would lead to Shimer becoming the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College, parallel to other schools at NCC. The Shimer Board is enthusiastic, and the Faculty and Assembly have been strongly supportive. We (Chris and Rebecca) also personally believe that this prospective arrangement for Shimer is a wonderful opportunity to maintain the Shimer program, which has contributed so much to all of our lives. But to make this deal work, Shimer will need to raise substantial amounts of money over the next year, since it is an explicit requirement of the MOU that we remain financially viable on our own until March 2017. As you know, we have a detailed development plan. If you write to Isabella Winkler at i.winkler[@redacted], she will send you a copy via email. Shimer needs to raise $900,000, which will involve at least doubling our gifs [sic] from alumni, both in the general alumni appeal and in major donations of $5000 or more fr om alums. In the past, many alums have contributed loyally to Shimer but have not made it a top charitable priority - quite naturally, since our sustainability was always in question and no one wants to throw money away. Now, however, we have a chance to give in this 'window of opportunity,' confident that our gifts will help Shimer become sustainable over the long term. Several of us on the board have already decided to vastly increase our giving to Shimer. Those of us who are soliciting funds feel that we can only ask others to "stretch" if we do so ourselves. Please consider whether you could give an order of magnitude more than in the past-- $10,000 instead of $1000, $5000 instead of $500. If not, please at least consider doubling or tripling your previous gifts. Shimer has been such an integral part of our lives. It has taught us more than just critical thinking; Shimer has encouraged us to be curious in our every endeavor. Shimer has taught us that being different is not only acceptable, but actually desirable. And most importantly, Shimer has shown us through the examples of its amazing faculty how to be strong and persevere with grace and dignity. It is our most fervent hope to keep these same learning and growth opportunities alive for future generations, and that is why we are working now to keep the fires burning for Shimer at North Central. Won't you please join us? Sincerely yours, Chris Vaughan and Rebecca Sundin

I'n not on Facebook, so I have questions. 1. My impression was that Shimer would actually be absorbed in whole by NCC. Am I to understand that "affiliation" differs from "absorption"? 2. I'm a little put out by the "no-one wants to throw money away" comment. I am not currently giving to Shimer because I am yet recovering from three years of unemployment due to long illness. I'm getting back, but currently saving to buy a bottle of ketchup (we'll pretend that I am being ironic so I don't have to weep); 3. I don't know that there was any avenue for reply, other than giving or descending upon Ms. Winkler-- or giving. If I am to be consigned to naked eggs for the next few months, I would very much like to know to what, precisely, I am giving. Is there a web page outlining this somewhere?

Recent coverage of Shimer

A few days ago, Jon Ronson published a piece in the Guardian about Shimer. It may be the best and most Shimerian publicity that Shimer has ever received. You should read it.

The article was prompted by the pushback against the Washington Monthly's recent rating of Shimer as "worst college in America" for a certain set of criteria (which are worthy of separate discussion). Since nobody was coming out of the woodwork to defend any of the other "worst colleges," Ronson decided to visit Shimer to find out what it was all about.

What happened next was kind of epic.

I get talking to Albert Fernandez, a professor of cultural history and humanities. He has the intense demeanor and indeterminate European accent of a Slavoj Žižek. He leads me into a classroom as austere as he is and tells me how angry he is about the list.

“What we do at Shimer,” he says, “is difficult. It’s difficult to sit in a small room with six or eight students and have your beliefs challenged. If a school is hard to graduate from for reasons to do with an attempt at educational quality – that should be taken into account. The writer said nothing about that.”

A look of fury crosses his face, at the thought of Shimer being penalized for what makes it great. He says a lot of places that top those best colleges lists are the opposite of difficult. They’re undemanding. “If you’re going to take education seriously you can’t have a system where the objective is to make it as easy as possible to get through.”

At this writing, the article has received more than 14,000 interactions on social media, including more than 900 Tweets and more than 140 LinkedIn shares. The article itself has 343 comments, which are also well worth reading.

For a time it was the Guardian's #3 article sitewide:







The article was tweeted by Neil Gaiman (he of 2.1 million Twitter followers), who followed up with a personal greeting to the people of Shimer:











The article has since been picked up by Longreads, The Baffler, Gapers Block and others, and is continuing to spread. At this writing, some 4 days after it was posted, new tweets of the article are still coming in at about 3-5 per hour.

Here are some notable response pieces by Shimerians and others:

• Chicago's own #bestworstcollege, by Shimer prez Susan Henking
• Shimer College in the Guardian, by Shimer prof Adam Kotsko
• How statistics turns best into worst, by St. John's prez and longtime friend of Shimer Chris Nelson
• Mugged by a ratings system designed for someone else, by David Mills
• The Fiction of College Rankings: Meet America’s 'Best Worst College', by David Wieneke (Shimer '83)
• The value of a Great Books education, by Peter Piper (Shimer '98)
• Shimer College should not be condemned for untraditional teaching methods, by Sabiha Masud  
• How to think, not what to think, by Dave Trott, author of Creative Mischief
• Bah humbug, numbers never tell the entire story, by ChicagoNow gifted education blogger Rhonda Stern

... and on the matter of response pieces: although unworthy of a link, one of our old friends from 2010 is apparently still nursing old grudges:



If Joe Bast is still mad at Shimer, we must be doing something right.

Please share the Ronson article with anyone you think might be interested in Shimer!


(updated to include new response pieces -- December 18, 2014)

Pictures taken at an inauguration

Via the official Flickr page:


Created with flickr slideshow.
You can view my own photos from that day, which mostly cover the pre-inauguration discussions, here. (I've attempted to upload them to Shimer College Wiki, but something went haywire and I haven't had time to fix it.)

Both my and the College's photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so please share freely!

Shimer College Assembly to meet August 28

The Assembly of Shimer College will meet at 3:15 PM this coming Wednesday, August 28, in the Cinderella Lounge at Shimer.  The agenda is as follows:

Meeting of the Shimer College Assembly

3:15 pm Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Cinderella Lounge

1. Welcome from the Speaker and review of Assembly protocol and procedures by the Parliamentarian.

2. Approval of Minutes from meeting of April 21st, 2013.

3. Questions on Committee and Director reports to the Assembly.

4. Motion from David Shiner (10 minutes):

To suspend until the Fall 2014 meeting of the Board of Trustees the clause in the description of the Institutional Goals and Assessment Committee in the Constitution of the Assembly that states "Trustees whose terms on the Board end during their term on the Committee cease to be members and are replaced by election."

5. Elections:

- Replacement(s) for Institutional Goals and Assessment Committee

- Secretary of the Assembly

- Admissions Committee

- Agenda Committee

- Quality of Life Committee

- Student Representative to IIT Student Government

6. David Shiner, Chair of the Institutional Goals and Assessment Committee, presentation on community participation in the committee's work.

7. Announcements from the community.

8. White Whale presentation on new Shimer College website.

9. Adjournment.

Help Shimer build a kick-ass website

Via trustee Chris Vaughan ('86) comes the following request:

HELP SHIMER BUILD A KICK-ASS WEBSITE. The dangerously new Shimer website will launch within weeks, and it will be kick-ass. But WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW.

We need you to RECORD A ONE TO TWO MINUTE VIDEO about your favorite book you read or discussed at Shimer and let us post it on the site. It can be a memory of a classroom moment, your own personal feeling about the book, or a fun story that's only partially connected to the book.

The only rules are (a) you should mention the book at some point; and (b) that you should try to look at the camera. Any HD camera will do (even an iPhone). Please email submissions to i.winkler@shimer.edu as soon as possible. We really do need your help.

Below is a sample from an honorary Shimerian, Jason Pontius, who heads up our web design firm. He did his thing. Now you do yours.

Shimer symposium at Growling Rabbit in Chicago, August 30

Update: RSVP to event on Facebook.

The Growling Rabbit Café presents:

Learning About Learning: 
The Tumultuous History of Great Books Education in America

Presented by Dr. David Shiner, 
Dr. Stuart Patterson, 
and Dr. Barbara Stone 
of Shimer College.

Friday, August 30th

7 pm 'til 9 pm

Dinner served until 7:45

Coffee and baked goods available until 9 pm

No Cover

6981 N. Sheridan Road (At Lunt)

IGAC to meet August 9

 The following missive was kindly passed along by a member of the internal community:

Fellow Shimerians,

The next meeting of the Institutional Goals and Assessment Committee (IGAC) is open to the community at large and will take place beginning at 1 PM next Friday, August 9. We'll meet in the Infinity Room. If you decide to join us please be prompt. We will be discussing our ongoing work with assessment and strategy at Shimer.

Thank You

(For more on IGAC, see David Shiner's letter.)

The tree that is not one

This photo, kindly furnished by Isabella Winkler, shows a nearby tree neatly reflected behind the new "Shimer College" lettering at the Admissions entrance:

The reflected tree reminds me of something I noticed when I was last walking around the outside of the Shimer building: that in summer, the Chicago campus is not such a gray and dreary place at all.  The flourishing greenery actually gives an almost human touch to the modernist angles of the old Institute of Gas Technology.

But the reflection also uncannily recalls the opening sequence of the recent Shimer video:

That tree, of course, is (or is intended to represent) the tree of the Shimer logo:

But whence comes the tree of the Shimer logo?  It first emerged in the early 1970s; here it is in the 1973 catalog:

There appears to be some dispute as to exactly which tree that is.  In shape it most resembles an oak, and it may have been modeled on a large oak [or maple] that grew on the Shimer golf course in Mount Carroll.  On the other hand, contemporary reports indicate that the Graduation Elm -- which was in the final throes of Dutch elm disease by 1971, when the logo first emerges -- had an unusually oak-like shape.

For my part, then, I prefer to think that it is the Graduation Elm: a noble tree that had the wisdom to leave Shimer before Shimer left it.


When I attended Shimer in Waukegan in the late 1990s, there were a number of delightful trees on the campus, which, by then, had grown into a real campus (or pretty close) with a quad and everything.  But there were many years in the Waukegan period when the "campus" consisted only of the 438 building.  And although the sideyard of 438 did boast a couple of respectable pines, it didn't have any that were anything like the tree of the logo, or even the sort of tree that you can hang out in the branches of, as we had by the 1990s.  Shimer had left all its trees behind.

What could the tree logo represent, then, but a reminder of everything that had been sacrificed to keep this school going?  As students, we sometimes called the Shimer tree "the Tree of Knowledge."  But perhaps a better label would be "the Tree of Loss."  And so it remains today: no real thing, but a stray image caught in the glass, a reflection seen through tears. 

Our comrades at Marlboro College have a mascot known as the "Fighting Dead Tree." Perhaps this is another case of convergent evolution between these two peculiar schools.  Our trees die, or are left behind, but we keep them as our symbol: either our shield against the madness of the world, or a marker of our shared insanity, whichever you prefer.

It is our losses that give us the strength to fight. 

New article posted to examiner.com

There are many things not to like about Examiner.com, from the odious politics of its owner to the general sleaziness of its operations and presentation. 

However, I've found that on balance the articles I've posted there seem to do better and reach further than any other efforts I've made at documenting Shimer events. 

I have thus resolved to reconcile myself to the luzerliness of playing campus reporter for a school I graduated from 15 years ago, and have posted my latest article here: Chicago's Shimer College to Shine with New State Grant.

Monsters University and the rigors of radical uniqueness

Susan Henking's recent post on ChicagoNow directs us to this masterful spoof of the standard university website, courtesy of the movie Monsters University.

Reading through that website's exquisitely unoriginal prose, I experienced a painful twinge of recognition with regard to the three points I suggested in my revised part 1 responding to David Shiner's questions.  Monsters U may not lean too heavily on the radical side of things, but it is full of unique rigor and rigorous uniqueness. If President Gross was up to date on the latest "disruptiveness" sociobabble, it would no doubt be full of uniquely rigorous radicalism too.  And just to belabor the point, it is full of those things because all universities and colleges are full of them, or at least imagine themselves to be.  Nothing, in short, is less unique than uniqueness.

This isn't just a pleasant exercise in Hegelian logical maneuvering. It leads us to a specific problem: a lot of the things that are true and important about Shimer College sound exactly like the insincere blather mouthed by hundreds of other institutions -- most of which, in my humble and thoroughly biased opinion, are unique in only the most trivial sense, inasmuch as they are all unique in the same way.   (And many of which are no longer really educational or even nonprofit institutions, having become increasingly pure exercises in credentialist rent-seeking.  But they still talk like such institutions, and with their funds rerouted from academics to marketing, they can make the case for what they aren't more convincingly than ever.)

"How to think, not what to think"? Been there, heard that. "Small classes and a real commitment to teaching"?  Well, that's original.  "Close-knit and supportive community"? C'mon, pull the other one, it's got bells on.   Heck, even Shimer's motto isn't exactly one-of-a-kind.  (Note: the aspersions cast in the previous paragraph do not necessarily apply to the specific institutions linked.)

When Shimer's own brand signal is so weak and the truth about Shimer sounds so much like the lies and half-truths that other schools tell, it's no wonder our recruitment efforts end up relying heavily on word of mouth and serendipity.

Thinking about it this way, it becomes clearer why Shimer has gravitated so much toward the "Great Books" aspect of its identity, even though Shimer's version of the Great Books isn't quite what most people would expect.  Being a Great Books college is far from the only (or even most significant) way in which Shimer presents a radical alternative in higher education, but it is one that's relatively easy to make the case for. It's a particular aspect of rigor that is hard to fake (and unlikely to be faked).

This also helps to explain the fetishistic focus on the Oxford program in the current Shimer video and viewbook: for all its value, the Oxford program wouldn't naturally suggest itself as a major selling point, but at least it is a concrete distinguishing characteristic (and a photogenic one too).

I'm not sure how we can extricate ourselves from this particular trap, but thinking about this does make me increasingly convinced that we need better and more specific ways of making the case for what Shimer does.

Eric Nicholson on "The Future of Shimer's Best"

Eric Nicholson responds to the questions posed:

The Future of Shimer's Best

"So, what do you think? What is most important about Shimer? What do you think we should preserve – that is what are the key elements of what you value about Shimer? Where do we need to improve, and how might we go about doing that? Where should we innovate, and why? In short, what is it that, in your opinion, matters most about Shimer, and especially about Shimer’s future?"

What do I think? No. How do I think? How do I conceptualize the manifold sensation of what we intuit as Shimer as an act of will worthy of reasonably willing all rational beings to will?

Shimer is us. Saints preserve us, they write great books and intercede for us with almighty questions to keep us thinking. Who are we? We read, and while we read the distinctions we discover take hold of manifold memories and sensations and gather them together in more or less coherent clusters of idea. We gather together at more or less regular intervals to share the ideas with which we've gathered what we've read and through our interactive dialog reopen those ideas, exchange and rearrange the memories and sensations gathered in them. In our interaction we begin to sense the form and function of our ideas and remember they reappear in highly varied contexts with quite diverse contents of memory and sensation. We begin to read our memories and sensations in concert with the books of saints and the conversation of our peers and to write our reasoned wills in our interaction with the world of sense and memory around us.

How does any of this distinguish Shimer from any other gathering of literate scholars? The idea of Shimer as a specific location, however nomadic, contains a notion, through time, of who we are. Those specific times and places in which we gather to carry on the conversation in Shimer's name provide occasion for our preservation, but we distinguish ourselves by how we occupy those occasions. The books we read and their authors are read by others in other places at other times. The canons, too, by which we gather them for beatification according to their greatness are shared in common with others, as are forms and functions of ideas developed through our reading in which we comprehend manifold memories and sensations that we also share with others. I think what distinguishes us is how we question everything and everybody.

We question everything as a whole and each thing's part in that whole through the curricular arrangement of the times of our readings of great books and our meetings to discuss them. We recognize in our experience questions concerned with the natural world that contains and constrains us, others that relate to the ways we contain and constrain one and other in our social institutions, and still more with respect to the contents of and constraints on the productions of our imaginations. We question also the forms and functions of the questions we ask.

We question everybody in ourselves, in each other, in the saints whose relics we read as great books, in God who created this world and gods holding sway in it, and we regard our questions as the same as those confronting all of our fellow denizens of this planet. But here's the thing.

Shimer's curriculum is a distillation of the fundamental core of explicitly Western Civilization. This combination of ideas and methods was concocted over the course of the first half of the Twentieth Century by great minds gathered at the University of Chicago for the purpose of training the best minds drawn from the American public to assume roles of leadership as citizens in business, government, the professions and academia. Given the time and place of its creation, it is not surprising that that curriculum would show signs of use as an instrument of oppression of the underprivileged, minorities and other peoples with exploitable resources.

There is in the American offshoot of the British branch of the Western Tradition a continuing critique of the ruling of elites that showed up in William Rainey Harper's attempts to put the power of a college education within the reach of ordinary citizens. The affiliation of the University of Chicago with Frances Shimer's Academy in the middle of the last century was a product of this impulse. F.A.W. Shimer, of course, was all about putting the power of the intellectually elite into hands of an underprivileged class: women. Mrs. Shimer's endeavor was also forged as a community based on intimate personal relationships tightly woven into what she clearly considered her family. The marriage of Shimer's community with Hutchins' curriculum, freed from the centrifugal forces of divisions of advanced disciplines by Mount Carroll's rural isolation created a unique combination of intellectual rigor and intense interpersonal attachment.

I have more to say about the urgent need for this particular institution to reach out beyond the elite tradition of modern globalization and read together with these, the works of saints of other traditions together with members of all underprivileged races, genders, classes and nationalities in order to gather ever more manifold memories and sensations into distinctions with which to truly question everything and everybody, but I have no more time.

Where does Shimer need to innovate and improve?

This is the third in a series of posts in response to this request.

David Shiner asked:

Where do we need to improve, and how might we go about doing that? Where should we innovate, and why? 

Shimer's core product -- the Shimer education -- is in my opinion extremely sound, and does not need to be substantially reworked. The more radical improvements and innovations are needed at the margins and in the support structure. 

In terms of improvement, I think that above all, Shimer needs to do a better job of making the case for itself.  I don't mean this in a marketing sense  (though we can take it as given that Shimer will always need better marketing), but in the sense of being able to explain and justify to a skeptical observer exactly what Shimer does and why. 

This is particularly the case when it comes to assessment of Shimer's learning outcomes.  In particular -- although this is only one aspect of the problem -- it is frankly unconscionable that the last (and really only) independent review of Shimer's academic performance is a Harvard Educational Review article now 50 years old.  The GRE data and Ph.D. completion rates that provided some ongoing objective validation of Shimer's academic quality are now both substantially degraded: the GREs by the fact that they are no longer mandatory for all graduates, the Ph.D. rates by the devaluation of the Ph.D. in many fields. 

If the old metrics are out the window, Shimer needs to replace them with something else.  There are any number of well-validated quantitative tests that might be used for tracking academic progress; in my opinion, Shimer needs to pick one and use it. (This seems like the sort of thing there should be grant money for, especially if Shimer can team up with a friendly psychometrician.)  And if the results turn out to be not what we expect, we'll know that it is in fact time to take a truly unsparing look at the Shimer curriculum and pedagogy.

It is precisely because I have no doubt in the quality of Shimer's academics that it pains me that I have so little with which to make the case for Shimer -- really nothing but my own subjective impression and a handful of anecdotes.  I will continue using those wherever I can, but in the end, nobody but Shimerians will ever care what Shimerians think about the quality of their education. On the other hand, if we can show that Shimer is still achieving world-beating levels of student academic progress, the world will take notice. 

Where Shimer most needs to innovate, I think, is in dealing with the creeping rot in its foundation: the community and governance structure.  There do not seem to be any easy solutions for either one.

Where community is concerned, the sample of "tiny liberal arts colleges in very large cities" is essentially 1, so there also aren't a lot of useful lessons to be drawn from other schools' experiences.  The "Shimer Street" and similar proposals that are floated from time to time are, I think, worth a closer look: where and how can Shimer make a concrete mark on the city it now calls home?  Can we do so in a way that does justice to the uniqueness of Shimer itself? 

Where governance is concerned, there may be lessons to be drawn from other self-governing schools, and from other experiments in participatory democracy (such as participatory budgeting). Here too, with the growing hunger for meaningful alternatives in academic governance, there is a chance for Shimer's unique approach to catch the world's eye.  But that will only be possible if we can make a stronger and more unambiguous case for it than we currently do.

What should be preserved about Shimer College?

This is the second in a series of posts in response to this request.

David Shiner asked:

What do you think we should preserve – that is what are the key elements of what you value about Shimer?

I suppose the best answer to the question of what should be preserved is: as much as possible, starting of course with Shimer itself.

However, that isn't very helpful.  So to a second approximation, I would answer this as follows: The most important thing to preserve about Shimer is its status as a participatory and self-directed community of learners.

This answer is based on my answer to the first question: that what is most important about Shimer is that it is radical, rigorous, and unique. The things that are most important to preserve, therefore, are the things that keep Shimer radical, rigorous, and unique (and existing). 

The foremost of these things, I believe, is the participatory ethos, as manifested at Shimer both in learning and in governance. Without this, there is little to prevent bureaucratic drift; likewise, the lessons of the classroom become hollow.  Radicalism, rigor and uniqueness all depend in large part on the continued engagement of the student body in the school's affairs.

The other key thing is the community itself.  In another forum, alum Jonathan Goldman noted the importance of trust, particularly students' trust in faculty and one another, in enabling the kind of radical inquiry that is essential to the Shimer experience.  The close-knit community isn't just a happy byproduct of Shimer's size and history: it is integral to all aspects of the value that the college provides.  The combination of radical rigor and a "home-like" environment is another aspect of the niche that Mrs. Shimer carved out for this most peculiar of schools;  it has been central to Shimer's value proposition from the very earliest years, and remains so today.

As I wrote before, I think the community is ultimately a means to an end.  In practice, however, it is an indispensable means to that end.  Without a community that is both close-knit and self-directed, the iron laws of institutional gravity would soon have Shimer locked in its "proper" place -- shuttered altogether, or at best cranking out obedient drones alongside all the other interchangeable institutions in American higher education.
Unfortunately, the condition of Shimer's foundation appears, at least from the outside, to be deteriorating.  The lack of a real community outside of the classroom (a foreseeable consequence of the Chicago move) is a frequent complaint from current students. The Office of Student Life has made a dent in this problem, but evidently not a big enough one.   Students understandably flee the IIT dorms as soon as they are able, but their daily lives are then dispersed across the city.  No solution appears to be in view.

The recent shift in the Assembly's role from what was already an extremely abstracted one to an even more abstracted one is also concerning -- although at least it has occurred, thus far, by democratic means. The old structure of Budget and Administrative committees may have outlived its usefulness, but a more meaningful replacement seems to be needed; the sense of ownership in the affairs of the college is slipping.  Student input on "strategic planning" is a very good thing, but is no substitute for participatory governance.

It is conceivable that Shimer could survive (in a Shimer-worthy fashion) without the foundation provided by its close-knit, participatory community.   But doing so would require changes more radical than any the school's tumultuous 16 decades have seen. 

Comments from IIT students about Shimer College

Just came across this (PDF) in a bit of casual Googling; seems like something the readers of this blog might enjoy:

 The experience I had at Shimer College was awesome. Being able to be in a small classroom of only 7 students and to be encouraged to discuss differing opinions and views was great. While the professor did prod the conversations and sometimes had to ensure that everybody got a chance to speak the class was largely student run. The opportunity to openly discuss current issues and to learn about how an organization might deal with them was very interesting and insightful for a student of Biomedical Engineering.

While IIT has a diverse student population, meeting and working with students from Shimer College also opened me up to new experiences. While engineering students are often taught how to master logic and the working out perfect solutions; Shimer students are taught to take any idea, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, and run with it to see where it might take them.

I am very happy to have received my degree from IIT, however, the opportunity to work with Shimer College faculty and learn in their classroom environment made my education more valuable because learning will never stop and if you only have one way to learn then you will be severely limiting your growth in the future.

 I took a film class at Shimer, which I would highly recommend. There were never any lectures like in most IIT courses-- all discussions were student-led. The small class size led to very thoughtful discussions. Also, I got to meet a new group of students I would otherwise have never met, and have remained friends with some of them.

Shimerians are completely different from most IIT students, and I wanted to meet them. I also wanted to experience a rigorous and discussion-based approach to literature. I understood before taking the class that there would be a lot of reading, a lot of writing papers, but most of all a lot of talking in class, and I wanted to expand my worldview in this way. When I took this class, I realized that the Shimer floor was very home-y and that students not only took classes there, they could recognize by sight and name everyone in the building, which was a completely foreign experience to me, and very pleasant.

The Shimerian approach to discourse is sometimes abrasive and very often goes off on diversions that I would never have thought of. I developed my skills of argument to a much higher level than I ever would have without that class. I also read some interesting works by ancient writers that I had never heard of before. During the paper revision process, I learned the Shimerian way of improving a paper- i.e. to completely demolish it and then build it back up again with a much better understanding of what it should be.

Shimerians are aggressively literate and they in general enjoy examining concepts from all sides, playing devil's advocate, and making elaborate logic structures in order to make points. I believe that taking a Shimer class can help IIT students to open their minds to the concept that the war of words is challenging, and not just what people who can't do engineering have to resort to.

(Also relevant.)

What is most important about Shimer College?

This is the first in a series of posts in response to this request. 

Update: In retrospect, I cheated a bit here; I don't think coherence really belongs in the list, which I would boil down to this: the most important thing about Shimer is that its education is radical, rigorous and unique.  (That may technically be three things, but like the legs of a tripod, none of them is good for much if either of the others is removed.)

David Shiner asked:

What is most important about Shimer?  What do you think we should preserve – that is what are the key elements of what you value about Shimer?  Where do we need to improve, and how might we go about doing that?  Where should we innovate, and why?  In short, what is it that, in your opinion, matters most about Shimer, and especially about Shimer’s future?

It's not clear whether these were intended as separate questions or a single one, but for the purposes of this blog, I'll treat them as separate. Let's tackle the first one: "What is most important about Shimer?"

My answer is this: The most important thing about Shimer College is that it provides a radical, rigorous, coherent alternative in undergraduate education. (This is more or less what I like to call the "intellectual boot camp" aspect of Shimer.)

Before detailing exactly what I mean by that and why I think it's the truly essential element of Shimer, I should probably explain why I'm leaving out all those other important Shimer things.

• The Great Books are pretty great, but they could be replaced with other types of original sources -- and in my opinion this should be seriously considered for parts of the Nat Sci and Soc curricula -- without damaging the overall integrity of the Shimer education.  
• The Shimer community is also pretty great, but ultimately it is a means to an end. As a practical matter, it is difficult to see how Shimer could survive without its dedicated and close-knit community, but if it were able to do so (perhaps due to a massive influx of funding), it could still make a valuable, unique and Shimerian contribution to the world.
• Even the Shimer model of instruction through facilitated small-group discussion involving meticulous analysis of original sources is not, in my opinion, essential to Shimer. Shimer could continue to provide unique value to the world even if it were abandon any or all of these things ... assuming it could find an equally radical and rigorous alternative to replace them. (For example, although no online learning system has yet been put forward that is competitive with facilitated classroom discussion, it is certainly possible such a system could be devised, and that Shimer could benefit from adopting it.)
• I can similarly imagine a version of Shimer that remains profoundly Shimerian but ceases to involve any meaningful amount of self-governance.  I don't want such an outcome, and am skeptical that it would actually be a wise move, but such an institution could still be viable, valuable and Shimerian, just as Shimer was before the 1970s.  Communal governance, like the community itself, is ultimately a means to an end.
• Other important aspects of Shimer, such as the Oxford study abroad and early entrance programs, support the underlying Shimer value proposition in key ways.  If removed, they would need to be replaced by something else.  But Shimer could still be Shimer, and worth fighting for, in their absence.

(To be clear, as a practical matter, I think that all of the things I've listed above are very important, and perhaps even indispensable in the near term.  But I can imagine Shimer being Shimer without them.)

With that out of the way, let's get back to what I think is essential: that Shimer provides a radical, rigorous alternative in undergraduate education.  I believe that this sums up not only what Shimer should be (in order for it to be worth fighting for), but also what it must be as a matter of survival, since if Shimer ever ceases to be worth fighting for, it won't be around for very long after that.

Starting from  the head of the phrase:

• Shimer must provide an alternative, and probably a unique one, because otherwise there will be no reason for anyone to go there -- or even to care if it ceases to exist.
• The alternative Shimer provides must be a radical one, for much the same reason. Minor tweaks to conventional higher education are not enough to sustain such an improbable institution as Shimer.  Nor, for that matter, are minor tweaks to un-conventional higher ed.  Shimer has tried presenting itself as St.-John's-by-the-Lake, and it hasn't worked very well.  (Harry Truman's quip about "Republicans in Democratic clothing" comes to mind here.)
• The alternative Shimer provides must be rigorous -- and radically so -- because Shimer's students will always have to succeed on their own merits.  A Shimer degree will never provide the sort of brand value or network capital that comes with a name-brand degree.  Ideally, a Shimer education should be so intense that the rest of life seems easy by comparison.  I am not convinced, however, that Shimer currently rises to this challenge as well as it can and should.
• The alternative Shimer provides must be coherent -- "integrated", as we say -- because it is only in this way that Shimer can leverage its small size. Integration is actually something that small schools can do better than large ones, since there is no room for specialties to hive themselves off from one another.  Shimer's current four-stroke curriculum is one way of approaching the challenge of coherence; others that spring to mind include College of the Atlantic's focus on human ecology, or Marlboro's Plan of Concentration.
• This alternative is necessarily within the field of undergraduate education; it must therefore remain a meaningful alternative in relation to what other colleges are offering right now, and not just in the past.  For example, if mainstream higher education actually does get rid of the lecture -- I won't hold my breath on that one, for various cynical reasons -- and replaces it with something more hands-on and dialogical, this would significantly reduce Shimer's relative value. The more similar other undergraduate schools are to Shimer, the less reason Shimer has to exist -- and by the same token, the less value it can offer to counterbalance all the obvious reasons not to attend such a peculiar school.

Getting back to my hobbyhorse of Shimer history ... Shimer has perhaps not quite fit the above description for all 160 years of its history -- in particular, radicalism and rigor both slipped considerably in the late Academy period -- but I believe that this more or less describes the niche that Frances Shimer carved out for the school in 1895, and which we have been more or less stuck in ever since. Mrs. Shimer understood that such a small and under-resourced school could not survive unless it had something unique and rigorous to offer.  For better or worse, I believe this remains the case.

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Those, at any rate, are my thoughts on the first of David Shiner's questions.  Please direct your own thoughts on the matter to d.shiner@shimer.edu by Wednesday-- and please also consider contributing them to this blog, either as a post or a comment.  New authors are always welcome here.

Shimer seeks your input on the future of the college

Input from alumni on the future directions of the college is sought by the end of this month (July 31, 2013). 

Quoting the original letter from David Shiner in full, since I don't think anyone will mind:

This is the second article I’ve written for alumni on the issue of planning for Shimer’s future.  Since some of those reading this article might have missed the first one, I’m going to briefly repeat some of the points I made earlier.  Then, in true Shimerian fashion, I’m going to propose a topic for discussion and to ask you to contribute to it.

Every so often, we at Shimer take a deep breath and plot our course for the future.  This is one of those times.  Shimer’s 10-year strategic plan is about to expire, and we need to prepare for Shimer’s future.  As part of that preparation, the Assembly has approved and elected a new committee, the Institutional Goals and Assessment Committee (IGAC), which I am chairing.  That committee will contribute to the work of the Strategic Planning Committee, a broad-based group that will be appointed by Board of Trustees Chairperson Sally Brown later this summer.  Both committees will work on a new Vision Statement – that is, a statement declaring Shimer’s aspirations for the foreseeable future – and will propose goals for the College to achieve during that period.

It’s important that alumni be included in this process.  The Board consists primarily of alumni, which allows for a certain degree of representation.  However, we don’t think that’s enough.  So we’re inviting all Shimer alumni to offer their views on the direction of the College over the next few years. 

So, what do you think?  What is most important about Shimer?  What do you think we should preserve – that is what are the key elements of what you value about Shimer?  Where do we need to improve, and how might we go about doing that?  Where should we innovate, and why?  In short, what is it that, in your opinion, matters most about Shimer, and especially about Shimer’s future?

Think on these things.  Once you’ve clarified your thoughts, send me your reply at d.shiner@shimer.edu.  I need to hear from by the end of this month (July 31, 2013). Your missive can be as short or as long as you wish, but whatever you do, be sure to send something.  It really matters.

 For those who might like to post their thoughts in a more public forum as well, this blog is at your service.

Letter from President Henking: alumni gifts up 40%

Susan Henking's latest missive to the external community is worth reading in full, but of particular note is the announcement that Shimer's alumni giving rate is up from 10% to 14%.  Given the unique characteristics of the Shimer alumni community -- particularly its many fractious subsets and Shimer's high historic rate of attrition -- that's quite an achievement.  (And you can be a part of it by donating to Shimer now.)

Among additional highlights, the good Dr. Henking's letter includes an overview of recent personnel changes, which will be of interest to all followers of les affaires Shimeriennes:

[W]e've reconfigured four positions and created two new ones.

• Janet Henthorn's position has been expanded to include additional admissions support.
• Marc Hoffman's position has become more focused and is now renamed Director of External Relations & Chief Information Officer.
• Isabella Winkler has moved into the President's Office; her position has changed to Director of Strategic Communications & Special Assistant to the President.
• Joseph Fitzpatrick has taken on some urgent organizational and managerial tasks and is now Chief Operations Officer as well as Dean of Students.

We've also added an Executive Assistant to the President to handle my travel and calendar as well as to support Development, and will be hiring a full-time staff member responsible for payroll, AP, and parts of HR.

Read more...

Finding new Shimerians

I would imagine this tweet is pretty close to the ideal response to Shimer College recruiting materials:

I got an email from a place called Shimer College in Chicago. The whole thing was basically about Star Trek and I kinda want to go there now.
— @NotReallyATree June 28, 2013

That's a momentary response from a sample size of one, to be sure. But as a longtime watcher of Shimer-mentions across Twitter and the web, I can say that even one such response is quite rare.

I was reminded of this tweet by Alfred Lord Tenniscourt's objections to "Dangerously Optimistic" in the comments to this post, which -- to paraphrase -- accused that slogan of fighting the last war by presenting a Shimer identity that would have appealed to the intellectual misfits of previous generations rather than the present one.  This objection is well-taken, but it raises the question: how do we present Shimer in a way that will actually connect with the Shimerian splinter of the millennial generation?

Potential Shimerians are out there, waiting for their signal, in numbers far greater than Shimer could accommodate.  I would venture that every high school in the country has at least a few.  But reaching them in sufficient numbers has proven over the years to be an almost insuperable challenge, rendered even more challenging by the constant changes in the recruiting landscape. Shimer has had to adopt ever-more-sophisticated techniques and software just to keep pace, without really addressing the basic problem that there has never been much overlap (in either direction) between potential Shimerians and the kids dutifully standing on the college-prep conveyor belt.

Yet there is one common thread that unites many who are drawn to reading as an escape from the socioeconomic conformity and intellectual pablum to which they are subjected (even more in this generation than the past) in high school classrooms and university lecture-halls: the literature of speculation and escape, aka science fiction and fantasy.
 
The ever-helpful Adrian Nelson of Shimer admissions was kind enough to provide me with the email referenced above. It was composed by current student James Eastling and sent out to prospectives under the title "Is Gene Roddenberry a Shimerian?":

Gene Roddenberry, the brains behind Star Trek, Andromeda, and a few lesser known television shows, would be an honorary member of our community. From the Original Series back in 1968 with the first televised inter-racial kiss to The Next Generation which featured a blind man at the helm of Starfleet's flagship, the U.S.S. Enterprise-D, Roddenberry pushed the envelope of the social and cultural status quo. He dared to dream of a universe where problems were handled with words rather than violence. He created a government structure, the United Federation of Planets, which brought people of different species together for the sake of interstellar cooperation and exploration. He dreamed of humanity being fixated on exploration & discover y rather than intrigue and war. Though people chuckle at Star Trek for its cheesy effects, Shatner's over-the-top acting, and iconic redshirt trope, Star Trek encouraged real-world change. Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in The Original Series, almost quit the role until Dr. King told her just how important it was the African American community to see an African American woman on the bridge as an officer on television. John Cho, who played Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the J.J. Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise, recently articulated just how important it was for him when he was a young child to see an Asian man on television (referring to George Takei in the same role on The Original Series). At Shimer College, students read ancient books discussing ideas like justice, liberty, and equality. Rather than being told what these ideas are, students are encouraged to imagine what these ideas mean for the world today and for the future. Students examine and challenge the current interpretations of concepts brought up and debated throughout history. Roddenberry would have fit right in as a Shimerian, constantly pushing peers to think outside the accepted beliefs about the world, and that is why he would be an honorary member of our community.... N. James Eastling, class of 2014

Shimer College      3424 S. State St.     Chicago, IL 60616             Tel: (312) 235-3555         Facebook

Credit for header image: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScl/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

In my opinion, that's pretty awesome. 

One could, I'm sure, take all kinds of issue with the above email (as with any other single way of presenting Shimer). It is certainly not the be-all and end-all of recruiting materials.  But it seems to me that it is fundamentally on the right track: both in terms of being written by a student (which is quite important if we are to avoid the generation-blindness that Lord Tenniscourt warns of), and in terms of finding a way of talking about Shimer that will actually reach potential Shimerians.  

The forgotten crisis of 1927

In a recent post, I dropped the year "1927" into the familiar list of crisis years in Shimer College history.  I was, I'll confess, hoping that somebody would ask "what happened at Shimer in 1927?"  Nobody did, but I'm not going to let that stop me from answering the question anyway.

The December 1926 issue of the Frances Shimer Record, recently uploaded to archive.org (and embedded below), opens with an urgent communiqué from Shimer's second president:

With the opening of the New Year, Frances Shimer School faces a crisis and, for the first time in its history of over seventy-three years, the School is making a financial appeal to its constituency for endowment and buildings. The need in which the institution finds itself is due to no fault on the part of the administrative officers.  The School was never so well equipped as it is today, nor the attendance larger.  Moreover, the institution has no debts and its income has for years been in excess of its expenditures.

Since 1909 the School has continuously and in all particulars met the exacting standards of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.  Now, however, this same organization has voted that beginning with the year 1927, all Junior Colleges in order to remain on its accredited list must have an annual income of not less than $10,000 from stable sources over and above the income from student fees.

(For context, one calculator indicates that this is equivalent to $132,000 in today's dollars in terms of purchasing power, or $1.64 million in terms of economic power.)

I believe this is the first crisis (and far from the last) that was directly precipitated by Shimer's accreditor, the North Central Association.  I cannot recall ever having heard of this particular crisis, and it seems to have been weathered easily enough.  In the great historical sweep of Shimer crises, perhaps, it hardly rates a mention. But it certainly set a pattern, which has continued to the present day, of the NCA imposing arbitrary thresholds unrelated to educational quality.


Then as now, the NCA calls the tune and Shimer must dance. And then as now, the changes forced by the accreditor are not necessarily bad: Shimer weathered the Great Depression surprisingly well, and some of that may be thanks to the expansion of its funding base that the NCA required.  The same may be true of other NCA-forced changes over the years. (Without the accreditors' carping, for example, Shimer might never have had President Albin Bro, Ph.D., and thus never have become the Great Books school of today.)

At the same time, it's hard to overlook the utter moral bankruptcy of the system.  In making dictates of this sort, which have become rather commonplace since 1926, the NCA is not merely laying out best practices in higher education administration.  It is not merely suggesting (as a reasonable person might) that students should consider carefully before attending a school that might abruptly cease to operate. It is saying that academic qualifications from an institution with less than a given level of financial support should not be recognized.  Students from nonconforming schools will be mercilessly shut out, no matter how sound their academic work.  And at Shimer, we know that this is not an empty threat.

In the American accreditation system, its seems, regulatory capture converges in a particularly ugly way with the use of higher education as a mechanism of socioeconomic sorting.  The crisis of 1927 gave Shimer its first glimpse of this fact, but regrettably far from its last.

"Shimer College: ________ ________ ______ ______"

Isabella recently posted a very interesting suggestion on the Shimer redesign blog:

We took this discussion about "Dangerously Optimistic" back to the drawing board and thought, Why not rotate the "Dangerously" every once in a while with other adverbs? Someone floated "Daringly." Modifiers could also reflect featured Shimer, seasonal, or cultural events.

I doubt if that suggestion will mollify the opponents of the "Dangerously Optimistic" slogan, but I think it's a great idea on its own merits. A "Mad Libs" school motto seems like a perfectly Shimerian answer to the whole problem.  Pick one adverb, adjective, and prepositional phrase for one month; then go with another set for the next month (or some other unit of time), and just keep switching things around, at least until some generally acceptable equilibrium is reached.  "Shimer College: Hilariously Obscure Since 1853." You couldn't do with this with printed materials, but the Internet is another story.

I like this approach in part because it spotlights the ludic aspect of Shimer, playing with the idea of a school slogan in much the same spirit as Shimer's classroom names play with that other convention of paint-by-numbers higher education.  But drawing on some of my own post-Shimer experiences, I think there's a more fundamental reason to like it.

Like most Shimerfolk of the Waukegan and Chicago years, Shimer was my first real experience with the pros and cons of a consensus-based community.  Drifting about after leaving Shimer, I was drawn to the open content movement, particularly the Open Directory Project (yes, that actually used to be a thing) and later Wikipedia and its sister projects, where I've logged about 50,000 edits in total so far, enough to get a very general sense of things.  The ODP and the Wikimedia projects are all more or less consensus-based dialogical communities.

Looking back at my experiences with those communities, and at Shimer, one lesson that comes through clearly is that consensus-based communities tend to handle zero-sum conflicts very poorly.  In good-faith conflicts over article content at Wikipedia, for example, the solution is often to improve the article in such a way that the subject is represented in a more nuanced way that captures both of the conflicting perspectives.  But when there's a problem that admits only of winners and losers (such as a conflict over naming conventions), inevitably some significant part of the community will find themselves on the losing side. The community is thus faced with a situation where a decision must be made, but true consensus is impossible.  At best, this creates hard feelings. 

An imperfect analogy from recent Shimer experience is the mission statement fight of 2010 (which, of course, was symptomatic of a much more serious problem, but let's set that fact aside for a moment).  Whenever a new thing like a motto or mission statement is presented as a fait accompli, the details already decided, it forces a split: you can only be for the change or against it, a winner or a loser.

A tagline is of course a less serious matter than a mission statement.  But then again, it admits of even less possibility of compromise. Even if the Assembly were to designate an Ad Hoc Sloganeering Committee (gods preserve us), there's very little wordsmithing that could be done on a four-word tagline.  And it's highly unlikely that any single tagline could ever gain anything close to a consensus from Shimer's delightfully fractious community anyway.   (We could demonstrate this with a mongrel version of Euclid's theorem:  if a slogan has the support of a large number of Shimerians, then either it will be opposed by some other group on the merits, or it will have become so generalized and watered-down that it will be opposed on that basis alone.)

Yet in these challenging times, it is essential for Shimer to have an outward-facing identity that has the backing of the whole community (as far as such a thing is possible).  Why not, then, sidestep the zero-sum aspect of the problem entirely, and take this issue to a higher and more playful level?