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)

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.)