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.)

"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?

Dangerously optimistic?

Over on the Shimer.edu redesign blog (previously), there's some controversy about the tagline used on the mockups of the new website: "Dangerously Optimistic Since 1853":

A lot of people don't like it, and I can understand why. It doesn't seem to say anything about Shimer's core product—whether you call that dialogal education, Great Books pedagogy or what have you. On top of that, it lends itself to unfavorable interpretations. Can Shimer really afford to emphasize its own precariousness in this way? Even the old and thoroughly-reviled tagline "the Great Books College of the Midwest" at least suggested stability. 

But even though I'm the sort of person who normally hates everything, this new tagline really appeals to me. I'll try to explain why (see also Adam O.'s eloquent comment).

As much as Shimer stands for the great books (and for smallness, intentional community, dialogical pedagogy, and various other good things), it stands also for a certain glorious bloody-mindedness without which the school's existence—beyond 1853, or 1855, or 1857, or 1895, or 1898, or 1906, or 1927, or 1949, or 1957, or 1973, or 1977, or 1979, or 1990, or 2010, inter alia—would be unthinkable.

There is a reason that Shimer's people have always kept going, in the face of challenges that would have  made any well-adjusted institution decide to meekly curl up and die. Putting that reason into words can be challenging, but it's there all the same.

"Dangerously Optimistic" wouldn't have occurred to me as a way of summarizing this, but I think it works quite well—and certainly better than obvious alternatives like "Telling the World To Go Fuck Itself Since 1853," which for one thing is a bit too long.

Yes. 

.
For a long time, there has been an understandable desire to  keep this crazier side of Shimer safely tucked in the attic—when that craziness isn't needed to repel the latest existential threat, of course.  But this has left me and many others with a strange sense of contradiction between the community that we identify with and the school's outward face (which is also the face presented to alumni). Some contradiction between the inward and outward faces of Shimer is inevitable, but there's been something strangely bloodless about the way that Shimer has presented itself for many years, as if Shimer were trying to pretend that it had become a scaled-down version of an otherwise normal college.

This isn't good for Shimer or its people, and least of all for students who come to Shimer expecting something completely different from what they find.

Does the "dangerously optimistic" tagline emphasize precariousness, even foolhardiness? OK, sure. But Shimer has tried over and over to try to pretend that it hasn't spent 1.6 centuries dancing (flawlessly) on the volcano's brim, only for this pretense to be given the lie when the music starts again. This is stupid and self-defeating. We need to find ways of more effectively integrating this underlying strength in the outward-facing version of Shimer.  We cannot afford to keep turning Shimer's strengths into weaknesses.

In the end, I trust that the choice in this matter rests with the people of Shimer College, as it should.

But for my part, I think this is a good tagline.

New shimer.edu coming soon

As announced on the alumni website today, the new version of Shimer's website is nearing completion, and will be launching sometime fairly soon.  The redesign is being done by White Whale Web Services.

Here is one example page from the redesign (more here and here):

You can leave feedback as comments on the posts on the redesign blog, as many Shimerians have already done. 

(The redesign blog mysteriously lacks an RSS feed and fails to sort posts in chronological order, so you'll want to drill down from the main page, but as of today the most recent post is here.)