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?

Some resources for Shimer College curricular history

Following up on the earlier post on curricular history, I thought it would be useful to collect some of the online resources for understanding Shimer's own curricular development from the 1940s to today.  Many of these resources have only recently become available, and hopefully more will become available in the future, so I'll try to keep this list updated from time to time.  

New resources may also become available soon as part of Stuart Patterson's upcoming course on "Why & What Should We Read?", which will touch on Shimer curricular history in the context of larger historical trends and conversations.

I'm always looking for new materials to add to the archive, so if by any chance you have resources that you'd like to share, please do get in touch. I can be reached at samueljhenderson@gmail.com.

1940s-1950s
1947-1948 catalog, the first catalog to present the "Shimer Plan", a four-year curriculum foreshadowing the full Great Books curriculum of later years (those so inclined can follow the clickpath from here through all the Shimer catalogs of the Academy period, 1896-1950).
1951-1952 catalog , the first catalog published within the "Great Books period" as usually understood

1960s "The Shimer Plan" (from 1960 student handbook):
"Shimer and the Humanities" (Hirschfield, 1965)
"Shimer and the Social Sciences" (Keohane Sr., 1965)

1970s 
Moon memo 
"Shimer Curriculum Under Review" (with perspectives by Moon, Beeson, and Sakurai)
November 1976 Symposium

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.