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.

When is a Great Books program not a Great Books program?

On her "Evocations" blog, President Susan Henking posted the following provocative quote from Donald Levine's foreword to The Idea and Practice of General Education:

Often hailed as the most momentous curricular experiment in the history of American higher education, the 'Hutchins College' has even more frequently been misrepresented. The phrase evokes a widely cherished founding myth: Robert Maynard Hutchins came to the University of Chicago as a young man in 1930; he brought along Mortimer Adler, who introduced him to the powers and pleasures of the Great Books; as a result, Hutchins established a liberal arts curriculum in the College organized around reading of Great Books. The story is colorful, inspirational perhaps, but quite untrue.

The facts of the matter are:
(1) Well before Hutchins was even considered as a candidate for the presidency of the University of Chicago, its faculty has developed all of the ideas for what became known as the New Plan, instituted under President Hutchins in 1931.
(2) The College faculty subsequently considered but firmly rejected his aspiration for a curriculum organized around the Great Books, after which the plan for a Great Books curriculum got transported to St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
(3) The curriculum consistently developed in the College in the Hutchins years followed an alternative principle, that of leading students to develop their powers by focused work in the major disciplines by means of which human knowledge had been constructed -- not a Great Books program, then, but one that included some Great Books along with other texts whose selection was geared to progressive mastery of some basic ideas and methods of the various arts and sciences.

(my emphasis)

Levine is unquestionably correct on the facts. However, coming from the Shimerian perspective, I have some problems with his interpretation of them.


One part of today's Shimer curriculum that stands out for its ties to the U of C curriculum of Hutchins' day is Social Sciences 1 (known then as Social Sciences 2), which despite numerous changes in form and content, is still recognizable as the course designed by eminent Chicago social scientists as a general "survey course" to introduce undergraduates to the field.  (Hilariously familiar concerns about undergraduates reading unwholesome texts like Durkheim's Suicide can be found all the way back in the earliest years of this course in the 1930s.)

If Soc 1 is not a Great Books course, then Shimer is not a Great Books college -- which is absurd.  We must therefore revisit the premise.

In so doing we can no longer escape a truth that Shimerians often avoid, whether deliberately or unconsciously:  "Great Books" means something quite different at Shimer than it does at most other schools that have adopted this label, from St. John's to Gutenberg to "Harrison-Middleton".  

If I were to try to pin this Shimerian difference down, I'd inevitably get into trouble: any N Shimerians have at least 2N+1 strongly-held and mutually contradictory opinions about the curriculum.  But suffice it to say that at least part of what sets Shimer apart is an enduring commitment to the Great Books approach as a pathway to "general education" -- which is to say, as something fundamentally radical, inclusive and progressive rather than exclusive and conservative. 

This is the ideal that informed the survey courses of the Hutchins era, of which Soc 1 is  a leading exemplar -- and which broadly underlay the curriculum that took shape in Hyde Park in the 1930s and 1940s, of which these courses were part.  This ideal requires a conversation informed by the classics of a given field, but not necessarily limited to them. In fact, including recent and contemporary scholarship will tend to strengthen the focus of such a course.

 From the perspective of a classic Great Books college like St. John's, Shimer's curriculum can appear as, at best, a compromise, with its numerous recent and contemporary texts (and extensive allowance for electives).  But seen properly on its own terms -- as even we Shimerians often fail to do -- I would argue that Shimer is in fact truer to the Hutchinsian Great Books tradition than any other school in the present day, St. John's included.  

This points to a broader theme, which I'll hope to tangle with some more in future posts: the more deeply we understand Shimer's own history, the more forcefully we can argue for (and the more effectively we can preserve) the integrity of the Shimerian vision.

Shimer College Open House for prospective students, October 8 2012

Via shimer.edu:

COLLEGE FOR A DAY
OCTOBER 8, 2012

The faculty and students of Shimer invite you to visit us on Columbus Day, Monday, October 8, 9:30am to about 2:00pm (or later if you'd like to sit in on afternoon classes).



You will tour the campus, meet Shimer faculty, students, and staff, and get a chance to experience a Shimer class: a class with no more than twelve students discussing a text that has been pivotal to the development of civilization.

Feel free to bring your parents, a friend, or both.

Complete this online registration form to let us know that you are coming.

Call 312.235.3504 or email us with any questions you have. We hope you can join us in the Great Conversation.

Shimer College
Office of Admission
3424 S. State Street
Chicago IL 60616

New Shimer viewbook

Here is the new 2012 Shimer College viewbook. Quite an impressive job has been done:



Between this and the Shimer video, Shimer's marketing materials are really getting somewhere.

Support the Great Books and Take Home a Set

Long-suffering Trustee Dan Shiner is sponsoring a fundraiser for Shimer College that will run through March 7. Over $2000 has been raised in the first days of the fundraiser.

Here is the fine print:

All donations to Shimer College must be made no later than March 7th (Dan Shiner’s birthday) for this cause. Anonymous donations are appreciated, but we will not be able to award any gifts to those who choose to donate without providing a name.

*Make a donation of $100+ and you will receive a signed first edition book (one per donor). It may not be Hemingway, but Dan says it will be something like a signed Sue Grafton or a signed Capitalist Manifesto by Adler and Kelso.

*Make a donation of $10+ and your name will be put into a drawing for a complete used set of the Great Books (one entry per donor).

*Be the largest individual donor ($1000 min) and you will also receive a complete used set of the Great Books.

DONATE DONATE DONATE!!! That is all.