Video of Shimer College banned books reading

The video of the "Banned Books Read Out" event at Shimer has at long last found its way to the Shimer College YouTube channel, after first being featured on Chicago's CAN-TV. Many thanks are due to those who made this happen, not least Shimer prof Stuart Patterson, who coordinated the event (and who is now on his way to England to head the Oxford program for the coming semester), and above all to videographer Ben Housten.

The video is in three sections:

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:

2012: Shimer College year in review

This year has had its twist and its turns, but finally it deposits us here -- with just enough time for a quick backward glance.

Here are a few of the top forms of Shimer-related awesomeness that come to mind from the past year (not a comprehensive list):

- Awesome new Shimer College video, now over 4,000 views:



- Awesome new Shimer Colege viewbook:

- Awesome new Shimer College president. (Some representative forms of awesomeness: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

- Awesome new/old Director of Admissions!

 - Lots of awesome articles about Laurie Spiegel ('67), prompted first by her music's appearance in the Hunger Games movie and then by the expanded reissue of her Expanding Universe album. Rounding up all this coverage needs a separate blog post (hopefully forthcoming), but here a three pieces picked more or less at random: Slate, Pitchfork, New Yorker. 

- An astounding amount of historical material from Shimer's first decades has been made available online, (mostly) courtesy of NIU, for example:

• every known issue of the Oread (1869-1895),  
• every surviving issue of the Seminary Bell (1859-1862). 

- Most photos in the Shimer College Flickr stream are now licensed CC-BY, allowing them to be freely reused (e.g. on Wikipedia) as long as Shimer is credited. (If you haven't tangled with copyright issues in the digital age, it's easy to miss how much awesome is wrapped up in that development.)

Of course, the most awesome thing of all is that Shimer's extremely high baseline level of awesomeness has made it through yet another year intact.

So, then.... if, like me, you approve of the above developments (or any fraction thereof), I hope you'll join me in making a year-end donation to Shimer College.