Help Shimer build a kick-ass website

Via trustee Chris Vaughan ('86) comes the following request:

HELP SHIMER BUILD A KICK-ASS WEBSITE. The dangerously new Shimer website will launch within weeks, and it will be kick-ass. But WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW.

We need you to RECORD A ONE TO TWO MINUTE VIDEO about your favorite book you read or discussed at Shimer and let us post it on the site. It can be a memory of a classroom moment, your own personal feeling about the book, or a fun story that's only partially connected to the book.

The only rules are (a) you should mention the book at some point; and (b) that you should try to look at the camera. Any HD camera will do (even an iPhone). Please email submissions to i.winkler@shimer.edu as soon as possible. We really do need your help.

Below is a sample from an honorary Shimerian, Jason Pontius, who heads up our web design firm. He did his thing. Now you do yours.

Monsters University and the rigors of radical uniqueness

Susan Henking's recent post on ChicagoNow directs us to this masterful spoof of the standard university website, courtesy of the movie Monsters University.

Reading through that website's exquisitely unoriginal prose, I experienced a painful twinge of recognition with regard to the three points I suggested in my revised part 1 responding to David Shiner's questions.  Monsters U may not lean too heavily on the radical side of things, but it is full of unique rigor and rigorous uniqueness. If President Gross was up to date on the latest "disruptiveness" sociobabble, it would no doubt be full of uniquely rigorous radicalism too.  And just to belabor the point, it is full of those things because all universities and colleges are full of them, or at least imagine themselves to be.  Nothing, in short, is less unique than uniqueness.

This isn't just a pleasant exercise in Hegelian logical maneuvering. It leads us to a specific problem: a lot of the things that are true and important about Shimer College sound exactly like the insincere blather mouthed by hundreds of other institutions -- most of which, in my humble and thoroughly biased opinion, are unique in only the most trivial sense, inasmuch as they are all unique in the same way.   (And many of which are no longer really educational or even nonprofit institutions, having become increasingly pure exercises in credentialist rent-seeking.  But they still talk like such institutions, and with their funds rerouted from academics to marketing, they can make the case for what they aren't more convincingly than ever.)

"How to think, not what to think"? Been there, heard that. "Small classes and a real commitment to teaching"?  Well, that's original.  "Close-knit and supportive community"? C'mon, pull the other one, it's got bells on.   Heck, even Shimer's motto isn't exactly one-of-a-kind.  (Note: the aspersions cast in the previous paragraph do not necessarily apply to the specific institutions linked.)

When Shimer's own brand signal is so weak and the truth about Shimer sounds so much like the lies and half-truths that other schools tell, it's no wonder our recruitment efforts end up relying heavily on word of mouth and serendipity.

Thinking about it this way, it becomes clearer why Shimer has gravitated so much toward the "Great Books" aspect of its identity, even though Shimer's version of the Great Books isn't quite what most people would expect.  Being a Great Books college is far from the only (or even most significant) way in which Shimer presents a radical alternative in higher education, but it is one that's relatively easy to make the case for. It's a particular aspect of rigor that is hard to fake (and unlikely to be faked).

This also helps to explain the fetishistic focus on the Oxford program in the current Shimer video and viewbook: for all its value, the Oxford program wouldn't naturally suggest itself as a major selling point, but at least it is a concrete distinguishing characteristic (and a photogenic one too).

I'm not sure how we can extricate ourselves from this particular trap, but thinking about this does make me increasingly convinced that we need better and more specific ways of making the case for what Shimer does.

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. 

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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.)