"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?

The Founding of Shimer College: A Tale of Two Tales

 To anyone who has been associated with Chicago's Shimer College, the story of its founding is probably familiar: in May 1853, two young teachers, Frances Wood and Cindarella Gregory, came out from upstate New York to the tiny frontier town of Mount Carroll, Illinois, to start a "seminary" (not entirely unlike a high school) that had been chartered by the state legislature the year before. Nominally governed by a Board of Trustees but effectively run by the two teachers, the school moved into its own building in 1854. A few months after that, the struggling school was given up for dead by its Trustees, and placed fully into the hands of Misses Wood and Gregory.

That is the well-worn tale of how this plucky little college got its start. It is not wrong, and can be verified by consulting contemporary newspaper accounts, as well as the letters and journal of Miss Wood herself. But it isn't the only story.

The second story of Shimer's founding varies a bit, but goes something like this: The overambitious townspeople of Mount Carroll started a seminary in 1852, but were unable to get it off the ground -- a common pattern across the Old Northwest at this time. In 1853, completely independently, Misses Wood and Gregory arrived in town and started a private school. Their school prospered, and observing the teachers' administrative prowess, the despairing Trustees asked them to take over the Trustees' stillborn school; the teachers graciously accepted the charge.

To be sure, this second story is wrong. Wood and Gregory were part of the Mount Carroll Seminary from the very day (May 11, 1853) when they taught their first class. Yet we can find this story as far back as 1857, signed by none other than John Wilson, who had chaired the Board of Trustees during the school's difficult first months of operation. And we find it again, in 1869, in a report submitted to the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction-if not directly from the pen of Mrs. Shimer (née Wood) herself, surely at least prepared under her close supervision.

So, why is this utterly nonfactual story coming from such reliable sources?

We may find the beginning of the answer in a key distinction in 19^th-century private education: between "venture" or "select" schools (often little more than one or two teachers hanging out a shingle) and "proper" state-chartered institutions overseen by boards of trustees. (For discussions of this, see e.g. Tolley 2002, Katz 1975.) Agency and gender come into this distinction as well: a select school would naturally be governed by its teacher or teachers, often female; but a proper seminary or college was governed by its almost invariably male trustees.

Thus, when the Trustees relinquished control in 1855, the Mount Carroll Seminary found itself in a treacherous position. Abandoned by its Board, it could only move forward under the direct governance of its teachers. Yet if it was perceived as merely a teacher-run school, it would soon lose the prestige it needed to survive and grow. It needed to somehow be both things at once: a joint proprietorship and a "proper" school working to the highest standard.

Understanding this contradiction, we can understand the two contradictory stories of Shimer's founding: if the narrator wanted to emphasize the prestige of being a proper state-chartered institution, the simple factual narrative served just fine. But when emphasizing the agency and authority of Misses Wood and Gregory, the second narrative served better - and for good measure, captured the real power dynamics of the first years much more accurately.


It is thus unsurprising that the second narrative first emerges in 1857, when the town was wracked by scandalous accusations against Wood and Gregory, and the Seminary's supporters needed to shore up their moral authority (for more on this, see Malkmus 2003).

There is an underlying tension here, between Shimer as an institution (embodied by the first narrative) and Shimer as the work of its people (embodied by the second narrative), that can be traced through all of the school's 160 years. From time to time - as in 1967, or 2010 - when things have become a little bit unbalanced, a crisis has ensued. In the present day specifically, the Trustees' legal authority stands in tension with the "moral suasion" exercised by Shimer's radically democratic Assembly. And just as with the two contradictory tales of Shimer's founding, we could construct two entirely contradictory (but equally accurate) accounts of the college as it exists today.

This suggests that Shimer's ability to strategically balance between two contradictory identities has played a key role in this tiny school's improbable 16-decade run. This may also help to explain why Shimer has also remained so very small for all these years: this kind of ambiguity becomes harder to sustain when expanding beyond the human scale.


Works mentioned

• Katz, Michael B. (1975). Class, Bureaucracy, & Schools.
• Malkmus, Doris. (2003). " My whole ambition has ever been to do something smart ": Frances Wood Shimer, Cinderella Gregory, and the 1853 Founding of Shimer College. Journal of Illinois History 6(3), 195-204 .
  
• Tolley, Kim. (2002). Mapping the Landscapes of Higher Schooling, 1727-1850. In Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727-1925.