On the Road to Shimer

I didn't want to bump the prime news but I wanted to share. ~S

The day prior was spent on and in Lake Michigan on the Indiana side. This was followed by the typically early wake up and some more sleeping and laying about and then a brunch-ish breakfast. On the drive up to Chicago, returning to the fabulous Ms. Skimmel's, Sam turned and asked "do you have anything you want to do on the South Side?"

There are lots of questions that one might enjoy hearing asked about Chicago. "Want to go drinking?" "Want to go eat?" "Want to go shopping?" "Want to go to the lake?" "Want to go listen to some music?" "Want to hit Evanston?" "Want to drive LSD?" "Want to go to a Museum?" "Want to go to a game?" "Want to go to boys town?" "Want to hit Belmont?" "Want to go to the Parthenon?" "Want to hit the aquarium?" "Want to go to a midnight marathon of Kubrick movies at the Music Box?" These are all perfectly acceptable questions to ask someone when you are heading in or out of Chicago. Asking "Anything you want to do on the South Side?" is just one of those question that would make any salted Chicagoan give you the look that says "'Da fuck?"

I'm not saying that there aren't some interesting things on the South Side of Chicago. Hyde Park is on the South Side of Chicago and aside from the Seminary Co-op you have some fabulous places to eat. The Dixie Kitchen, for one and there is that Jamaican place that does the jerk food name of which escapes me. And Hyde Park is pretty. It's a very pretty little part of Chicago all tucked around the UIC. Of course, you don't really want to be caught on the south side in the ten block radius that surrounds Hyde Park, Hyde Park being an island of suburban decadence nestled in the dark underbelly of Chicago.

And while I should have just given the "Da fuck?" look. I instead, asked a question.

"Where are we, again?" I had not been paying attention.

"Stony Island, just past 95^th."

"Huh."

There is thinking.

">We could go to Shimer."

There are many a time I have often dreamt of going to Shimer, but rarely would I have thought to utter a response to a question like "Anything you want to do on the south side?" with the answer "We could go to Shimer."

But I did.

And we did.

Sam drove and we looked for signs for the IIT campus where our school had relocated. No longer really our school, I felt. More The School, the Shimer of my dreams now being nothing more then a collection of random memories for buildings that are occupied by people I will never meet. My school is gone, replaced instead by The School which has been relocated to somewhere on the South Side of Chicago. And now in a rented car, with a big orange dog, I was traveling to visit The School and I was not really sure why.

Curiosity more than anything else, perhaps. A confirmation of my fears. A longing. A chance to see something that had been missed. The sense of belonging to something again, even if it wasn't really mine. Shimer. Shimer. I dream a dream of Shimer.

It took a few minutes and some searching but signs were located, a general direction established, and a parking lot was found. The car was parked and the boy, the dog, and the girl got out and crossed the street to head towards a neatly clipped and manicured lawn with a few sprawling trees on a hot summer day. This was Shimer.

My brain railed against it.

This was not Shimer.

And yet, this was Shimer.

We walked together to the front entrance only to find it closed, so we turned down some sidewalks and found a path leading around to the back of the building, where we saw a sign. Shimer College. The door was propped open with a wooden doorstop. And for some reason it screamed to me that this was perfectly Shimerian. We walked through the door, our little ménage a troupe and found that the first thing to catch our eye was a bookshelf. "Take a book." Being that we are in fact true to our calling we stopped and looked through every title on that shelf to find what that might appeal. I picked up a tome on Education and Capitalism and regretted having not brought a book with me to leave. We walked in and found at the front desk a very attractive young girl full of piercings and I found this very comforting. It settled my heart for some reason that there would be some girl working admissions who reminded me of all the pierced out lovelies of my own Shimer generation. She was an amalgamation of myself, and Caila, and Psyche, and Layla, and Natalie (a little of Jason Stahl, but in a feminine sort of way) and a dozen others I could name. She had that sense about her and I recognized it. A feeling, a subtle shift in attitude, an extenuation of grace: Shimerain.

We asked for catalogs but the new ones were not available. She said hello to us, to the dog. We asked if we could go up. "Visiting Alums. Just want to see."

"Sure, sure. There's an elevator around the corner."

"Can we take the dog? He's also an alum."

"I don't think it's a problem." So the three of us found the elevator around the corner and went up to the second floor were Shimer, all the buildings collapsed into a small space, is now housed. The doors opened on a library. And this was somehow comforting. My heart was beating fast; thrumming pounding. Because as strange as this place was, as new as I knew it to be, it was in some small way still a part of myself. And that part of me that is full of Shimer and that will never be able to let Shimer, the education, the people, go; that part of me was called by this place. And that part of me responded to it like a home, an old friend.

The floor was cool and dark, most of the lights were off. Some of the doors were opened but most were locked. We walked through silently. Not speaking, just taking it in. There was a lounge called Cinderella and in the lounge there was a painting I recognized. I used to set up coffee service under that painting. It hung in Prairie House lounge, the tree in a field of muted colors. I talked under that painting. I read Hobbes under that painting. I bumped into Ariella (the littlest Amazon) one night doing a mailing for no readily apparent reason under that painting. She talked to me about getting paper cuts on her tongue. I'd once attended a breakfast where Steve blasted Jonathan Rickman as he served. I'd sat in this very room on many an after-hours night alone playing piano to ease my heart; to make me feel alive. It was not surrounded by the place I remembered, but somehow it felt right. It was a piece of my past and it pulled this place together and made it Shimer.

A few doors were open to classrooms so we let ourselves in. The classrooms were named names that brought just as much to my mind as the paintings. There was Infinity classroom where I drank cognac with my Hum 2 class lead by Sklar while reading The Brother's K. Wolf and Mas got wasted during the class. In the end Wolf walked singing at the top of his lungs towards the train to make sure Mas got on to Chicago where he needed to be.

There was Pi (or was it radical 2), you know the room at the top of the stairs on the right. Where the sound system was, a room where I had discussions with Nancy Rose and where David Shiner got so pissed after a day of silence while discussing the Iliad in IS 5 that he actually walked out on us. I can't really blame him for that as the class was truly abysmal that day. I blame the grayness of winter and the fact that at least seven out of twelve people had not done the reading. I do admit though that at the end of the course I found the Iliad was by far a much more engaging read then the Odyssey and have become quite enamored with it.

I was looking into rooms that were not the classrooms I attended, not the rooms with the high vaulted ceilings, the explosive halogen lamps burning last years dead mosquitoes; rooms thick with ancient smoke that no manner of non-smoking policy would ever remove; rooms with memories of a dozen other Shimerians before me who could argue that this place was there's; it wasn't 438, it wasn't Hutchins, but it was somehow still Shimer and it still felt like home. The octagonal tables finished where the paintings left off and I stroked the side of one and thought of some names and smiled to think these tables were still here.

It wasn't my Shimer.

There was no Shimer-Henge. There was no quad. There were no crappy pea gravel paths to cut a swath through the middle and connect buildings. There would be no trudging through the snow to make classes from one place to another. There was no gym basement to play pool in. There was no coffee shop to move from building to building to building. But there was a Young Chang piano that I had played till my fingers bled. There were pictures I remember staring at when my attention wavered after a night of too much reading and too little sleep. There were names that were familiar. There was Shimer. And it is Shimer. We walked through quiet, almost reverent, alone and opening doors and peaking in to see what we could see. A thousand ghosts and memories in every corner of this building that I had never been in before; all of it telling me that this was still Shimer.

It is still Shimer.

Of all the people who were angry about the move, and of the most stubborn, I did not think I could find anything redeeming in this place. So I made a pilgrimage to The School to be angry and to fuel my distaste and my rage. And it didn't happen.

It's not the same. I won't try to argue that it is. It's merely Shimer. Seeing it there whole and intact stole all my hatred from me. It's still Shimer.

The boy, the dog, and I walked down the stairs to find the Nubian pierced goddess of Admissions who was working on a Saturday. We asked for bookmarks and she gave us a stack; bookmarks to be used to promote Shimer, to keep it alive, to put new people and new memories into this new building. I want to keep it alive for the most selfish reason of all, because knowing it is there in some incarnation is easier then letting it go.

The journey the rest of the way north was spent silent for a while. Both of us lost in thoughts of our own Shimer, a little world that had been created there. Then came Skimmel's and coffee and the discussion of what we can do. "Anything you want to do on the South Side?" Yeah, yeah, there is.

Repost: Rice is waving Adieu

This is a repost from the Chicago Reader article of today.

So Long, Shimer

President William Craig Rice engineered Shimer College’s controversial move to the IIT campus, but he’s not hanging around to see how it works out.

August 31, 2007

By Deanna Isaacs

When I talked with Shimer College president William Craig Rice earlier this summer about how the venerable little school was doing after its first year as a tenant on the IIT campus, he said he was looking forward to the fall of 2008. Last August, at Rice’s urging, Shimer made a controversial move from its cozy cluster of vintage buildings (all but one homes) in Waukegan to the stern Miesian campus on the south side. It’s now a radical pocket tucked into the larger school—its beloved campus traded for the second floor and a main-floor entry at 3424 S. State, in one of IIT’s beige bunkers. Shimer, where students read and talk their way through a Great Books curriculum, made the move in an effort to goose enrollment, which Rice says has been stuck at about 100 for the last 15 years or so.

But instead of bumping up last year the Shimer student body dropped 25 percent. And things weren’t looking any better for this year: Shimer—which accepts serious students without a high school diploma and charges about $22,000 for tuition—had signed up a grand total of 75 undergraduates. Rice said this small number must be transitional and pushed the date for the expected growth spurt ahead to the 2008-’09 school year. Then, last week, just before the start of the fall term, he announced that he’ll be splitting in September to take a job with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

That news left the Shimer board, which he’d clued in two weeks earlier, scrambling for a replacement. According to academic dean David Shiner, no one at the school is positioned to step in. “We don’t have any vice presidents, and this close to the start of the term our [teaching and administrative] lineup’s set.” Shiner says the board wanted a quick fix—an interim president who could fill the gap for a year while a more leisurely search for a permanent hire could be conducted. They turned to the Registry for College and University Presidents for help, which has a roster of mostly retired university executives. (At press time, negotiations were under way.)

But a mere placeholder president could be dangerous at such a delicate juncture. And Shimer’s such an odd duck that it’s unlikely the Registry’s candidates would have had experience anyplace comparable. Shimer’s history, recounted in a 1988 Reader story by Harold Henderson, goes like this: Founded in 1853 as the Mount Carroll Seminary, it was purchased two years later by its head, Frances Wood. It changed to a women’s school in 1866, then 30 years later became the Frances Wood Shimer Academy of the University of Chicago—a traditional prep school and junior college for women, under the supervision of the U. of C. The biggest change came in 1950, when it was transformed into a true U. of C. outpost: a four-year coed college devoted to Robert Maynard Hutchins’s Great Books curriculum. The formal U. of C. connection was dropped just eight years later, but Shimer hung on to both the Great Books curriculum and an enhanced academic reputation. By the mid-1960s, with enrollment at more than 500, the school had taken on debt to expand its physical plant. Then—at the school’s apex—the faculty went to war with one another over issues too obscure to recall even 20 years later, when Henderson wrote. Enrollment began a long decline, and by the late 70s Shimer was bankrupt. In 1979 the Mount Carroll buildings were sold, and the small remaining faculty moved the school to Waukegan.

Money’s always been scarce. Henderson recounts how Wood allegedly handled a sizable school debt back in 1857: she married the creditor, Henry Shimer. Over the years the employees have made numerous sacrifices to keep the place going. For two decades, beginning at the time of the bankruptcy, the school had a single salary policy whereby the janitor—if there’d been one—would have been paid as much as the president. That policy began to erode when they brought in a CFO in 2001, but even today new teachers, no matter what their experience, start at the same salary, and almost all of the dozen faculty members also perform administrative functions. Professors also jump the usual boundaries to teach across the core curriculum of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The physical anchors for the program are the specially designed octagonal tables that were moved from Waukegan, where students in classes of no more than 12 gather to consider the primary documents of Western civilization starting with Plato. Shimer claims that by having students engage directly with the sources rather than predigested textbooks, it teaches not what to think but how to think.

It’s not surprising, then, that when Rice proposed the move a couple years ago, students and former students thought deeply about it. On a Shimer blog they debated whether the school would be able to keep its identity and sense of community when students were no longer living together on their own turf. They worried at length about what it would be like to be tenants on a big campus that some perceived as alien—cold and technocratic, in a possibly dangerous neighborhood. Shimer grad Sarah Kimmel, a corporate training consultant, says the worst fears haven’t materialized: “The community seems to be retaining its identity,” and “many of the people who had doubts are now hopeful” about the school’s future. She adds, however, that Rice’s departure is an unexpected disappointment: “We thought his commitment to the school was greater than that.” Rice was hired in 2004; previous president Don Moon, who’s still on the faculty, served 26 years.

Rice says he wasn’t “out looking for a job” when the NEH offered one he couldn’t refuse: he’ll be heading up its education division, overseeing grants to schools, colleges, and universities. (He says he’d have to recuse himself in regard to Shimer, but others surmise his new gig can’t be bad for the school.) All but one of the dozen Waukegan buildings have been sold (for a total of about $2 million); when the last one goes, the school will be free of long-term debt. Meanwhile, though a planned all-years reunion this month was canceled largely because of a disappointing response, fund-raising is booming, relatively speaking.

Rice says Shimer raised $1.2 million last year—a 400 percent increase over the average of the three preceding years. (According to other sources, the boost in donations was imperative because it’s more expensive to operate at IIT than it was in Waukegan.) The current budget is about $2.75 million. Rice says the move has also given Shimer a leg up on recruiting: its students now get access to IIT’s facilities and services and the option of registering for IIT classes, making it “the best of both” a Great Books school and a great technical institution. Even if they’re not yet storming the place, he says inquiries from prospective students have jumped. A Shimer spokesman says the school got an average of 500 inquiries a year in Waukegan, and has gotten about 2,000 already for 2008-’09. Rice is convinced that “the move is being vindicated.” He just won’t be around when the real evidence comes in.

Hold that Sale

Marc or anyone from Shimer who might be subscribing to this blog, will it be possible to get a sale extension for Alums who need to travel transcontinental to shop at the sale?

Book sale

http://www.shimer.edu/newsandevents/events.cfm

If you don't care to click, Shimer is selling off either a third or two-thirds of its library, including the stuff that has not seen the light of day in ages. The sale will be held on the 19th through the 21st, one to four, most books being a dollar. I am going during office hours, in case you wish to avoid running into me, and I wish I could figure out how one can be considered a "community member" and get invited to the pre-sale!

Take care, all.

Why is this happening?

I simply don't understand. If any of the college attache's are reading could you please explain why they are selling of a large chunk of the library?

"

Winter Book Sale
Shimer College is planning a major winter book sale from January 19-21, 2007 on its former Waukegan campus. The College is looking to sell 10,000 volumes from its 30,000 book collection at the three day event which is open to the public.

Hours are 10-4 each day. The sale will be held in the former Shimer Gym located between Genesee St. and Sheridan Road, just south of Cory in downtown Waukegan.

Shimer will be moving its remaining 20,000 books to Chicago in February. About 5,000 books will be housed at the College and 15,000 books will move into the Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Shimer Library Director Colleen McCarroll says books which have been part of the College’s collection since its founding in 1853, will be for sale. Most books will be offered for sale at $1 per volume for hard covers and 25-cents for paperbacks.

A special pre-sale event will be held on January 18th from 10 - 4 for librarians and members of the Shimer community."