Special Meeting of the Assembly to Take Place::::Sunday, February 28, starting at 4 pm, in the Cinderella Lounge.

Citizens of Shimer College,


A special unscheduled meeting of the Assembly will take place this Sunday, February 28, starting at 4 pm, in the Cinderella Lounge. The Agenda Committee is convening the Assembly in response to requests from throughout the community for an emergency meeting after the Board of Trustees plenary last Saturday. The agenda for the meeting will be published shortly and no later than tomorrow.

Because of the special nature of this meeting there will be no approval of minutes or committee reports, though time will be set aside for announcements. It is not clear how lengthy this meeting will be, but, given the importance of the issues before us, members are asked to prepare to stay late if need be.

Members who are unable to attend the meeting but who would like to address the Assembly may send written messages to the Speaker and they will be forwarded to the membership. In keeping with Assembly precedent, in the interest of saving time, and to avoid preferential recognition of absent members, such messages will not be read or distributed during the meeting. For prior distribution, they must be received no later than Saturday, 9 pm cst, but the Committee cannot guarantee all messages will be disseminated if their number turns out to be overwhelming.

Since Sunday’s will be an unscheduled meeting, we cannot say with assurance that it will be webcast, as prior meetings have been, but preparations are being made for online access, and, if the meeting will be available on the internet, website information will be disseminated to members of the community. Please bear in mind that, according to the Constitution of the Assembly, only members present may address the Assembly, vote, or introduce motions.

Both Trustees and alumni are members of the Assembly, though alumni are not voting members. Since it is not possible to send this message to all alumni, those who are recipients should feel free to forward it to alumni whom they know are planning to attend. The Committee, on behalf of the internal community, welcomes Trustees, alumni, and all other members to the meeting.




Albert B Fernandez

Speaker of the Assembly
For the Agenda Committee
(Simon Creek, Jim Donovan, Meg Nelson)

Letter from the Faculty to the Board Re Mission Statement Changes

The Faculty supports unanimously the Assembly's recent vote to uphold the current mission statement of Shimer College. In doing so we confirm and uphold our responsibility for the College's mission itself: in word, education.

The Faculty and Assembly together, rather than President Lindsay by himself, have the standing to define the College's mission. As Chris Nelson recently wrote, the Faculty and Assembly have for decades labored against "almost insuperable challenges" to save the College itself and greatly enrich its incomparable instructional program. But President Lindsay turns his back to this history, revealing just days ago a proposed mission statement restating "guideposts" that have been resoundingly rejected by the internal community and alumni both.

More trying still, President Lindsay presumes to use his mission statement as a test of the Faculty's continuing commitment to the College. He has indicated to us that if the Board adopts his statement, he would ask us individually to confirm our support of it. The implied alternative was to seek employment elsewhere. Let us be clear: we reject with one voice such tests of our loyalty to Shimer College or to President Lindsay.

President Lindsay has maintained that he wants only to clarify the College's mission, not to change it. An unsympathetic redrafting of the entire mission statement is not a clarification. Further, his intransigent insistence on the rightness of his views on education, even in the face of months of considerate attempts to qualify them and to offer alternatives, only betrays how little he understands or adheres to the College's principles for cooperative dialogue.

Such betrayals strike at the heart of our educational mission. Students complain rightly that they are admonished just to study, while their studious efforts to defend and clarify their sense of the College's mission are repeatedly dismissed. And we hear more and more from alumni troubled by the lack of harmony gripping an institution they helped build on mutual support. For our part, the Faculty has grown increasingly dismayed at the President's and even Board's seeming relunctance to affirm our necessary authority over the College's core educational program and to assure the security and freedom we must have to protect and enhance it.

We understand entirely the Board's need to support the powers necessary to the President. But to define the College's mission unilaterally and without board approval is not one of these powers. We therefore state again our unanimous backing of the Assembly's present will to uphold the current mission statement. And we trust the Board will help in enlisting President LIindsay to this bgeneral will for the greater and lasting good of the College.

The Faculty of Shimer College

[version circulated at 2/23 SSA meeting]

What the Hell Just Happened

"What the hell just happened?!"

On the afternoon of February 20th, in a discussion circle hastily formed by students outside the IIT meeting room in which the Shimer College Board of Trustees had just decided, by a narrow vote of 18 to 16, to adopt President Lindsay's whole-cloth rewrite of the mission statement, Jack Garvin ('12) - part of a peaceful protest of over 60 students and alums there to challenge this eventuality - in exasperation, asked this question.

Given the circumstances, it's a really good question. Despite overwhelming support from the Assembly, a powerful letter from a unanimous Shimer faculty supporting the Assembly's affirmation of the current mission statement, as well as a petition from both students and alumni in support of the current mission statement, a determined faction of the Board voted against community consensus, instead adopting the clearly unpopular, hastily drafted, last-minute whole-cloth rewrite of Shimer's mission statement by President Tom Lindsay.

What the hell just happened, you ask? Well, here's our answer.

1. October 2009: Mr. Lindsay offers his "guideposts on the mission" in an hour-long lecture to the internal community. Though it's billed as a "discussion," questions are not welcomed.
2. February 3, 2010: Mr. Lindsay met with the Shimer community and respectfully disagreed with faculty, staff, students and alumni about what the mission of the College is (see notes here).
3. February 7, 2010: The Shimer College Assembly considers several alternative mission statements and votes overwhelmingly to affirm the current one. Since Mr. Lindsay had only submitted "guideposts", the Assembly could not vote specifically on his proposed mission statement.
4. February 8, 2010: Noting the "soft conviction" of the [unanimous] Assembly on behalf of the current mission statement, "Bud" Vesta - a Lindsay trustee nominee from 2009 - sends an open letter to Lindsay and the Board asking Mr. Lindsay to draft a rewrite of the Shimer mission for consideration by the Board at their plenary meeting of February 20.
5. February 15, 2010: Mr. Lindsay submits his whole-cloth rewrite of the Shimer mission statement to the Board via email. The Assembly doesn't have a chance to respond to it. As per Lindsay's own strategic plan, it is not formally scheduled for a vote until the May 2010 Board meeting.
6. February 19, 2010: A day before the plenary meeting of the Board, Patrick Parker - the chair of the hiring committee which forced Lindsay's hire despite overwhelming internal community resistance in 2008 - claims that there exists a legally-binding grant document that was supposedly signed by Dean David Shiner and [former president] Bill Rice in 2006, according to which Shimer MUST rewrite its mission statement to include the terms "Great Books of the Western Canon", "Socratic method" and "Hutchins curriculum" by April 10, 2010. Though Dean Shiner does not acknowledge this claim and Parker cannot produce this document, Parker uses this as a pretense for forcing a vote on the issue at the February 20 plenary session of the Board.
7. February 20, 2010: The Board, by a narrow vote of 18 to 16, adopts Mr. Lindsay's whole-cloth rewrite of the Shimer College mission statement.

"What the hell just happened?" The short answer: Snake oil, a la Lindsay. What's gonna happen next? Stay tuned. Like Aristotle says, "This shit ain't over yet."

Shimer Student Union Blog

Hi All!

I am pleased to announced that the students of Shimer College have formed what we are currently calling the "Shimer Student Union." The Shimer Student Union is a group of concerned students dedicated to playing an active and instrumental role in preserving and furthering Shimer College's ethos and democracy. In order to be a more powerful force than we were in the proceedings of the last board meeting and in general, we are formally outlining goals and tactics, gathering allies, reaching out to media outlets, disseminating information, and preparing in such a way that the voice of the students can no longer be ignored.

Join us! For private, member-only discussions, submit a request to join our Google Group. And for the latest news and commentary written by solely us students, visit the Shimer Student Union Blog.

Thank you for your care and concern.

--Jonathan Timm, Class of 2011

Letter to Shimerians Regarding By-Laws Changes

Via Karen Stabler,

This is a letter sent out by Dave Shiner explaining by-laws changes that were adopted by the assembly in 2008.

Dear Shimerian,

There appears to be some misunderstanding about the current constitutional roles and powers of the Board and the Assembly, especially with respect to changes that were approved by those bodies of the College in the spring of 2008. In the interest of helping to clarify these matters, I crafted the message below and sent it to the Board of Trustees last week. The faculty discussed governance issues at today's faculty meeting, as a result of which I was asked to forward that message to the entire Shimer community. So here it is, with very slight modifications. If you're interested in governance issues, you should find it helpful. Comments are welcome.

David Shiner

****

Dear Board Member,

In my remarks last Friday night concerning recent changes to Shimer's governance structure in general and to the By-Laws of the Board of Trustees in particular, I mentioned that it is difficult to summarize those changes briefly. In this email I'd like to offer a bit more background information so as to obviate any future misunderstandings.

On the basis of some statements made during last weekend's Board meetings, it might be thought that the changes in Shimer's governance that took effect last year, particularly with respect to the revisions of the By-Laws approved by the Board in 2008, marked a revision from democratic self-governance to a chief executive model. That would be a considerable
overstatement, albeit a somewhat understandable one given the time constraints that the Board faced last weekend. In point of fact, the formal changes approved in May 2008 were quite focused, although also significant.

The Board By-Laws already recognized the President as Chief Executive Officer of the College; the Assembly Constitution stated that, if there were to be any conflict between its strictures and those of the Board By-Laws, the By-Laws took precedence. However, each document had developed over the years in such a manner that there were some inconsistencies between them,
and there was growing concern that such lack of clarity would lead to confusion and ineffective decision-making.

For those reasons, Interim President Ron Champagne recommended and spearheaded the composition of a Task Force in early 2008 to study both documents and to recommend changes to the respective bodies. That Task
Force, on which I served, consisted of Board members and internal members of the Shimer community. Its agenda was set and its meetings moderated by Glenda Eeyong, an alumna of St. John’s College and a member of their Board of Visitors and Governors, who had previously facilitated a similar conversation at St. John’s as they amended their governance structure.

The express charge of the Task Force was, in Glenda's words, "to identify and resolve inconsistencies between the Assembly Constitution and the Board By-Laws for Shimer." In so doing, the Task Force was expected to explore the foundations of effective decision-making and action and to help clarify
the roles and responsibilities in the decision-making process for the Board, the Assembly, and the Executive Management Team (that is, the President and upper-level administrators).

The formal changes recommended by the Task Force and subsequently approved by both the Board and the Assembly included responsibility for (1) hiring and firing and (2) preparation and submission of the annual budget to the
Finance Committee of the Board. Prior to 2008, the Assembly Constitution recognized the Administrative Committee of the Assembly as responsible for the former and the Budget Committee of the Assembly as responsible for the
latter. With respect to effective decision-making, the Task Force concluded that it would be best if those roles were expressly given to the President in all College-wide documents. It was therefore recommended that the Assembly Constitution be amended so that those committees became advisory to
the President with respect to those roles, and that the Board By-Laws be amended to reflect the consultative role of those committees on those matters. The Assembly approved those changes in April 2008, and the Board approved them the following month.

Several other changes were approved by each body at that time, although those were restricted to matters of internal consistency or insubstantial revision. Otherwise the Board By-Laws and the Assembly Constitution remained unchanged; the powers of the Board, the President, and the Assembly
generally remained as they had been prior to 2008 with the exception of the revisions mentioned above.

As a concrete example of what changed and what did not, I will offer the example of the hiring of an upper-level administrator. At any time from many years ago until last spring, the Shimer President would have recommended a candidate and a proposed salary within the salary structure set by the Administrative Committee of the Assembly. The Administrative Committee would have made the final decision on both. In April 2008, as mentioned above, the Assembly voted to amend the description of the Administrative Committee so that some parts of the domain of its former powers became advisory only. The first paragraph of the description of the committee in the Assembly Constitution now reads as follows:

"The Administrative Committee is responsible for advising and counseling the President and the Executive Team regarding the supervision, direction, and management of the College on matters including, but not limited to, the hiring of new non-academic administrators and the setting of policies and
practices. It is also responsible for setting salary policy for
non-academic staff members."

The import of this is clear: the Administrative Committee advises on hiring choices (first sentence), but it sets college policy on salary structure (second sentence). Given this, the President must consult with the Administrative Committee (among others) concerning hiring of an upper-level administrator, but is authorized to make the final decision even if the committee recommends otherwise.

With respect to salary, on the other hand, the President is expected to abide by the College’s salary policy as set by the Administrative Committee. The President is of course welcome to make a recommendation contrary to that policy, but the Administrative Committee must approve it before the President is authorized to proceed with a salary offer. If it does not do so, the President's offer must be within the salary structure approved by the Administrative Committee.

I hope that this brief synopsis has shed some light on the nature of governance at Shimer. I cordially invite all who are able to attend the Assembly meeting that will take place in the Cinderella Lounge at Shimer at 4 PM Sunday, November 15. Also, if you do not have a copy of the current Assembly Constitution and would like one, please let me know and I'll send it to you as an email attachment.

David Shiner
Dean of the College"