Shimer Great Books School
Shimer Great Books School[University-preparatory school|] is a Great Books college that is part of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Prior to 2017, Shimer was an independent, accredited college on the south side of Chicago, originally founded in 1853.
Originally founded as the Mount Carroll Seminary in Mount Carroll, Illinois in 1853, it became affiliated with the University of Chicago in 1896 and was renamed the Frances Shimer Academy after founder Frances Wood Shimer. It was renamed Shimer College in 1950, when it began offering a four-year curriculum based on the Hutchins Plan of the University of Chicago. After the University of Chicago parted with both Shimer and the Hutchins Plan in 1958, Shimer continued to use a version of that curriculum. The college relocated to Waukegan in 1978 and to Chicago in 2006. In 2017, it was acquired by North Central College which established the Shimer Great Books School to continue offering its curriculum.
Shimer was, until joining North Central College, governed internally by an assembly in which all community members had a vote. In 2016, Shimer announced an agreement to be acquired by North Central College. The agreement came to fruition on June 1, 2017, when Shimer's faculty and curriculum were subsumed into North Central as a department known as the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College.
History
In 1852, the pioneer town of Mount Carroll, Illinois, lacking a public school, incorporated the Mount Carroll Seminary with no land, no teachers and no money. The town persuaded Frances Wood and Cindarella Gregory, two schoolteachers from Ballston Spa, New York, to come and teach. On May 11, 1853, the new seminary opened in a local church with eleven students. Shimer has evolved over time from a coeducational seminary to a women's seminary, a women's academy, a women's junior college, a women's college, to a coeducational Great Books college.Unable to raise sufficient funds locally, the seminary's founders borrowed money to construct a building in 1854. They were discouraged by the school's finances and sold it to Wood and Gregory, who borrowed money for the purchase. In 1857, Wood married Henry Shimer, a mason who was a creditor of the seminary. Henry left immediately after the nuptials for medical school, securing private lodging upon his return; the new Mrs. Shimer continued to cohabit with Miss Gregory. In 1864, the overcrowded school began accepting female students only.
To ensure the seminary's long-term survival, in 1896 Frances Shimer reached an agreement with the University of Chicago in which the school became the Frances Shimer Academy of the University of Chicago and was loosely affiliated with the Baptist Church. She retired to Florida, never returning to the school, and died in 1901. University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper was the first to champion junior colleges in the United States, and in 1907 Shimer became one of the first schools to offer a junior-college program. The two-year junior-college program, operating with the original
preparatory program, was accredited in 1920.
The college had a precipitous decline in enrollment and financial stability during and after the Great Depression, weathering the storm under five successive presidents. Its survival was due in part to the reorganization of the six-year preparatory program into a four-year junior college program and in part to steep salary reductions. In 1943, Shimer president Albin C. Bro invited the Department of Education at the University of Chicago to evaluate the college community; its 77 recommendations became the basis for Shimer's transformation from a conservative finishing school to a nontraditional, co-educational four-year college.
The school was renamed Shimer College in 1950, adopting the great-books curriculum then in place at the University of Chicago. The university connection dissolved in 1958 after the latter's decision to abandon the great-books plan, and Shimer narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 1957. The great-books program at Shimer continued, and the school enjoyed national recognition and a rapid growth in enrollment during the 1960s. In 1963, a Harvard Educational Review article listed Shimer as one of 11 colleges with an "ideal intellectual climate". According to a 1966 article in the education journal Phi Delta Kappan, Shimer "present impressive statistical evidence that their students are better prepared for graduate work in the arts and sciences and in the professions than those who have specialized in particular areas".
During the late 1960s, Shimer experienced a period of internal unrest known as the Grotesque Internecine Struggle, with disputes over curriculum changes, the extent to which student behavior should be regulated and inadequate fundraising by president Francis Joseph Mullin. Half the faculty and a large portion of the student body left as a result. Its financial problems worsened, and the school's survival was uncertain. Although Shimer's trustees voted to close the college at the end of 1973, the school was saved by intense student and faculty fundraising. In the school's 1977 bankruptcy filing, the trustees, in the words of board chair Barry Carroll, "put responsibility for the school's continuing on the shoulders of a very dedicated faculty of 12 and students who volunteered".
During the 1978 Christmas break, the faculty and 62 students borrowed trucks and moved the college into two "run-down" homes in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago.
Shimer emerged from bankruptcy in 1980. During the next 25 years, the college purchased 12 surrounding homes and the former YWCA facility at Genesee and Franklin Streets to form a makeshift campus and slowly progressed towards financial stability. By 1988 its enrollment had grown from a low of 40 to 114, and income exceeded expenses. In 1991, Shimer received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities with the help of NEH chair and core-curriculum advocate Lynne Cheney; the grant revitalized the school's fundraising, helping it raise $2 million.
In 2006, Shimer again moved to the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Although the institutions operated independently, they cooperated closely under a long-term agreement.
Shimer received national attention in 2009, when it was embroiled in "a battle over what some saw as a right-wing attempt to take over its board and administration". In February 2012 the college announced the appointment of Susan Henking, former professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, as Shimer's 14th president.
In September 2014 Shimer again received media attention when Ben Miller of Washington Monthly ranked it as one of the worst colleges in America, according to a formula adjusting graduation rates to the percentage of minority and low-income students and factoring net expense to low-income students. In December 2014 Jon Ronson of The Guardian disputed Miller's claim, citing Miller's assertion that the ranking was "at least partly due to small sample sizes".
Academics
Curriculum history
Shimer follows the great-books tradition begun by John Erskine. Erskine's Socratic seminar at Columbia University impacted his colleague, Mortimer J. Adler, who came to believe that the purpose of education was to engage student minds "in the study of individual works of merit ... accompanied by a discussion of the ideas, the values, and the forms embodied in such products of human art". Robert Maynard Hutchins, head of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951, brought Adler to the university and implemented a program based on Adler's ideas.The Chicago program comprised sequences in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences which were supposed to integrate past and present work within these divisions of knowledge. In addition, these sequences were capped by work in philosophy and history. The emphasis in teaching was on small classes with bright students, where discussion could supplant monologue as the dominant pedagogic technique.... At the same time, in order to retain high academic standards and contact with the "frontiers of knowledge", the College's pedagogy emphasized reading originals.
Shimer, affiliated with the University of Chicago since 1896, adopted the Hutchins plan in 1950. When Hutchins left the university in 1951 and it abandoned the Hutchins Plan, Shimer continued to use it and it is still reflected in the college's curriculum.
Degree program
Shimer was accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. Its core curriculum was a sequence of sixteen required courses in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and interdisciplinary studies. Basic-studies courses are generally taken during the first two years, advanced-studies during the final two years and integrative-studies courses in the final year. In addition to core courses students take electives, which offer basic instruction or in-depth work in particular subjects. Students may also take tutorials, with one or two students per course, tailored to their interests and similar in structure to the Oxford tutorial system.Shimer College students did not pursue traditional majors, instead having broad concentrations in the humanities, natural sciences or social sciences. Within these areas, students could specialize in literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science or psychology.
The school's 200-book reading list remained largely faithful to the original Hutchins plan, with new works judiciously added to the core curriculum. These included voices originally overlooked in the formation of the canon, or not yet published when it originated, including Martin Luther King Jr., Carol Gilligan, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault and other contemporary authors. Readings were organized by broad historical and philosophical themes.
Small seminars were the sole form of instruction in all subjects, from mathematics to poetry. Classes were composed of no more than twelve students, who read and discussed only source material. In a process Shimer called "shared inquiry", "the text is the teacher, and thus the faculty member's role is to facilitate interaction between the text and the students". According to a former Shimer professor:
At Shimer, the professor is a facilitator, a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage – encouraging each student to contribute to the intellectual light being kindled in every class. Each student was expected to question and comment upon the text, to respond to one other's insights, actively taking part in every discussion.... Students know their insights matter; they have something to offer to their peers, and to the life of the text being discussed. Some students are more exuberant than others, some would rather talk than listen; others may be a bit shy. The professor/facilitator must make sure that each student has a chance to shine, that each can feel confident, each can have the courage to ask what they think might be a stupid question. What are feared to be stupid questions are often the most provocative ones.
The curriculum emphasized writing; students were required to complete a semester project each term on a topic chosen in conjunction with an advisor, and were required to complete a research paper during their third year. All students needed to pass a basic-studies comprehensive examination to register for upper-level courses, and at least one area-studies comprehensive examination to graduate. A senior thesis was required of all students. Usually an analytic or expository essay, it could also be a piece of original fiction, poetry, a performance or work of visual art. Students were encouraged to present their theses orally, and the public was invited to the presentations.