7 comments - Last on 01/29/2010
Four Rented Rooms and a Big Idea: Shimer College at the Crossroads
January 27, 2010
By Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne
In May 1853, an express train on the Southern Michigan Line collided with an emigrant train on the Michigan Central ten miles outside Chicago, killing sixteen, mostly German and Irish immigrants headed west. A local paper described it as a scene of “indiscriminate ruin.” Perhaps it was especially so given the hopes that had led these travelers to the American heartland. We ran across this story while looking for material on a small Illinois college founded that same year. Shimer College is in the news because campus activists opposed to its traditionalist president are predicting another train wreck.
As readers of this website know, we have a soft spot for intellectually ambitious small colleges, and the quiddities of their curricula. In today’s Chicago Tribune comes a report, “Shimer College in Power Struggle,” that quickens our interest.
Shimer is among America’s smallest colleges (102 students, 11 professors) and is devoted entirely to a Great Books curriculum. In recent years it has flickered on the edges of extinction. It gave up its old bucolic campus in Mount Carroll, Illinois in 1979 and moved downscale to Waukegan, and moved again in 2006 to four rented rooms on Chicago’s South Side at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the last three years it has had three presidents.
The current president, Thomas Lindsay, is exactly the sort of person that American colleges and universities ought to thirst for as their campus executive. He is a University of Chicago Ph.D. who had a long and successful academic career before his appointment as Deputy Chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities. In that position he led the We the People Project—which carried forward his long dedication to the links between democracy and education. His becoming president of tiny Shimer can only be understood as an act of public service. His last academic position was as provost of Seton Hall University and before that, as provost of the University of Dallas.
President Lindsay is now focusing his considerable talents on bringing Shimer College out of its hospital ward condition. One might think this could only prompt joy among the College’s faculty members and students. But as the Chicago Tribune headline announces, many of them see his efforts as an intrusion. It’s hard not to think of Antioch College in its final days when, faced with results of decades of leftist mismanagement, a vociferous group of faculty, students, and alumni demanded yet more mismanagement. Antioch, of course, gave up the ghost. But President Lindsay and his board are determined to keep Shimer afloat.
What is the fight at Shimer all about? According to the Tribune article, it is a dispute between campus egalitarians who want the students to remain involved in the college’s governance and President Lindsay who favors a more top-down approach. Or as Ron Grossman, the Trib reporter, puts it, “The communal democracy of which Marx dreamed [vs.] the enlightened despotism that Hobbes advocated.” Well, that probably exaggerates things a bit. Marx may have his acolytes at Shimer, but the democratic Tom Lindsay is no follower of Tom Hobbes.
A better explanation is that Lindsay is disturbing the leftist complacency of a college campus. It doesn’t really matter whether an American college is large, medium, or small; nor does it matter that much whether its curriculum is vocational, free-form, or liberal arts core; nor does it matter what its official mission is—these days the default disposition is the same. The American college is an institution of and for the Left. It propagates the view that America is an unjust society dominated by the privileged few at the expense of the oppressed many. It assumes that the project of education consists of cultivating resentments and guilt, and ideally, instilling lifelong animus against the West in general and America in particular.
In that light, it is no great surprise that, left to drift during its years of decline, Shimer College has drifted left. Small as it is, Shimer has developed the same ideological reflexes as the University of Michigan or the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Can Tom Lindsay teach Shimer a new and better disposition? He has his work cut out for him. He does, however, have some puissant allies. The Shimer curriculum, after all, features Sophocles, Cicero, Shakespeare, Pascal, and Locke. It’s hard to read writers like this and conclude that the Western tradition is wholly bankrupt.
Putting aside the current contretemps, the presence of Shimer College among the three thousand eight hundred some colleges and universities in the United States warrants a little bit of celebratory reflection. The higher education establishment in the U.S. never tires of lauding the great diversity of colleges and universities that dot the national landscape. In principle, the variety is nearly endless, and there is something for everyone. In reality, the vast majority of colleges and universities in this country present a dreary sameness. The same smorgasbord of banal, watered-down, one-sided courses is taught nearly everywhere. Political correctness seeps in at every pore. Remediation (official or unacknowledged) is built into introductory courses. Grade inflation is institutionalized to carry forward the unmotivated. The hard work of conveying to students comprehensive surveys of subjects is displaced by boutique courses lacking intellectual context. And the faculty members are largely interchangeable from one campus to the next. They all have the same python-like graduate education: long and narrow, except for that bulge of specialization, where they swallow the pig.
That overmuch of a sameness has a few small exceptions. Shimer could be one of them. How did Shimer escape the mold?
We’re not sure. Shimer began as a preparatory school for young women, founded in 1853—a year after Antioch, and much in the same spirit. Two young women from New York State, Frances Shimer and Cinderella Gregory, set out for the “frontier” as they saw it to bring education to the West. Their school offered courses in “home economics and etiquette classes alongside ‘intellectual mathematics’ and the study of electricity.” This sounds some distance from a Homer to Hamilton curriculum—not that we undervalue etiquette or electricity.
Northwestern Illinois in 1853 may not have been the Wild West, but it was a land filling up with footloose immigrants who were striving to acquire some culture in the old sense. Frances and Cinderella were effectively missionaries to an educational frontier, though early on they insisted that the College be non-denominational. It was nearly a century later that Shimer began admitting men and swung into orbit around Robert Hutchins’ enthusiasm for the Great Books.
The Great Books focus cannot be said to have been a brilliant marketing move, but it did add a distinct richness to the education alternatives for American students. In a way, Shimer remained a college for immigrants, the more so as Americans became increasingly outsiders to their own intellectual heritage and civilization. That this experiment has lasted sixty years seems nearly a miracle. We hope that Tom Lindsay can take inspiration from the name of the College’s co-founder and once again rescue it from the ashes.
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Again and again we're told that the source of Shimer's ills is "leftist mismanagement" (as if good management is left/right issue). Where, then, is the evidence? This article mentions the "four rented rooms," perhaps to suggest Shimer is small and that this is a failing (this is innacurate, by the way, since Shimer rents a floor and a half with closer to twenty four rooms total); it mentions that Shimer has had three presidents in three years (which is true, though it neglects to mention that the second was intentionally transitional and it just as easily could have said three in seven years, as the first started in 2003); but, beyond this, where is the evidence of Shimer's poor management?
Let me provide some evidence. Under Shimer's former president of 25 years, Don Moon, at the "downscale" Waukegan campus, tripled the College's Board size, tripled its student body, went from one to eleven buildings, started a successful weekend program, gained back its accreditation, increased donations from effectively nothing to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and received several major grants, &etc, and never did all this change upset the Shimer community like this. Never.
Shimer certainly can improve, but that's not the current issue. The current problem is that President Lindsay has proven himself a poor manager. Him and several of his recent Board nominees, without bothering to even acquaint themselves with them first, have shown repeated flagrant disregard for the traditions of governance at Shimer and, thus, predictably, upset students, administrators, faculty and alumni.
You have to ask yourself: If President Lindsay is so good, why all the controversy? It's certainly not good for business. And this, I would think, is one thing everyone could agree on.
by ShimerAlum Posted on 01/28/2010
I'm not quite sure where to begin in response to the article, since almost everything is factually inaccurate. Shimer College does not have four rented rooms. It does not have 102 students. It does not have 11 professors. It is not devoted entirely to a Great Books curriculum. It is not very liberal (it is basically impossible to be a Great Books College and very liberal). Shimer's "years of decline" ended in 1977, when a top-down adminstration voted to close the College, having saddled the institution with over $1,000,000 in debt and mortgaging all assets to the hilt.
Since then, the slightly more "egalitarian" governance system (Shimer was never cooperatively or communally run; the President always had decision making authority, with student and faculty input) has eliminated all debt, accumulated over $3,000,000 in assets, and seen student enrollment triple from less than 45 to more than 120. If Shimer needed "rescuing," it was acomplished by former president Don Moon, who served for 27 years (1977-2004) and oversaw the College's recent renaissance.
Tom Lindsay came to Shimer with high hopes and great support from everyone in the community. Unfortunately, he has lost the trust of the College's students, faculty, staff, alumni, and many Board members, something that never happened with the three previous presidents the College has had since 1977 (including one hired as an interim president under a one year contract).
To characterize this as a "left vs. right" situation is patently false. Shimer's last president was clearly conservative and was respected and admired by the entire community. The problem is not the politics. It is the person.
by Robert Hathaway Posted on 01/28/2010
ShimerAlum and Robert Hathaway challenge the accuracy of our reporting. We got our facts from the article in the Chicago Tribune. ShimerAlum and Hathaway dispute the details but provide no evidence to the contrary. We await a more substantive correction if one is needed.
- Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne
by Ashley Thorne Posted on 01/29/2010
As a first place to start, I'd look at easily available tax documents. My five minute search found the college's forms 990 from 2002-2008, a period in which the annual budget doubled.
That points to a lack of decline in the years immediately preceding Mr. Lindsay's tenure.
by Obvious Points Posted on 01/29/2010
And a quick look at their website extols the Great Books curriculum and shows 11 full-time faculty. One could quibble over 2 additional part-time faculty, but the spirit of the original article's description seems perfectly sound.
One factoid on the website that I found fascinating was the claim that there are 150 student organizations at the college. Their 102 students must be serious joiners -- or these are very small organizations!
by Dave Taylor Posted on 01/29/2010
It is sometimes a good idea to do minimal research before publishing an article, no matter how one sided one wishes to be. Shimer College is located on the campus of IIT, which has 150 student organizations, all of which are open to Shimer students. If anyone had bothered to call Shimer College and ask what facilities they had, one would have quickly been told that there are not "four rented classrooms," but about six times that many rooms. Calling up the College and asking how many students they have might also have been a good idea. Even the statement that "Frances Shimer and Cinerella Gregory set out for the frontier..." is factually incorrect; her name was Frances Wood at the time. Just another example of sloppy reporting. And checking 990's over the years is an easy way to prove that Shimer was doing quite well financially with their small student body for the past 30+ years. Until Tom Lindsay entered the picture. Contributions to the College, which were $2,000,000 in 2007-08--with an interim president hired just for that one year--are expected to plunge this year to barely a third that amount. That's one of any college president's main jobs--to raise money. Obviously, whatever Tom Lindsay's "vision" is for Shimer College, the rest of the world is not willing to support it. It's only too bad that Shimer College has to suffer for the hubris of one individual.
by Robert Hathaway Posted on 01/29/2010
The posts in this discussion appear to me to derail the discussion (to use the article's opening image) from a debate over Shimer's direction to a tit-for-tat over certain "facts," a contretemps itself grounded in, it appears, poor reporting from the Chicago Tribune. Big surprise there.
More importantly, some of the posts implicitly critique the article's assumption that college administration can and should be viewed as "liberal or conservative." These posts instead argue on the basis of Shimer's administration being "good or bad" in the sense of "effective or ineffective." This slip strikes me as missing the point. As we have seen in the business world quite starkly, "value neutral" administration (i.e., valueless administration), no matter how well-schooled as "managers," can quickly destroy financial and communal values. Colleges need revenue and cost control to survive. But they need clear moral direction in order to make surviving worth while. A college president and board of trustees need to attend to both matters, not just efficiency.
As a University of Chicago grad myself, I am tickled by Shimer's bold tagline, "The Great Books College of Chicago." For a taste of the intellectual life at Shimer, check out emeritus NIU professor Gary Glenn's lecture there last Fall, posted on the Shimer website: http://www.shimer.edu/newsandevents/upload/Lecture-Glenn.pdf. Glenn deftly catalogues some of the obstacles to liberal education, which should be of paramount interest to those of us in NAS. And he does so in a way that calm and thoughtful way that would probably be too much to expect of in the blogosphere, but should nonetheless stand as an example.
by Keith Whitaker Posted on 01/30/2010