It strikes me as bizarre that an organization claiming to support intellectual freedom would endorse a unilateral change in the mission statement of an organization, done over the unanimous objections of a politically diverse faculty and student body.

 Friends,

I wish to complement you on your great successes. You have achieved a level of patronizing that I have never before seen in writing.

As a friend to folks at Shimer including trustees new and old (and on both sides of the mission statement vote), presidents current and former, students and alumni, and administrative staffers, let me offer a few words congratulating those stake-holders in the college as well as my words congratulating you in your silly attempt at journalism.

Students and alumni of the college have demonstrated the importance of the education they're working to preserve. Where else do students actively fight to preserve and articulate the reason they're in school? Where else to they conduct sit-ins using Robert's Rules?

The faculty has a president that threatens their jobs explicitly and pushes them to sign loyalty oaths to a president who has demonstrated a total lack of understanding of what a liberal education really is. In spite of this, they have maintained their presence in the classroom and continue to advise students on theses. And to plan for future years of the college they believe in and sacrifice for.

And the board members who have stood up for the college that has existed since it took the Hutchins plan in the middle of the last century and that many of them attended between the early 1950s and the 2000s? They're advocating with all they can to ensure that the institution that does so much for students today and did so much for them will survive for another generation.

But Lindsay and his friends on the board, many of whom I know and respect (including Tom, with whom I have lunch plans in coming weeks) have had remarkable success at the project they've set out on. As trustees have told me, Lindsay was hired with the understanding (whose is never made clear) that he was to revive a failed college. With this idea, Tom has been a remarkably effective agent of disruptive change. He has planned and executed a plan to alienate faculty, staff, & students with significant success. Tom & company (including, seemingly, the authors off this article) have a vision of what Shimer was meant to be that doesn't match the history, and they're embarking on a plan to change that history. And, with the aid of a complacent commentariat (the NAS writers) and a press distracted by pretend culture-wars (the Chicago Reader), they may be successful.

I, for one, think that the college Tom envisions might be a neat place to study. But it's not Shimer. And he should start it elsewhere.

It strikes me as an act of astounding arrogance for Mr. Lindsay to take it upon himself to rewrite the mission statement to reflect “what Shimer actually does” after such a short stint as president. It is clear that what he has done is to rewrite the mission statement to reflect his own political ideology, and this change was pushed through with the support of his cronies and recent additions to the board and in spite of the unanimous rejection of the rewrite by the faculty and student body. Mission statements are not meant to be ideological hammers.   

The mission statement was passed with a board vote of 18 for 16 against. This fact does not support the statement that the board of Shimer College is a monolithic "tradition-minded" entity, and it is a significant lapse in reporting that the author does not bother with these kinds of "pesky" details.
 

I commend the author for speaking to at least one member of the Shimer community besides the former long-time NAS trustee, Shimer's President, Tom Lindsay.  This is one better than the last article.

I wrote one of the evidence-based comments for the previous article.  Referencing what happened under Shimer's previous president, Don Moon, it included dollar figure improvements in fundraising, the creation of successful new academic programs, and the acquisition of new buildings.  Mine wasn't the only comment that offered such hard evidence.  The fact that you cherry pick someone's random correction about Shimer's founder's name, and then go on to suggest that this reflects the character of the opposition Lindsay faces, is extraordinary and only strengthens the argument that you write not in the service of truth, but in the service of Mr. Lindsay and your shared ideology.

Regardless of your ideological orientation, one thing I think everyone can agree on is that Lindsay has and continues to prove himself a failed adminstrator at Shimer.  If he was doing his job well - whether that means furthering the previous mission, or pushing a new one - do you think you'd be hearing about it in the media like this?

When outsiders with a political agenda try to take over a college, confusion ensues.  I am a graduate of the Shimer College and can assure you that all political views were respected until the advent of the Lindsay administration.  I find your article poorly written and clearly biased.  You do no research on your own, other than talk to Stuart, and steal quotes and details from the articles of others.  I am sure you are being spoon fed details, probably by Tom Lindsay himself.  Your orginazation, your research methods and your seething bias leave me dumbfounded.  One more thing, Barre Seid is not allegedly the anonymous donor, but assuredly he and his organization have given money anonymously to the college.  We have the 990 forms to prove it!

What I find to be most striking about Tom's mission statement in its use of the word 'Liberty'.  Jefferson stated, "Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." 

I am a student and a staunch individualist who tends to hate government.  For me, the idea that liberty of the mind can transcend political liberty is profoundly absurd unless voiced by Socrates on the way to his death, or by Frankl; regardless it is a bad position to be in.  The end result of Tom’s use of the term 'Liberty' is its reduction to an idiom.  Justice becomes, to quote Thrasymachus, "the morality of a band of robbers who are face to face with their victims."   To qualify this statement, we would merely need to point that Tom is writing a document glorifying liberty, while opposing the liberty of others.  Put in terms of Aristotle's Ethics, actions make a man; it is what we do that is important, everything else is rhetoric.  Here is the question, would you be a fan of the upsurption of a document that is an edict for informed responsible action, over a logically unsound diatribe that violates your liberty?  I for one am not.

In the second-to-last paragraph, the author proclaims: "We hope President Lindsay’s board understands the situation and stays focused on the main thing, which is restoring the College’s Great Books tradition."

Let me point out that the Board is the Board of Shimer College and does not belong to Linsday, nor should it be accountable to him. It is he who serves the Board, and they reserve the power to fire and supervise him. To attribute the Board to him is a gross mischaracterization of the role the Trustees play in Shimer College.

The "mission statement" was released a few days before the Board meeting. It was not originally an action item on the agenda. No one can mischaracterize that as having had adequate time and dialogue to consider it. The Board that voted the "mission statement" was a slim majority; the vote was 18-16 (which fact the author has, for some reason, omitted, as mentioned above in comments). Of those 18, the vast majority have served on the Board for a year or less, and have little to no understanding of the College, its history, its function and its goals. Some have even admitted to not reading the college's current mission statement before voting to attempt to change it. Other Trustees who voted against it were threatened beforehand by Lindsay to vote for it or be fired. This is not the action of a person supposedly engaged in dialogue. In essence, the only people who currently hold that the "mission statement" cited above is the mission statement of the college are eighteen people on that Board.

 I feel constrained to reply to a number of points in Ms. Thorne's article, though again I do so as an individual, and not on behalf of the Faculty or Assembly or Shimer College. I appreciated the opportunity to speak with Ms. Thorne for this article, but need to point out a few difficulties with how she stated things. I'll proceed from more to relatively less crucial matters, so that there's no mistaking my intent not to offer an indiscriminate dismissal of Ms. Thorne's statements.

First and foremost, the suggestion that anyone is taking "glee" in what is going on at Shimer is the most regrettable single thing about Ms. Thorne's article. If we are oriented to the details of what people say and do, it is partly because we are a very small and intimate college. More importantly, details matter when it comes to reasoned dialogue. Everyone at Shimer undertakes their work on behalf of the school with utmost seriousness, including President Lindsay. That said, the Faculty and students themselves are at least due the same consideration.

Beyond this, Ms. Thorne states that President Lindsay is trying to "return" Shimer to "ideals of Western Civilization." But this simply can't be the case. Shimer is a great books school and has been for more than 50 years. If anyone is looking for an institution that takes the Western tradition of thought and making seriously, Shimer's the real deal, and we were so long before President Lindsay joined us. 

Further, in this light, that the faculty might be "left leaning" is - even if it were true - beside the point. Everyone on the Faculty teaches J.S. Mill as readily as they teach Karl Marx. And, in fact, I know my colleagues better than to brand them, myself, or all of us together with a single ideological epithet. I am not sure what evidence Ms. Thorne had for such branding. Again, and Ms. Thorne more or less quotes me to this effect, I dare say the Faculty is, if anything, at least as mindful of tradition as President Lindsay. That is, it is the traditions that saved and have successfully managed the school for more than thirty years that we are attempting to uphold in our statement to the Board. The Assembly is a democratic institution founded as directly on principles of liberal speech and ordered political action as any body I know of. And indeed, this very tradition at Shimer is what makes our commitment to "active citizenship" far from "banal." We practice it regularly in ways few schools dare to. Unfortunately, President Lindsay has made clear that he considers such ordered political liberty within Shimer itself an "historical accident" and a "trendy" holdover from the1960s. This, in fact, is what boggles the mind about his attempt to remake Shimer's mission statement, insofar as the "values" and institutions upheld there seem to be the very ones we feel his tenure has threatened at Shimer. 

A smaller but no less important correction I need to make is that the Faculty did not oppose President Lindsay's proposed statement. We couldn't, as he did not present it to us in either a timely or formal enough way to get our feedback on it. In our statement to the Board we simply supported the Assembly's vote to uphold the current mission statement, doing so in part to uphold the long and effective tradition of shared governance at Shimer.

Finally (though I do hasten my case in order to be brief), I have to point out that the Board voted to close the school in 1973 and 1977, not 1979 as Ms. Thorne stated. It's a small detail, and I can only regret that it's not the largest error of fact or interpretation in Ms. Thorne's piece. 

National Association of Scholars -- hah! your poorly researched and blatantly biased article proves that you are anything but "scholars".

"NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities"

This must be some kind of sick joke.  How about "NAS is an independent membership association of committed idealogues working to foster dogmatic anti-intellectual doublespeak and to sustain the tradition of one-sided scholarship and uncil censorship in America’s colleges and universities."

To risk adding a comment to this melee as an uninvolved observer ... I spend many of my days helping families come up with mission statements for their business or other enterprises. Many of the members of these families are, to put it mildly, strong-willed. I have never seen a mission statement prove helpful that has not evolved from some sort of dialogic process, often with a fair amount of conflict in it. As a former boss of mine said, "Where there's no conflict, there's no interest, and where there's no interest, there's no conflict." So I'm not surprised by this brouhaha.

That said, I still can't make out what the dissenting faculty and students reject in the newly approved Shimer College mission statement. No one appears to defend the old statement, which certainly reads as banal. And no one points to any specific points in the new one that are disagreeable. Several commentators indicate that its emphasis on Great Books accurately captures what Shimer has long stood for. So what gives? The heat appears to center around President Lindsay's way of creating and winning approval for the new statement, but here too it doesn't look like he's done anything obviously underhanded. Frankly, in default of anything clearer, several of these posts, with their imputations of malevolent motives to President Lindsay, just seem to reflect personal dislike and resentment rather than reasoned disagreement. If they are representative of the style of debate that's taken place on campus, then it would seem that this new mission may not have been adopted a moment too soon.

Keith Whitaker, Wise Counsel Research, www.wisecounselresearch.org

Mr. Whitaker, there is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education dated February 25, 2010 which does a good job of explaining why Mr. Lindsay's actions are not in keeping with the Shimer spirit, which he vowed to uphold. 

http://chronicle.com/article/At-a-Tiny-College-an-Epic/64368/?key=QG53clk9MHlKZSBkKHRAfXReOiZ6IU4sbHMSMn0aYFBc

If President Lindsay had an understanding of the Great Books program he administers--which is based on original source material, not a second-hand interpretation of the source material--he would have gone back to the source of the Great Books program, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who used the term "liberal" in terms of  a human being receiving an extensive general education. Indeed everyone knows this is what the term "liberal arts education" refers to, it does not refer to what President Lindsay states in his newly crafted mission statement, "The word “liberal” in “liberal education” has the same root as the word “liberty.”  Liberal education at Shimer is an education for and through liberty." The term "liberal education"  has never had that meaning, it means an extensive, general education for freemen (and freewomen) and nobles. It refers to what type of education such human beings need to receive, i.e., extensive, general, classical, and ongoing, to be fully educated. Robert Maynard Hutchins, the founder of the Great Books program said: "The LIBERAL ARTS are not merely indispensible; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one, or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one. The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can."   

The statement your article attributes to President Lindsay: "He said the old statement "was just a bunch of old 60's terms" that didn't explain "why we had a Great Books curriculum or why it mattered" seems to me to show a lack of understanding of the institution he is serving, and to be ignorant and and a bit insensitive to the history of the college paying his salary. A person who would make such a statement derisively dismissing its long stated official mission, which has been factually in place for decades, is perhaps not fit to lead this particular educational institution. He was perhaps the wrong choice as he is either insensible to or ignorant of the community's history, traditions, and accomplishments, and to its mission of liberal education, i.e., extensive, general, ongoing education for free men and women.   Stephanie Arena

Dear Mr. Whitaker,

You write: "I have never seen a mission statement prove helpful that has not evolved from some sort of dialogic process, often with a fair amount of conflict in it."

I believe that the Shimer community is asking for that dialogical process rather than an autocratic one.

I can't recall facts as well as other may be able to, but the process towards the board vote last weekend went something like this:

Tom floated the idea of changing the mission in the fall.

Tom put out guideposts on what the mission could do.

Tom held conversations in which he defended his idea of what a "Liberal Education" is. He did little to ask what a Shimer education is or has been or should be.

The College's Assembly chose from a slew of mission options (not including any from Tom) to keep the existing one for the time being.

The faculty expressed its unanimous agreement with the judgment of the Assembly.

The Board was presented with a mission statement that Tom drafted.

The Board was faced with a choice from Tom & Patrick Parker between changing the mission to Tom's or losing significant funding because of a heretofore unknown contract signed between Parker and a previous president (the contract has yet to be produced).

The Board, in a closed vote, narrowly voted to change the mission statement.

I don't think that that's the result of a dialogical process. I would love to see a dialogical and contentious process happen as the mission statement is revised.