Shimer College
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Shimer College | |
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| Motto: | "To Serve Rather Than Be Served" |
| Established: | 1853 |
| Type: | Private |
| President: | Ronald O. Champagne - Interim President |
| Undergraduates: | 100 |
| Postgraduates: | 25 |
| Location: | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| Campus: | Urban |
| Colors: | Burgundy and Gold |
| Mascot: | Pioneers (historical), Flaming Smelts (unofficial) |
| Website: | www.shimer.edu |
Shimer College is a liberal arts college in Chicago, Illinois, which is best known for its intellectual atmosphere, small class sizes and its Great Books curriculum. The college is located on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology where students of both colleges have the opportunity to cross-register in appropriate courses.
With fewer than 150 students, Shimer is one of the smallest liberal arts colleges in the United States. More than 50 percent of Shimer graduates go on to graduate and professional schools. Shimer is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
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[edit] Curriculum
Shimer College became formally affiliated with the University of Chicago in 1895 and adopted the Chicago "Hutchins Plan" in 1950. The Hutchins Plan refers to American educator Robert Maynard Hutchins who was the president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945 and the chancellor from 1945 to 1951. The Hutchins Plan relies on close readings of original sources rather than textbooks as the basis for its curriculum.
Shimer remains among a very small number of "Great Books" colleges— among them Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Shimer markets itself as "the Great Books college of Chicago". The emphasis at Shimer on Great Books has been broadened and updated in recent curriculum additions to include a scope of contemporary texts and texts by female authors and writers of color.
Shimer's core curriculum generally requires three years of study in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and integrative studies. Electives are generally taken in the junior and senior years, as well as tutorials. A senior thesis is required. Classes are small and are guided by a faculty member, acting as a facilitator. Apart from a very few specific courses, the discussion method is the pedagogical norm. Core readings include the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Descartes, Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Woolf in the humanities; Lucretius, Lavoisier, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Feynman in the natural sciences; and Machiavelli, Rousseau, De Tocqueville, Weber, Michel Foucault, Freud, DuBois, Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, and Arendt in the social sciences.
Shimer College is also notable for its Early Entrant Program, which caters to bright high school students ready for college after their sophomore or junior year and not challenged by high school requirements.
Shimer also maintains a weekend college program partly separate from weekday enrollment. In keeping with the proposed Hutchins ideal of lifelong education, the weekend college offers the full core curriculum of the weekday program but is tailored to those students balancing a college education with full-time employment.
Additionally, the Shimer-in-Oxford Program offers an academic program in Oxford, England, most years for a subset of Shimer students who take courses from Shimer faculty and tutorials from University of Oxford faculty.
[edit] History
Shimer was founded in 1853 in Mount Carroll, Illinois, by Frances Wood Shimer as a non-denominational co-educational seminary.
In the early 1960s, Shimer gained national attention with a Time magazine article about the school. The article cited a survey by the Harvard Educational Review that ranked Shimer as among the top eleven small liberal arts colleges in the United States, along with Carleton College, Reed College, and Swarthmore College. Despite the very traditional Hutchins curriculum, Shimer developed a reputation as a counterculture mecca in the 1960s and 1970s. Mounting debts and bankruptcy forced the college to leave its Mount Carroll campus and move to the northern Chicago suburb of Waukegan, Illinois, in 1979.
Amid controversy, on January 19, 2006, the Board of Trustees announced that it had accepted an invitation to move the school to the Illinois Institute of Technology campus on the south side of Chicago. The move to Chicago was completed August 19, 2006.
[edit] Notable alumni
- Heather Corinna, sex educator, feminist activist and creator of visual and written erotica
- Stephen Dobyns, transferred to Wayne State University, poet and novelist
- Alan Dowty, international relations scholar
- Steve Heller, BA 1971, technical author and software engineer
- Robert O. Keohane, BA cum laude 1961, international relations scholar
- C. Clark Kissinger, transferred to University of Chicago, political activist
- Ken Knabb, BA 1965, situationist writer and translator
- Heather Lynn, musician, member of The Capricorns
- John Norman Maclean, author and journalist
- Jesse Kraai, BA 1994, chess Grandmaster
- Nick Pippenger, BS 1965, researcher in computer science
- Daniel J. Sandin, BA 1964, computer graphics and visual arts pioneer
- Laurie Spiegel, BA 1967, composer and computer scientist
- cat yronwode (née Manfredi), comic book publisher and folklorist (dropped out of Shimer before graduating)
[edit] Notable faculty and board
- John Bellairs, novelist best known for his work The Face in the Frost
- Ralph W. Conant, writer and social policy researcher
- William Craig Rice, educator and division head at the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Irv Kupcinet, journalist and broadcast personality, member of Shimer's Board of Trustees
- Geoffrey M. Rappaport, founder of Supercuts, member of Shimer's Board of Trustees
[edit] See also
- Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies, present owner of the Mt. Carroll campus
- Great Books, the foundation of Shimer's curriculum
- Robert Maynard Hutchins, advocate of Secular perennialism and author of The University of Utopia (1953)
[edit] Sources
- Moran, Dan. "Shimer bolts county", News Sun, 19 Jan 2006.
[edit] External links
- Official website
- Unknown, Unsung, and Unusual - TIME Magazine profile of Shimer from April 1963
- Small Campus, Big Books - November 2007 profile of Shimer from the New York Times
