Shimer Great Books School
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.
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.
[3][4][a] The town persuaded Frances Wood and Cindarella Gregory, two schoolteachers from Ballston Spa, New York, to come and teach.
[5] Unable to raise sufficient funds locally, the seminary's founders borrowed money to construct a building in 1854.
[6] 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.
[11] 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 college had a precipitous decline in enrollment and financial stability during and after the Great Depression, weathering the storm under five successive presidents.
[18] The great-books program at Shimer continued, and the school enjoyed national recognition and a rapid growth in enrollment during the 1960s.
[20] According to a 1966 article in the education journal Phi Delta Kappan, Shimer "present[ed] 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".
[21] 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.
Although Shimer's trustees voted to close the college at the end of 1973, the school was saved by intense student and faculty fundraising.
[26] During the 1978 Christmas break, the faculty and 62 students borrowed trucks and moved the college into two "run-down"[29] homes in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago.
[30] 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.
[33][34] 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".
[41][42][c] Erskine's Socratic seminar at Columbia University (begun in 1919) 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".
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 (sometimes although not invariably, defined as Great Books).
[51] In addition to core courses students take electives, which offer basic instruction or in-depth work in particular subjects.
[53] The school's 200-book reading list remained largely faithful to the original Hutchins plan, with new works judiciously added to the core curriculum.
[59] The Early Entrance program, which admitted students who had not yet graduated from high school, was pioneered by Hutchins at the University of Chicago in 1937 and adopted by Shimer in 1950.
The college considered applications from any interested students, with motivation, willingness to learn and intellectual curiosity the most important qualifications.
[71][72] The Shimer-in-Oxford program allowed third- or fourth-year students to study for one or two semesters in Oxford, supervised by a Shimer professor.
[73] Students took a core class each term with the supervising faculty; the rest of their work is completed in tutorials of self-selected subjects under the guidance of academics associated with the University of Oxford.
[97] President William Craig Rice said, "What Shimer does well – educating ourselves in on-going dialogue with the greatest minds of the past – can't be captured in the U.S. News measurements".
[98] Washington Monthly ranks Shimer 200th among liberal-arts colleges, based on social mobility, research and service.
Until its move to become part of North Central College, "As a function of its mission to promote active citizenship" Shimer was "devoted to internal self-governance to an extent that is rare among institutions of higher education".
[109] Its goal was to foster an environment in which "all the top-down bureaucracy of traditional colleges and universities has been replaced by participatory democracy committed to dialogue.
The New York Times, calling Shimer "one of the smallest liberal arts colleges in the United States", described its students as "both valedictorians and high school dropouts.
[106] The Orange Horse, Shimer's biennial talent show since the 1960s, invites students, faculty and alumni to read poetry, sing, play music or tell jokes, individually or in groups.
[128] The selection of works it contained defined the reading list on which Great Books curricula were based, and which Shimer has largely kept, with minor changes, ever since.
