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Shimer College
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Shimer College |
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|---|---|
| Motto | "To Serve Rather Than Be Served" |
| Established | 1852 |
| Type | Private |
| President | William Craig Rice |
| Undergraduates | 125 |
| 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 small enrollment and its Great Books curriculum. As of August 2006, the college, previously based in Mount Carroll and Waukegan, has relocated to the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Shimer's student body is extremely small. 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. The Ph.D. rate for Shimer graduates is the third highest in the nation[citation needed]. Shimer is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
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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 and disdains textbooks as the basis for its curriculum.
Shimer continues to use the Hutchins Plan. It is one of a very small number of "Great Books" colleges—most notable among them 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 lessened somewhat in recent curriculum changes in favor of contemporary texts and texts by female authors.
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 who believe they are ready for college after their sophomore or junior year and who feel they are not challenged by the requirements of high school.
Shimer also has the unusual practice of having a weekend college separate from the normal weekday enrollment. The weekend college is tailored to people who want to balance a college education with a fulltime job. 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.
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.
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. The Waukegan campus will continue to be used for the Hutchins Institute and for a lab learning program coordinated with local public schools.
- Peter Cooley, poet
- Stephen Dobyns, poet and novelist
- Robert O. Keohane, international relations scholar
- C. Clark Kissinger, political activist
- Daniel J. Sandin, computer graphics and visual arts pioneer
- Neal Solomon, social theorist and management consultant
- Laurie Spiegel, composer and computer scientist
- cat yronwode (née Manfredi), comic book publisher and folklorist (dropped out of Shimer before graduating)
- Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies, present owner of the Mt. Carroll campus
- Harrison Middleton University
- Moran, Dan. "Shimer bolts county", News Sun, 19 Jan 2006.
- Official website
- Unknown, Unsung, and Unusual - TIME Magazine profile of Shimer from April 1963