It doesn’t take a lot to rock the boat at tiny Shimer College, where the current enrollment is 110, the full-time faculty count is 11, and everything is always up for discussion.
Founded in 1853 as a seminary, Shimer evolved into a women’s prep school, a junior college, and an affiliate of the University of Chicago. In 1950 it became a four-year coed college focused on the Great Books curriculum developed by U. of C. president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Over the next two decades enrollment grew—at one point topping 500—and then shrank, while the debt-load expanded. By 1979 the school was on the verge of bankruptcy, its trustees had voted to shut it down, and its Mount Carroll campus buildings were auctioned off. As Harold Henderson reported in a 1988 Reader cover story, a tiny nucleus of faculty and students were determined to preserve Shimer’s Great Books tradition. They moved what they could salvage to a Victorian mansion in Waukegan and started over, governing by the consensus of the entire active community—students, faculty, board, and staff—constituted as the Assembly.
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Looking at that lineup and at changes Lindsay has proposed to the Shimer mission statement—trading references to “active citizenship” and “informed, responsible action” for an appreciation of “ordered political liberty such as we enjoy in American democracy”—worried Shimer community members gathered for an Assembly meeting November 15.
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