Shimer College - Alumni

Alumni

As of 2008, Shimer claimed 5,615 living alumni. Nearly 25 percent of graduates are employed in education (from elementary schools through college), 7 percent are lawyers, and 7 percent work in computer software. The remainder occupy all walks of life, from consulting to social services, to non-profit organizations.

Samuel W. McCall, a US Representative from Massachusetts's 8th congressional district and later Governor of Massachusetts, attended the Mt. Carroll Seminary in the 1860s. Shimer graduates include poets and authors such as Peter Cooley, who has sponsored a Shimer College poetry contest for many years, as part of the University and College Poetry Prize Program of the Academy of American Poets; poet Stephen Dobyns; Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer John Norman Maclean, author of the bestselling Fire on the Mountain; and award-winning comic book writer and editor Catherine "Cat" Yronwode. Alumni also include notable political theorists such as Arab-Israeli conflict scholar Alan Dowty and Robert Keohane, author of the seminal work After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, and political activists such as C. Clark Kissinger, former National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and situationist Ken Knabb. Computer pioneers Nick Pippenger and Daniel J. Sandin went to Shimer, as did experimental artists Laurie Spiegel and Ken Friedman.

Other notable alumni include singer/songwriter Phoebe Snow; medical inventor, Slate columnist, and Yale University School of Medicine professor Sydney Spiesel; Whitman College Classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver; author, activist, and internet publisher Heather Corinna; computer software author Steve Heller; philosopher and chess Grandmaster Jesse Kraai; and Florida State Representative Ron Schultz. Chicago businessman and Shimer graduate Peter Hanig co-organized the international public art exhibit CowParade in 1999.