Shimer College - History

History

Shimer was founded in 1852, when the pioneer town of Mt. Carroll, Illinois, lacking a public school, incorporated the Mt. Carroll Seminary with no land, no teachers, and no money.a The town persuaded two schoolteachers from Ballston Spa, New York, Frances Wood and her friend Cindarella Gregory, to come west to the prairie to teach, and on May 11, 1853, the new seminary opened with 11 students in a local church. Failing to raise enough money locally, the incorporators borrowed enough money to construct a building in 1854; discouraged by the financial picture, however, they sold the school to Wood and Gregory, who borrowed the money to buy it. In 1857, Wood married Henry Shimer, a mason to whom the seminary owed money, who gave Wood, and later the school, his name.

In 1864, the school began accepting only female students, not on principle, but because the school was out of space. Wishing to ensure the long-term survival of the school, in 1896 Frances Shimer reached an agreement with the University of Chicago (U. of C.), under which the school became the Frances Shimer Academy of the University of Chicago, affiliated loosely with the Baptist Church.b Then Frances Shimer retired to Florida, never setting foot on campus again; she died in 1901. William Rainey Harper, then president of the U. of C., was the first to champion the idea of the Junior College in the United States, and in 1907, Shimer became one of the first schools to offer a junior college program. The two-year junior college program, which operated alongside the original preparatory program, was accredited in 1920.

The college suffered a severe decline in enrollment and subsequent financial hardship during and after the Great Depression, which it survived — under five different presidents — in part by reorganizing the six-year preparatory program into a four-year junior college program and in part through deep salary reductions. In 1943, Shimer president Albin Bro invited the Department of Education at the U. of C. to evaluate the entire college community. The 77 recommendations they returned would become the basis for Shimer's transformation from a conservative finishing school to a nontraditional, co-educational four-year college.

The school was renamed Shimer College in 1950, and adopted the Great Books curriculum then in place at the U. of C. The U. of C. connection was dissolved in 1958, following the U. of C.'s decision to abandon the Great Books plan and a narrowly averted Shimer bankruptcy in 1957. The Great Books program at Shimer lived on, and the school achieved national recognition and rapid growth in enrollment through the 1960s. In 1963, a Harvard Educational Review article named Shimer as one of 11 colleges with an "ideal intellectual climate". A 1966 article in the education journal Phi Delta Kappan reported that Shimer "present 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."

In the late 1960s, Shimer experienced a period of internal unrest known as the "Grotesque Internecine Struggle," involving disputes over curriculum changes, the extent to which student behavior should be regulated, and allegedly inadequate fundraising by president Joe Mullin; half of the faculty and a large portion of the student body departed as a result. As financial problems worsened, the school's survival was in doubt. The trustees voted to close the college at the end of 1973, but the school was saved by a desperate fund-raising campaign led by students and faculty. Three times in the next four years, the trustees voted to shut the school down, only to later vote to reopen it. Finally filing for bankruptcy in 1977, the trustees, in the words of board chair Barry Carroll, "put responsibility for the school's continuing on the shoulders of a very dedicated faculty of 12 and students who volunteered", under the leadership of Don Moon, a nuclear engineer and Episcopal priest who had joined the faculty in 1967.

I don't care if we only pay our way for a time, if we can ultimately have a school that will be appreciated.

Accepting an invitation from the city of Waukegan, Illinois, a declining industrial suburb north of Chicago, the faculty and 62 students borrowed trucks and moved the college into two "run down" homes over Christmas break in 1978. Classes began on schedule in January 1979. The college emerged from bankruptcy in 1980, but had its accreditation temporarily downgraded to "candidate" status as a result of its financial problems. Over the next 25 years, Shimer purchased 12 of the surrounding homes to form a makeshift campus and slowly progressed towards financial stability. By 1988, enrollment had climbed from a low of 40 to 114 and income exceeded expenses. Shimer won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1991, with the help of then NEH chair and core-curriculum advocate Lynne Cheney; the grant helped the school raise US$2 million and revitalized fund raising. That same year, Shimer's accreditation was restored by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

In 2006, Shimer, again struggling with stagnating enrollment, accepted an invitation to move, this time to the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, under a long-term lease agreement; the two institutions kept separate faculties and boards. Shimer attracted national attention in 2009 when the school became embroiled in "a battle over what some saw as a right-wing attempt to take over its board and administration". Students, organized under the name Shimer Student Alliance, protested at the February 2010 Board meeting. Following votes of no confidence by the faculty, the alumni, and the Assembly (Shimer's democratic governing body), president Thomas Lindsay stepped down in April 2010. He was succeeded by Ed Noonan, a Chicago-area architect and longtime Trustee of the college. In February 2012, Shimer announced that Susan Henking, a professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, would succeed Noonan as president of the college.