Shimer College
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Shimer College was founded in 1853 in Mount Carroll, Illinois by Frances Wood Shimer as a non-denominational co-educational seminary. Shimer 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.
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 11 small liberal arts colleges in the United States, along with Carleton, Reed, and Swarthmore. Despite the very traditional Hutchins curriculum, Shimer developed a reputation as a counterculture mecca in the 1960s and 1970s. Mounting debts forced the college to leave its Mount Carroll campus and move to the Chicago suburb of Waukegan, Illinois, in the late 1970s.
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, although the emphasis on "Great Books" has lessened somewhat in recent curriculum changes. 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 senior year, and a senior thesis is required. Classes are small and are guided by a faculty member. The discussion method is preferred. Core readings include the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Descartes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Woolf in the humanities; Lucretius, Lavoisier, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Feynmann in the natural sciences; and Machiavelli, Rousseau, De Tocqueville, Weber, 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 sophmore or junior year and who feel they are not challenged by the requirements of high school. 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.
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, each year for a subset of Shimer students who take courses from Shimer faculty and tutorials at Oxford University. 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. Shimer is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.