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Shimer College
Chicago, IL
The Great Books College of Chicago
Interests: discussion, Great Books, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Augustine, Aquinas, Darwin, Isaac Newton, Descartes, Pascal, Kafka, Homer, Anselm, Locke, Buber, Ruth Benedict, Piaget, Chodorow, DuBois, Durkheim, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Freud, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Arendt, de Beauvoir, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Lucretius, Bacon, Avogadro, Mendel, Lamarck, Cannizzaro, Lavoisier, Dalton, Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Oersted, Huygens, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Feynmann, Shakespeare, Euclid, Lobachevsky, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Aurelius, Dante, Chaucer, Thomas More, Milton, Cervantes, Hume, Goethe
Recent Activity
One Hundred Sixty Years Ago -- This Month
Posted yesterday at Evocations
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Now Where is She?
Shimer prez is, once again, traveling. Yes, she is away from Shimer's own turf. Here are some hints about where she is: In the land from whence Frances Wood and Cinderella Gregory began their travels to found a seminary in Mount Carroll. Thirty two miles from Naples, where Cinderella's parents... Continue reading
Posted 3 days ago at Evocations
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Where is She Now?
Posted May 14, 2013 at Evocations
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Six Degrees of Shimer
When I arrived at Shimer, some months ago, I started seeing connections. I saw them everywhere. There was a former student's name at the bottom of a hand out, in the footnote. There, on the back of a Shimerian's book -- the name of a dear friend doing a jacket... Continue reading
Posted May 14, 2013 at Evocations
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Great Books Revisited OR Is that Great Lists?
One way of thinking about what great books are is to think about lists. (Yes, people make lists. Perhaps they always have.) For example, the collection of great books created by those at the Encyclopedia Brittanica (think Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins) was, in some ways, a list with... Continue reading
Posted May 6, 2013 at Evocations
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Twenty-first Century Ponderings
The Chronicle of Higher Education for September 14, 2001 -- composed nad likely printed before what we have come to call 9/11 -- offered the following words as we entered the 21st century in an article entitled "A Battle Plan for Professors to Recapture the Curriculum" (page B7): "As we... Continue reading
Posted May 2, 2013 at Evocations
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May Day May Day
Posted May 1, 2013 at Evocations
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Robert Hutchins on the Web
If Shimer were a religion, and we had saints, one of ours would be Robert Maynard Hutchins. His name is even invoked in our mission statement. And yet, I am not sure many of us know who he was, or read his work. I had not done so in years... Continue reading
Posted Apr 29, 2013 at Evocations
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Where in the World Was Shimerprez?
Posted Apr 27, 2013 at Evocations
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Alexander Meiklejohn
I have always loved this chap's surname. I just do. No good reason, just the sound of it. In any case, Alexander Meiklejohn was quoted as follows by Laurence Veysey in his book entitled The Emergence of the American University; the quotation comes from Meiklejohn's 1908 piece "College Education and... Continue reading
Posted Apr 24, 2013 at Evocations
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The World is Noisy and So Am I
I find a lot of books in odd places, including on the streets and in Good Will stores and in bookstores and in sharing libraries in the places I live. And today, I am writing about a paradoxically wonderful book called In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a... Continue reading
Posted Apr 22, 2013 at Evocations
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A Novel Bookstore
This novel, entitled A Novel Bookstore, was written by Laurence Cosse, and published by Europa Editions. It is translated from the french. Hence the accent (invisible here, above the e in the author's last name.) The story is of a person who starts a bookstore which chooses its books by... Continue reading
Posted Apr 18, 2013 at Evocations
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Violence
Dear Shimerians: Recently a student asked me “why are you writing to presidents of colleges that have experienced violence?” I answered: once I had a terrible experience when I was acting as an administrator (it involved several accidental student deaths) and I received a few notes from utter strangers. They... Continue reading
Posted Apr 15, 2013 at Evocations
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Shimer in the News: USA Today
So, there is a national debate about the value of a liberal education. Can one, many ask, get a job with one of those? The implication is often that the answer is no, or at minimum, that the issue is more fraught for some than for others and that those... Continue reading
Posted Apr 7, 2013 at Evocations
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Adam Smith Goes to College
Posted Apr 4, 2013 at Evocations
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(Un)Employed Philosophers Guild
I am a fan of the Unemployed Philosophers Guild. Do you know it? Having a sense of humor is crucial, and the Unemployed Philosophers Guild does. So, too, does it have a way of linking their humor, their intellectual verve and financial acumen. (The latter hinted at by the fact... Continue reading
Posted Apr 2, 2013 at Evocations
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Presidential Tomfoolery (Yes, It is that Dangerous Day of Days)
Pressed Release Shimmer College April, 2013 Shimmer College is pleased to announce the beginning of several new programs. Each will draw significant revenue to the College, and enhance its academic reputation in important ways. Apocalypse Now is a new graduate degree program in crisis management. Students and staff will work... Continue reading
Posted Mar 31, 2013 at Evocations
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Callings and Vocations
Years ago, I came upon a book entitled Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, published by Trilogy Books in 1992, by Gail Griffin of Kalamazoo College. I have been thinking of it some in recent weeks, in part because I keep encountering the v-word. Vocation, I mean. Everywhere... Continue reading
Posted Mar 31, 2013 at Evocations
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Marge Piercy is Coming and You Should Be There
When I arrived at Shimer, a group of students were doing a tutorial on the "political novel." Among their readings: the work of Marge Piercy. I had taught (having been nudged into it by my partner) a book called Sex Wars in Introduction to Women's Studies in my prior life... Continue reading
Posted Mar 29, 2013 at Evocations
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A New Version of Shimertopia
Posted Mar 27, 2013 at Evocations
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From Adam Kotsko
Posted Mar 26, 2013 at Evocations
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Around the Web
Posted Mar 24, 2013 at Evocations
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Quote for the Day --
Ronald Grimes is an expert in Ritual Studies. He is also, of course, a guy. Here are some quotations from his book, Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man's Life (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995): Teachers and students constitute a lineage. Though Academic paternity is even more questionable than... Continue reading
Posted Mar 18, 2013 at Evocations
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Keble College Chapel and Organ
Posted Mar 17, 2013 at blog.shimer
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Where is Shimer's Prez Now?
Okay, here is another question about Shimer's Prez, aka Waldo. (And I do not mean Waldo, Alabama or Waldo, British Columbia, though that might be interesting since it is a ghost town. Nor do I mean Hurricane Waldo. I mean the little guy one looks for in pictures. You know,... Continue reading
Posted Mar 15, 2013 at Evocations
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