Evocations

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 a very intriguing route. There is a mysterious committee (no one knows who they are, and they are kept, even, from knowledge of one another) which picks llists of 300 or so books, and the contents of the bookstore come from those lists. Each year, they may add some more. So: the bookstore incldues only good books. Yes, a quality distinction. And, the owners -- and the committee -- actually choose wonderfully good books -- even acting in such a way as to create a demand for some long out of print. Their bookstore, it seems. finds a wonderful audience -- and has an impact. All those rather trashy books -- sometimes called peanut books, often selling huge numbers (sometimes even in airports), arriving with great hoopla to big box bookstores and piled in heaps near the door -- are set to the side so that one can actually find the "real" novels. 

Hmmm.

In the book, this leads to all sorts of consequences -- including competition from other like minded (or apparently like minded) capitalists, protests about their elitism in the media (and suitable defenses), and even more. 

I will not spoil the plot but I will ask: what does this have to do with Shimer? Is the notion of choosing only good books at all like proclaiming oneself a great books college? 

Here the complexity is (as articulated in the novel even), that one cannot choose everything. And, one does wish to steer away from sheer junk. But are there limits to this approach? who gets to be the committee? Who chooses the committee?

And, another question: in what ways are bookstores and colleges alike? How are they different? How do they (respectively) relate to the notion of a business or a non profit organization?

I liked this novel novel. Can you tell? Thought provoking and a good read (in the  sense of well translated and articulate as well as in the sense of a romp I enjoyed. )  

For a review in the Washington Post, click here. For some quotations from A Novel BOokstore, ripped out of context, but still worth a gander, click here. 

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 helped carry me – and indeed, our whole campus – through what remains one of the worst experiences I can imagine. (If you do not know about the stabbings and gun violence to which I refer, click here or here, for example.) 

At a recent meeting of the American Council on Education, I attended a session in which presidents talked about their experiences of crisis. One voice was an Illinois president who lead an institution that experienced the significant impact of a shooter on campus. It was the first time he spoke publicly of events that happened several years ago. Violence happens. Tragedies happen. And, they change the worlds of everyone.

So, I have taken the opportunity in recent weeks to reach out to those whose campuses have experienced stabbings and gun violence. Yesterday (by the time you receive this), there was more violence in Boston that left 3 dead and about 140 wounded.  While not a campus event, the explosions at the Boston Marathon remind us of the many ways our optimism is tempered by violence and sorrow. Indeed, Shimerians live – and read – in a city that experiences violence each and every day, including all too many murders. This past weekend, for example, was a particularly violent one across our city. We are not immune.

So: I am writing all Shimerians, asking that we take a moment from the work that seems so important – from the writing (or reading) of senior theses or bureaucratic filling out of forms, from budgetary management to reading for class, from fund raising to working on administrative reports, to extend our community to those in Boston who we may know, and others who have experienced violence in their lives. (And, they are not only strangers as we, too, include amongst us people whose lives have been shaped in this way.) I ask that we remind ourselves that every day we have the opportunity to work against violence in our own city and in our own lives, and elsewhere. As we read together, let us not only ask how our experiences as Shimerians improve our individual lives – but how our experiences help us to make a less violent world. This, indeed, is an enduring question that calls us to live in renewed ways with renewed commitments.

In Nelson Mandela’s youth, when he was tried for the crimes that led him to spend a lifetime in prison, he argued for violence. By the time he emerged from that prison, he was a vigorous and respected proponent of nonviolence.  Regardless of our positions on the particularities of his arguments – or indeed of the representations of violence in the Iliad or other great works – we know that destructive violence is one of the enduring problems that we face together as a species. I urge us all to do what we can to support victims and survivors of violence – and to work together for a world where we do not sigh and look away, but act as one of our t-shirts calls us to act – for change.

Please take care. And please let us know of the safety and well-being of Shimerians who may have been at the Boston marathon. For, we too run, we too work in cities, and we too must change the world. 

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 who are trained in a particular way are advantaged in the job market (either always or today). When it comes to great books colleges, the issue is, perhaps, even more fraught. How can we show evidence that what we do is consequential in the particular way of ensuring employment after graduation? Whether one argues with this measure of success or not, this is important in an era of student debt -- and in today's economic situation.

On April 6, USA Today did a story on a related matter -- highlighting a Shimer alumnus. Here's what was said about our alumnus: 

"Jonathan Timm considers himself lucky. A 2011 college graduate, he landed a job not long ago that both pays the bills and makes use of his education.

"Basically, I got hired for my abilities to think and write analytically, cut through complex issues and communicate effectively — exactly the skills liberal arts education should teach,"says Timm, 24, of Oakland. An investigator for a state agency, Habeas Corpus Resource Center, he gathers evidence to help indigent inmates on death row get a new trial, off of death row or both.

COLUMN: Thinkers have value in today's job market

The job search took about a year, during which he also waited tables, took an unpaid internship and had periods of "doubt and regret." But if he had to do it over again, Timm says, he would again go to Shimer College, a liberal arts school in Chicago whose coursework is based on the Great Books."

Here's the site, and a shout out to Mary Beth Marklein, the relevant reporter. 

And yes, admissions is still open at Shimer College. 

 

Adam Smith Goes to College

As I sit in my office, on occasion, I think about what the "great books" have to say about education and its funding. Of course, this is in large measure because the matter of how we fund higher education -- and indeed, how Shimer funds its education -- or Shimer students do so -- is a matter of great concern. Both locally and nationally, and indeed internationally, the theme of afffordability is everywhere. Student debt crises -- and international debt crises -- abound. Like the horses of the apocalypse, the themes of access, accountability, and affordability are, perhaps, the shadows that put all else in relief. And all too often, affordability is the key.

Part of that conversation is about confusion about the relation of cost and value. Part of it is about the ways we provide financial aid. Part of it is about escalating costs of higher education associated (on the one hand) with the costs of employment benefits, debt management, and other real phenomena and (on the other hand) part of the rising cost has to do with the rise in amenities "demanded" by those looking for a college or university to attend. The fabled third hand, though, is the many ways we have shifted the financing of higher education from the public sphere (alongside a recognition if its public good) to private funding (whether the individual or private foundations). The percentage of college costs paid by state and local, not to mention federal, funds has declined in recent decades. Our tax dollars are not funding as high a percentage of higher education as they once did. It is complucated, true, but that is part of the story.

Even when affordability is not the topic for discussion, finances remain centrally important to every institution of higher education. As I have been told (and of course know): higher education is a business. Well, not quite in Shimer's case: it is a not-for-profit institutions and most businesses are not. The sentiment is right, though, insofar as it means we must balance our books (and in this case I do not mean balancing Aristotle with Derrida or ensuring all of us read the work of women authors). Keeping our eye always on hte educational mission AND finances is the challenge. 

And what does this have to do with great books? Here's one example. 

(thanks to this site for the picture! I love a good beret.) 

Adam Smith has not only gone to college but he has (like his friend Mr. Smith, played long ago by Jimmy Stewart) gone to Washington (and to many state capitals as well). Though born in 1723, and dead by 1790), his words seem oddly relevant today. All of the following quotations come from the copy of Adam Smith I acquired while teaching in Soc II at the University of Chicago many years ago. The underlining seems oddly apt. (The edition: from the U of C Press, edited and with an introduction by Edwin Cannan.) The sections -- Book V, Chapter 1, articles II and III.

"In every profession, the exertion of the greater part of those who exercise it, is always in proportion to the necessity they are under of making that exertion. . . The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers." (p. 283)

"Whatever forces a certain number of students to any college or university, independent of the merit or reputation of the teachers, tends more or less to diminish the necessity of that merit or reputation." (p. 285)

"The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the masters." (p. 287)

There is, of course, more, and these are, of course, taken out of context both in terms of the structure of the argument and the period of history (and thus the state of higher education). And yet, aspects of what Smith says seem quite relevant today. Or, at least there are echoes of these views out there about the relation of affordability to teaching to . . . . economics. Could this be in part because those who warrant the privatization of many goods in our social order have read Smith? 

(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 that their url is actually www.philosophersguild.com and thus the UN is missing.)

In their case, they bring these various features together by selling such things as  Nietzsche's Will to Power Bar, Schrodinger's Cat, and a Virginia Woolf finger puppet (not to mention many more). Each one makes you smile -- if you are in the know. 

Balancing the humor, the intellectual verve and the financial acumen is part of it. But they do one more thing: they fund projects that are oriented toward social justice. (well, they do two more things. They also have this blog.) 

What does all this have to do with Shimer? Several things.

First: I am so much a fan, that I sometimes think of our Ph.D. Philosopher who is an internet marketer as the evidence that Shimer is, in fact, the employed philosophers guild. I also think the blend of intellectual, financial, humor and more is not that different from what we strive for when we are at our best. We must not take ourselves too seriously, but we are serious. We know that employment is not everything though it is definitely important to us all. We care about being financially stable and we are enchanted by similar authors and artists as the Unemployed Philosophers are. We are, in fact, a likely market for each other, I often say, only half-jokingly. 

Second: above I used the phrase "if you're in the know." One way to get "in the know" regarding the products of the Unemployed Philosophers Guild is to get a "great books" education that exposes you to a vast array of the figures that the guild references. And, of course, it does more than "expose" you -- it allows you or requires you to think -- and for that, I think you definitely need a sense of humor. So does April Fool's Day. But there is not a single statement in this blog entry that is false. Trust me. 

Check them out. How many of them do you know?  Are they acquaintances or friends? Or? 

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 together, in dialogical mentorship relationships, on problems and possibilities associated with the possibility of an impending apocalypse. Interdisciplinary and imaginative solutions will be rewarded with a space in the bomb shelter or, should the team so choose, a lottery ticket.

Journeys and Stories is a new under graduate program that provides training in the development of mobile higher education. The Mount Carroll degree will focus on preservation and small towns. The Waukegan degree will focus on inspirations from Ray Bradbury. And, the Chicago initiative will be focused on the Red and Green Show, aka the red and green lines.

Pharmacopia and Farming is a mentorship program rooted in connecting our alumni with current students around experiential learning. ‘Nuf said.

Nacirema Aimedaca is focused on the development of obstruse (and long winded, usually non-evidentiary) argumentation skills.   Graduates are expected to enter leadership positions in politics, higher education, and unions. A special certificate is available in this degree program called Assemblages. Here, the skill involves meetings for the sake of meetings. A second certificate is in the works tentatively called homoynm-ology investigating such topics as the relation of

 

• liberal education, liberation, libertarianism and liberal politics
• conservation, conservative politics, and consommé
• deliberation, deliverance, and delicacay
• opportunistic, opportunity, and optional
• great, grate

 

To apply for admission to one of these programs, please click here – your email will immediately go to our admissions office – and we will immediately bill you for the smile.  Media inquiries should be accompanied by food.

 

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 I look, it is an issue. There seem to be two meanings to it these days: vocation as in calling and vocation (often adjectival) as a synonym for work related. In the latter meaning, the term is often set over against the non-vocational, setting up the usual false binaries between meaning and work, intellectual and economic, and etc. 

Griffin is taking up the other meaning in many ways (though to teach as a college professor implies both meanings perhaps, given the binary between teaching and research or scholarship). She takes up the gendering of these matters in various ways, including the ways teacher=female, scholar=male, for example. She also gave me one of my favorite quotations about the vocation of teaching, worth us all reflecting on -- especially given the ways Shimer focuses on teaching and learning, and perhaps even teaching as learning. Here are her words: 

    ...teaching is about passing on the tools for survival. (p. 73) 

Hmmm. I think this is about more than those tools we use to gain and use jobs, but they are also those (especially given the ongoing gendering of the labor market in the US and globally). And, of course, survival means more than that -- especially given the spate of news on violence, sexual assault and harassment, and related matters across the US, including on our campuses. Here are more of Griffin's words:

    Teachers have always been the voices for culture, passing on accumulated knowledge. Academe thus     amounts to oral history. If in thinking of oneself as a voice a teacher has in mind a sort of funnel or a        megaphone through which culture spreads to the little pitchers with big ears -- then one's task is     relatively simple. If, however, one sees oneself in a problematic ironic relation to that story as its         narrator; if one cannot tell the story without disrupting it -- then in that case, one's vocation is at     once more difficult, more dangerous, and much more interesting. (p. 181)

Survival and danger. Is that what it is all about? 

Griffin ends the chapter from which this last quotation comes from with these words: "A vocation: a song in many voices." Is that what a Shimer education is all about? 

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 -- and have read some of her other novels. And, I love her poetry. So, I am thrilled to say that Marge Piercy is going to be doing an event for Shimer in April (details below). 

Why Marge Piercy for a great books college in Chicago? Well, of course, it is not all about the fact that I love her work -- and so do some other Shimerians. There are other reasons. Here are a few:

1. We read the Declaration of Sentiments in some of our courses here at Shimer. This document is a fascinating use of a founding US document to move forward the argument for women's rights. Written in 1848, a year when the Communist Manifesto and much else was penned, the document begins as follows:

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Recognize its origins? The changes?

What does Piercy have to do with this? S0me of the characters of Sex Wars were among the key figures in the creation of this document -- and in the social movements associated with the document.  As historical fiction, the novel instances one way to take the past (including past texts) and make them alive and relevant today. 

2. Because Marge Piercy is a poet -- and she knows what phlogiston is. Try this poem, entitled "For the Young Who Want To" to see her use the term in a poem. The poem is worth a read for many other reasons, including its relevance to reflecting on the purpose and the impact of education. 

3. Because she is mathematically inclined. She knows that one plus one equals one. (Yes, she does. Try this poem.)

4. She knows the midwest, having been born in Michigan and ended her graduate work at Northwestern. Here's what she says on her website about Chicago as a part of her biography:

After that marriage, Piercy lived in Chicago, trying to learn to write the kind of poetry and fiction she imagined but could not yet produce. She supported herself at a variety of part-time jobs; she was a secretary, a switchboard operator, a clerk in a department store, an artists’ model, a poorly paid part-time faculty instructor. She was involved in the civil rights movement.

She remembers those years in Chicago as the hardest of her adult life. She felt she was invisible. As a woman, society defined her as a failure: a divorcee at twenty-three, poor, living on part-time work. As a writer, she was entirely invisible. She wrote novel after novel but could not get published. Piercy remarks that at that time she knew two things about her fiction: she wanted to write fiction with a political dimension (Simone de Beauvoir was her model) and she wanted to write about women she could recognize, working class people who were not as simple as they were supposed to be.

(Here I should note that this evidences, as do the comments further above, that she has been influenced by works read in the Shimer curriculum!)

For these and many other reasons, including my suspicion that her work itself is of enduring historical significance, she wil be joining the Shimer community -- and you, if you want -- in April. 

Marge Piercy is coming to Chicago (of course, she has been here before) and will be giving a talk for Shimer at the Standard Club on April 18. If you are interested in attending, click here to RSVP. 

A New Version of Shimertopia

In addition to having a presence on this blog and others, Shimer is now appearing on occassion in the Huffington Post. Any comments you can make there will help get us attention. Please spread the word about that, and about this blog. 


Meanwhile, there is one more place to one more place to stop when you are cruising the web -- or updating your knowledge about today's Shimer.

That is, a new blog called Chicago is Our Campus on Chicago Now, a group of Chicago area blogs created (as they say) by Chicagoans for Chicagoans. The site was created by the Chicago Tribune Media Group. 

Shimerprez is the "author" of Chicago is Our Campus -- which will look at higher education related matters in Chicago and Chicagoland. Click here if you want to check it out -- remember, it is just starting! And, it appears on ChicagoNow. 

 

From Adam Kotsko

(Thanks to this site for the funky visual.)

For a discussion of MOOCs and the great books, there is nothing like a Shimer faculty member for thoughtful commentary. If you click here, you can read Adam Kotsko's views. 

Before you do, though, if you do not know what MOOCs are, here is a bit of an update. The acronym stands for Massive Open Online Courses. And this despite the fact that they sound vaguely like mooing cows and they are almost the opposite of a sacred cow in higher education today. They are at the center of media -- and higher education -- debate about how to make higher education scaleable (read: open to huge numbers of people for as little money as possible), combining a sort of populism with a variety of forms of access to new forms of learning. The big examples right now are Coursera and EdX. For a video on what a MOOC is, click here. 

In many ways, MOOCs are part of the "free" movement -- and the open movement -- both of which focus on linking access to education to the use of technology to the notion that these social goods ought be made as widely available as possible. In some ways they are utterly new -- and in other ways, their path was cleared by earlier efforts at on-line education in both the not for profit and the profit arenas of higher education. Some think the predecessors are large lectures with teaching assistants leading discussions (click here for that view); others connect this to earlier experiments in on line education. (See in this regard, Taylor Walsh's Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses published by Princeton in 2011, well before the first MOOC. For an interview with Walsh, click here. And no, it is not the same Taylor Walsh as the character in a not very high end television show.) And, of course, on line courses are not -- and never were -- the original form of distance or dispersed education.

For readers who are not Shimerians, perhaps, the notion of Great Books may need some clarification as well. Yes, the phrase has a specific meaning (linked to such names as Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins and to institutions like Columbia University, University of Chicago and Shimer), which links to a historical movement to identify and render accessible through the high tech of the era (a multi-volume encyclopedia) works of enduring historical significance. The movement was thus populist in some ways and linked to elite universities and colleges in others. 

So: today, MOOCs and great books? Great MOOCs? Here we are at the cusp of what some see as the changing nature of higher education. Read Adam's views -- and share your own please.