blog.shimer

Introducing Jill and Abby's Video Blog

After a long week as Orientation leaders, Abby and Jill may be exhausted, they may be losing their voices from the inevitable beginning-of-semester Shimer cold, but they still make their student video blog debut with great panache. They'll be bringing their perspective as third year Shimer students to the student video blog this year.

Announcing Shimer Student Video Blogs

Shimerians love to read--but also to converse.  To give you a different sort of sense of Shimer College's student voices, look for new video entries to the Shimer blog, here intermixed with our written entries and on our YouTube Channel. 

Michael Doherty, who will be our designated Second Year (Sophomore) video blogger, introduces the project in the very first entry, here:

Breaking the Cycle of Homelessness for Women in Chicago

I, like Erik, haven't been involved with the blog or admission so I'll follow his lead. I'm from Tacoma, WA. I transferred from community college to Shimer in 2008, so the next academic year will be my last, which means thesis, Integrative Studies 5 and 6, and grad school (or employment) planning. It means actually, in REALITY, reaching this previously mythical point where I think I might, maybe, perhaps know what I want to do with my life. Sort of. Or, to put it more accurately, I understand more completely that I want to do more than is possible with my life. BUT... it's the "doing" that I'm trying to get at. Reading has changed my life, Shimer has changed my life, discussions have changed my life, and mind. I see no validity in the claim that theory is useless, that sitting around flapping our jaws is a waste of time, time that could be used to DO SOMETHING! I think what's important is praxis. A combination of insight, theory, discussion, a cohesive understanding of society and ideas, and the real attempt to change things, to participate. So. That's why I'm here, at Deborah's Place, working all summer as a case manager in the basement Learning Center.

It's a difficult organization to explain in brief, but in an attempt I usually quote the first sentence of the mission statement: "Breaking the cycle of homelessness for women in Chicago." We have 3 permanent housing buildings around the city (one of which is part of the site at which I work), 1 interim housing program, 1 Safe Haven for women with severe mental disabilities (both of these are also at my site), and 2 learning centers. The most remarkable thing about this organization, besides its aim to help chronically homeless women specifically, is its method and philosophy. We use the harm reduction method, as well as motivational interviewing, and encourage communication without judgment. Particularly at the Learning Center, which provides resources for off-site women (my clients) and women who live at other Deborah's Place programs, we emphasize to every woman that she will always be welcome.

There seem to be 2 parts to my job: the case management half, and the Learning Center interaction and participation half.

One woman is deaf and knits the same perfect scarf over and over, each time in a different color yarn. She watches me frequently, and smiles when I look up. Another is from Haiti, has a joyful giggle, and tells me regularly "I just don't understand why people have to argue and be so unkind to each other!" Another woman could play Gin Rummy all day. She asks me for a game as soon as I walk in the door. And another, who we haven't seen in about a week now (after daily visits since I started) said to me a few weeks ago, after explaining that it shouldn't be anyone else's business what a person's sexual orientation is, "It's sad to be living in such an uptight world."

These women are beautiful. They are hilarious. They hurt. They are skeptical. Maybe she likes pumpkin pie, or velour, or reading the horoscope of whoever's in the room and will listen. Maybe she just got a promotion at her job. Maybe she has been homeless off and on for 12 years, and is losing her hearing. Maybe she needs to talk for an hour about why her daughter won't answer her phone call.

I am learning things tutorials can't teach me. I am developing a real understanding of classism, racism and sexism that books can put in words but fail to let me feel.

Though I haven't been here long, I realize already that this internship will play an indispensable role in my future, whether that be in social work, local or global activism, or in academia. I would not have been able financially to take this internship if it weren't for the Kemper grant, so I'm very thankful for that also. I'll write more about what I'm doing here as the summer progresses.

Psychosis in the Capital

    Although I've been at Shimer for two full years now, I've yet to blog or become an overwhelmingly active presence in the landscape of the admission office, so I figure that an introduction is probably in order.

 

    My name is Erik Boneff, and I'm going to be a third-year student in the fall. I hail from the suburbs of Detroit (which may or may not be as bad as Detroit itself), but after this last stint at home, I've grown almost entirely convinced that the city is the place for me. I'm interested in all areas of the Shimer curriculum (as are most of us), but I'm particularly passionate about psychology and philosophy, especially the grey area that exists between the two. I'm fairly certain that this isn't a coincidence, as both of my parents are practicing psychoanalysts who also do a fair amount of teaching and writing. On that note, I should probably talk a little about what I'm doing this summer, and thus why I'm posting on this blog in the first place. 

    Thanks to the logistical support of the Shimer Internship/Mentorship Program and the financial assistance of the JS Kemper Foundation, I'm spending this summer in Washington, D.C., assisting a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, Dr. Wilfried Ver Eecke, with a variety of research duties, both academic and otherwise. As I mentioned above, I'm very interested in both philosophy and psychology and I'm thus very thankful to be working with Dr. Ver Eecke, as he holds dual appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychology. For the most part, Dr. Ver Eecke is interested in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and has written an enormous amount on the application of psychoanalytic therapy to schizophrenic and psychotic patients. In addition, he has been involved in several efforts to challenge the dominant biomedical stance towards psychopathology, and has thus spent a significant amount of time lobbying for different professional and medical organizations. I hope that working with him this summer will help me to both refine my interests as graduate school draws ever nearer and also to understand the different paths down which advanced study can lead. I had my first day today, and I'm already doing secondary literature searches on the work of Jacques Lacan and medical research on different treatment outcomes for schizophrenia and psychosis. In other words, I'm excited beyond belief. 

    The District (as I'm told the locals call it) itself, is of course, no slouch either. I'm living in a one bedroom apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Dupont Circle, and I can't step outside without being bombarded by sidewalk cafes, independent bookstores, and foreign cinemas. I'm reminded of the streets of Paris as I wander through the wide and airy streets, looking for a coffee shop to post up in and escape the heat, which can be ridiculously oppressive. Despite the overwhelming heat, however, I'm already having an amazing time, and I'll be sure to post a couple more times throughout the summer, hopefully with some actual pictures of my surroundings next time.

Balancing Act

     As this is my first post, I will make a short introduction. My name is Alexandra Rosenberg, I'm open to cool nicknames, but most people call me Alex. Originally from South Florida, I now plan on forever calling Chicago my home. I'm in love, madly, with this small world around me.
      Of course, being a Shimer student, the question I get asked the most is "why Shimer?". Next on the list is "why are you so pale if you're from Florida?" but I usually just ignore that one. So, why Shimer? My story is a little different from others. I went through high school certain to one day be a journalist. I was Editor-in-Chief of my high school newspaper and of the literary magazine. I was published in city and county papers and online. My heart was set on NYU and I had never heard of Shimer.
     Then monetary complications arose and NYU was no longer an option. I was heartbroken. It was surely the end of everything, I'd have to go to a community college and live at home. This went on until I got something in the mail from Shimer. An advertisement and it spoke to me in ways even NYU hadn't. I knew that this had been the real plan all along, that my drive for NYU had been a stepping stone to get to Chicago.
      After last semester, I knew this was the right choice. I knew I could thrive in no other place than at Shimer. I still plan on being a Book Editor one day, I'm just going to use a very different path to get there. I spent my Winter Break speaking at middle schools in my county about journalism, but I slipped in a little about the Great Books program as well. I'd say things like, "journalism helps you understand and appreciate the world around you, much in the way reading original texts at Shimer is helping me now" (see? I'm sneaky, like a ninja).
     Coming back to the Windy City from Florida (which is also very windy) after break, it took a few days to transition back into Shimer mode. I had spent my break seeing friends and family, reading quite a bit, playing video games and swimming. Now I have to remember to bundle up before going outside (winter in SFL is a week or two long and rarely gets below 40) and to get my reading for class done before anything else.
     I like the reading for my classes, honestly, I do. Even when they're not the most enjoyable things I've ever read I realize I can still get something out of them. However, I really like other things too. Things that take up way too much of my time sometimes. Things like video games.
     Now, I wouldn't say I'm an addict (my roommate and friends back home may disagree) but I do enjoy several hours of sitting in front of my television screen and exercising my thumbs. I play Wii, as many students here do, but Nintendo is no longer where my loyalty lies. I am an XBox lover, through and through.
     I spill blood in Call of Duty, pull pranks in Bully, crank out the music in Guitar Hero, devote days to Oblivion, and now I've become a zombie for Mass Effect 2. I love video games, and I see nothing wrong with that love--it's a healthy, happy compulsion of mine. Mostly.
     I even did last semester's Writing Week project on video games. I wrote a twenty-page paper on their history and ethics. The point is, I came to Shimer to do what I love, read. But I love other things too, and that's alright. The reading takes up a lot of my time, but budgeting my time and being responsible leaves me plenty of time to give into my video game cravings too. It's all about finding the balance.

From our own correspondent

This being my first blog post, introductions are in order. I happen to be one of the human race’s more fortunate members: I’m on the faculty at Shimer College. I read and discuss “the best that has been thought and said” for work. Go figure. (I also happen to be Shimer’s current Dean of Students, but I’ll leave that for another post.) 

Most of the time, I ply my trade here in Chicago with the folks you already know - Brigid, Kieran, Sara et al and their colleagues in class. But now and then I get to take the show on the road. Last year I was the Director of Shimer’s program in Oxford (and just signed on for another stint there next year; life’s good. Here, by the way, is a link to the blog we did during our stay there last year.). But I write to you today to relate my recent jaunt up and down the coast of California with Cheryl Park, one of our Admission counselors. 

Some of you have already talked or written with Cheryl, I’m guessing. If you have you know how smart and nice she is in her unassuming way (and if you haven’t yet, tell her I sent you). I’ve known that since I met her, but what I didn’t know is that she’s a filmmaker. I found that out as we shot the breeze driving up and down the left coast between engagements to spread the word about Shimer. She makes documentaries mostly (or, that’s what I’ve been able to get out of her about herself so far), but she’s also an expert on experimental film. And she is the first person ever to get me to do karaoke. In short, the talent is deep here. 

Cheryl’s been out in Cali for going on three weeks now. I’ve been out twice myself during her tour, once a couple weeks ago to the LA area and Santa Barbara, and then just this last weekend to Monterey. On the first trip, I got to dine at the Jonathan Club on the beachfront in Santa Monica with Andrea and Rhos Dyke, the parents of Lance, who graduated last year (and, among other things, fenced for the University of Oxford and studied Lute last year on the program abroad). With us on that evening was Ruth Grubb, a College Counselor at Pacific Palisades High School. We talked a lot about the woes Californians are having with their state school system with the recent budget cuts. And we talked about more ways to get the word out about Shimer.

The next day, Cheryl and I went up the coast to Santa Barbara City College, a two-year college that sends many of its graduates on to four-year programs (most of them into the California State University and University of California system). Our host there was Professor Celeste Barber of the College’s English Department. Celeste helped design and now teaches in the SBCC Great Books program, and hosted a reception with students from the school interested in possibly attending Shimer. We went to lunch down in the harbor district with a student and Manoutchehr M. Eskandari-Qajar, a historian of Persia and political scientist who leads the Middle Eastern Studies club at SBCC. It was a filling and stimulating lunch. 

To finish off the weekend, Cheryl and I had a series of meetings with individual students around the area who had expressed interest in Shimer. That’s the thing about our Admission department - they give as personalized treatment as one gets all the way through the program at Shimer, where I know every student by name (and in most cases more than that). All told, Cheryl seemed to think the trip had gone well, and I had to agree.

Two weeks later - that is, just this past weekend - I went back out and met Cheryl up in the Bay area. This time, we were off to Monterey Peninsula College. We were joined on the visit by Ken Knabb, an alumnus of Shimer in 1964, back when the school was in Mount Carroll, Illinois. (If you’re not up on that history, it’s what I’d call a long story, but a good one. You can find more about the school’s storied past here.) 

Ken is a fascinating person. He came to Shimer in 1961 from the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, matriculating when he was just 16, an early entrant of the kind that Shimer’s welcomed since it adopted the Hutchins Program from the University of Chicago. When he graduated (in 3 years!) he moved out to Berkeley and has lived there since, in the same small cottage, lined floor to ceiling with his books. Ken’s a student of anarchism and especially the Situationists, whose writings he has translated and published, including here on his website. I’ve had the occasion to use his Situationist Anthology in a class and can tell you it’s an invaluable addition to any library of political thought. 

Cheryl, Ken and I made it to Monterey by about 12:30 last Friday and set up shop in a conference room in the Humanities building dedicated to Monterey Peninsula College’s Great Books Club. Our host in Monterey was Professor David Clemens, who is the Coordinator of the school’s Great Books program, with a significant interest in how technology interfaces with education. We also met a few other faculty in the Great Books Program, and two students, Joshua Converse and Jaclyn Carpenter. 

We had a great chat about the whole “great books idea,” which is the title of David’s introductory course to a curriculum of great books courses that Monterey Peninsula College hosts not only in its classrooms but also online. Beyond the ins and outs of doing great books education on the internet, our conversation ranged from the structure of Shimer classes and the curriculum to changes in American writing for the stage and beyond that to the evolving character of American heroic figures (from cowboys to private detectives to spacemen, e.g.). And we ate cookies. All in all, for a literate crowd, it was a total blast. 

More later, and very nice to meet you.

You can read more about Stuart on Shimer's Website.

Shimer sample

Faculty member Albert Fernandez joins us in this entry:

    Most of what is said in Shimer classes is, of course, said live and for the most part lost to posterity.  It's not easy to have an idea of what Shimer discussion is like unless you enroll or visit a class. But we also have cyber-exchanges, mostly by e-mail.  As a sample, below is such an exchange between one of my students, David Brault, in an upper-level course called Philosophy and Theology ("Hum 3"), and myself.

    The immediate context is class discussion of concepts that are sometimes claimed by philosophers or religious thinkers to be innate and to refer to transcendent realities--the concepts of God and of the Good are prime examples.  The more modern idea, mostly attributed to John Locke but originally articulated by Plato, is that all ideas are derived from experience and culture.

David writes:

Check this out: these two sites trace the history of the word "good" back to its original status as a word describing something actually physical, and then applied metaphorically to get the moral senses of the word.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080626165353/www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE155.html

 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=good&searchmode=none

"THE GOOD" is actually a metaphor related to the idea of being physically complete, taken over to mean complete in other senses too--

The prehistory of the word God has little relevance to the idea of a cosmic god:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=god&searchmode=none

The prehistory of the word "justice," just to round things off:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080701024909/www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE601.html

What is just is what is.... lawful. What is lawful is what... your culture's laws are. How would this all be explained form-wise [in terms of Platonic form]?  If you believe in Forms wouldn't there be an understanding of what these concepts are from the dawn of time, as they would not be metaphorically constructed concepts?

David  Brault

And my response:

    In answer to the question at the end of your message, I am channeling Plato, who says through me that, yes, the form of justice was present in human minds before there was any law, and indeed made it possible to conceive of law, even if that happened long before anybody had a concept of justice. Justice is a form older than the concept of justice or the concept of law, and is indeed the condition of possibility for thoughts of either law or justice.

  Thank you, Plato.  Speaking from a more modern perspective, what linguists call “language acquisition capability” is the condition of possibility for words or thoughts in English, French, etc. 

An Introduction of Sorts

Greetings and salutations, hopefully gentle readers.  My name is Hillary Woods.  I am a fourth-year student.

I love this school.  I have ever since my sister’s boyfriend told me of it.  They are not together anymore, but I am still at Shimer.  I suppose I could create some sort of fun analogy from this, but I will save that for another evening’s ruminations. 

As I said above, I love this place.  I feel a far greater attachment to this school than I ever did high school.  I suppose, to a certain extent, that has to do with the fact that I am at Shimer by choice, and no one ever seemed to care whether I wanted to be in high school.  I find myself feeling a much larger range of emotions over my pending graduation from Shimer than I ever did high school.  There, I was eager to be done and there was nothing else to it.  While I am also eager to be done with my undergraduate studies, I am not as enthusiastic to end my stay at Shimer.

The school has been a major part of my life for the past few years.  I have had the Shimer experience and all that entails take over my life (and I have been happy to allow it to) during semesters and I have worked here over every break.  There have been very few periods of my life for the past four years that have not involved Shimer in some way. 

I will miss the atmosphere.  I will miss having a community of people with whom I can have, at almost any moment, an interesting and intellectually stimulating conversation.  I will miss being able to refer freely to a large variety of works, knowing that they have also read them.  I will miss seeing the faculty and staff as well as having the benefit of their wisdom just an office visit away.  I realize, as Kant tells us in What is Enlightenment?, that all periods of tutelage must come to an end or we risk mental stagnation.  How can we expect to grow if we are always looking to someone else to further our process of enlightenment?  We can, and must, learn to provide direction for ourselves outside of college.  I suppose the additional challenge for someone that comes from a community so focused on understanding is finding a group of people outside of school with whom we can work in furthering our intellectual pursuits.  I hope that the friends I have made here will help with the process.

I will spend the next year cutting the apron strings that tie me to Shimer.  I will prepare myself for the test that waits for me after May.  I expect this year to be fun, frustrating and yet quite rewarding.  Perhaps I will be able to entertain some of you along the way.

*snip* *snip*

Cue the Supertramp Record

Hi.  I'm Kieran.

Like many, I came to Shimer through a circuitous, non-traditional route. After High School, I spent a few years finding myself, then a few years out in the “real world” (which I can’t wholly recommend). In that time I took classes at Harold Washington College, part of Chicago’s city college system. I took whatever classes caught my fancy and fit my schedule, while listlessly working towards some vague goal of a degree.  It was through Harold Washington that I was introduced to Shimer; last spring six students from HWC’s burgeoning Great Books program took a single course at Shimer. Any of you who’ve spent time at both types of institutions can imagine a bit of culture shock. I don’t mean that statement to disparage HWC in any way. I expect some of my classes there will remain fond memories of the life-long variety, and I must admit that Professor Richardson’s Existential Lit class formed the entire basis of my Shimer admissions essays. But learning at HWC often proceeds somewhat a posteriori. Of course Aristotle will tell you that all learning and teaching must proceed this way, though I suspect Aristotle’s predilection for analyzing posteriors was perhaps not entirely decent. Regardless, we usually knew where we were going, so figuring out how to get there wasn’t much of an issue.

So to suddenly find myself sitting around a an octagonal table with 12 other people, all actively breaking apart and digesting the profoundly obtuse phrases of the pre-Socratics, was a little frightening. Yet even more unsettling was the realization that we weren’t necessarily working towards any concrete, final answers. Certainly we were gleaning a better understanding, and in that understanding finding some answers. But those answers inevitably asked more questions than they resolved: you know that feeling of lingering anticipation you get when a musician leaves off at a 7^th interval? This sense of incompletion was further compounded by Harold Stone’s impeccable knack for asking simple questions that thoroughly rattled any perch we might try to cling to. So then, how could we climb a peak with no summit? To be so confronted with a seemingly infinite distance between myself and that mythical land of universal answers and platonic forms and rainbows and unicorns was beyond frightening. How many times in life do we use a grand totality, a sweeping absolute, to put off the dread that life’s terrible uncertainty fills us with? The experience brought to mind Socrates; not Socrates the guide who gently leads us to a better life through examination, but Socrates the smug jerk lurking around the corner, ready to confound our most firmly held beliefs.

Flashing forward half a year to my first class as an official full-time Shimer student, we are discussing none other than Socrates’ dialogue with Euthyphro. And we’ve just raised the question of the pragmatism of the Socratic method; as my classmate Ben succinctly put it, “Why hit the forms?” Will we really live a better life through constant self-examination, or will we just descend into endless navel-gazing, lost in Daedalus’ labyrinth? At some point, someone’s just gonna have to take out the trash because it stinks, without first finding the true nature of either stinkness or trashiness. It doesn’t seem that we can live in a world without absolutes, and yet it doesn’t seem that we can ever reach those absolutes.

Then the words of Socrates came blaring into my thoughts (oddly, in my mind Socrates’ voice sounds just like Steve Buscemi’s): “I prefer nothing, unless it is true.” If we read these words without the smarminess usually assigned to the man, there is something insightful in them.  If we consider truth as a tantalizing object, always just out of reach, these words compel us always forward towards that truth, even knowing we might never find it absolutely. It’s not the ends that matter here, as there’s a certain periodicity to it; when you get to the bottom of something you find yourself back at the top (hmmm, someone should write a song…). Suddenly what was terribly frightening before became terribly comforting; what before seemed the height of futility now appeared infinitely purposeful. We climb the mountain not to find the summit, but to make the ascent.  It now felt a little clearer why it is so important that we each make the ascent ourselves. What was it that Goethe said? “Let everyone sweep in front of his own house…” I can’t vouch that this will make the whole world clean, but at the least it is a first down payment on the debt of our humanity.

Hi, My Name is [THOMAS]

Hi there. I'm Thomas. It's nice to meet you.

A little bit about myself: I am from Iowa. I like to write and act and play music and make movies. There are other things I like to do too, but I think those characteristics are enough for you to get a sort-of-kind-of idea of me.

I should probably mention that this is not my first year of doing the college thing; I'm actually a transfer student from a much larger institution in the city. During my time there I met some great people who I'm still friends with to this day, but it didn't take me long there to realize that it wasn't the place for me. Though a "traditional" college education in a large institution is an a-okay way to go for many, it just didn't bode well with me. It seemed to me that many students at said first institution were interested solely in getting out of there with a degree rather than actually learning stuff. Though one could say that how a person handles their college experience is their own business, whether you like it or not your show-up-without-doing-the-work-and-hope-for-a-C-at-least students quite often have an impact on everyone else's educational experience. As Heraclitus says, "Even sleepers and workers are collaborators in what goes on in the universe."

And here's the thing about Shimer that I've discovered in just a few days: you can't sleep your way through this place. By that I mean two things: one, that for any mere mortal it's impossible to put in a minimal amount of effort and still make it out of here alive. And two: it's too darn interesting here. The people and the discussions that have ensued are way too interesting for me to fall into any sort of sleepwalking state. I realize that sounds kind of hyperbolic, but it's completely true - not to mention that in the busyness that is the first couple of weeks here at Shimer, I've been a wee bit on the sleep deprived side. But hey, that'll change once I get a more concrete schedule in place.

So anyway I suppose I'll be posting here about my experiences regarding what goes in and around this place. But in the meantime it's nice to meet you.