Top 10 Smallest Colleges
I never heard of this college here, have you? Where is it?
#2 Shimer College – 81 Students
#2 Shimer College – 81 Students
Calling itself the “Great Books College of Chicago,” Shimer College is definitely set out to attract certain students in the world. The college has been around for 157 years, founded by Frances Wood Shimer and Cinderella Gregory.
Shimer is a liberal arts college and only offers three majors: natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The college focuses a lot of attention on “The Great Books” which include titles such as The Bible, The Iliad, Agamemnon, Oedipus Rex, Paradise Lost, Spirit of Laws, and plenty of others. Despite its narrow focus of study, Shimer College also claims its goal is to create well-rounded students, all 81 of them.
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Thanks for the mention. Two quick points of interest, though--the first obscure and the second noteworthy…
1) Ms. Gregory actually spelled her name "Cindarella" as opposed to the more usual spelling. I know, I know, our lounge is spelled the regular way, and I think our promotional materials do the same. But it's actually Cindarella. If you ever see a Shimer student spell it with that first "a", that person is not illiterate; they're hewing to Ms. Gregory's own eccentric spelling.
2) "Great Books" is not actually capitalized for our curriculum. Again, it appears different ways in different materials according to the era in which they were circulated. But "Great Books" denotes a specific bound set of volumes Hutchins and Adler promoted last century. Lowercase "great books" is the actual Hutchins curriculum, which is more accurately a method of selecting books of note, including contemporary ones, and examining them through Socratic discussion. So we offer a full range of coursework from antiquity to the present day: from Aristotle and Plato to Marcuse, Sontag and Freire, arranged in a sort of "survey" format and analyzed through "maieutic" instruction. So you won't be missing out here. =]
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