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Shimer College (pronounced ) is an American Great Books college in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1853 as the Mt. Carroll Seminary in Mount Carroll, Illinois, the school became affiliated with the University of Chicago and was renamed the Frances Shimer Academy in 1896. It was renamed Shimer College in 1950, when it began offering a four-year curriculum based on the Hutchins Plan of the University of Chicago. Although the University of Chicago parted with Shimer (and the Hutchins' Plan) in 1958, Shimer has continued to use a version of that curriculum. The college left Mount Carroll for Waukegan in 1978, moving to Chicago in 2006. Its academic program is based on a core curriculum of sixteen required courses in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. All courses are small seminars with no more than twelve students, and are based on original sources from a list of about 200 core texts broadly based on the Great Books canon. Classroom instruction is Socratic discussion. Considerable writing is required, including two comprehensive examinations and a senior thesis. Students are admitted primarily on the basis of essays and interviews; no minimum grades or test scores are required. Shimer has one of the highest alumni doctorate rates in the country.〔〔 The college occupies a complex designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago's Near South Side. The American Institute of Architects has called the IIT campus one of the 200 most significant works of architecture in the United States, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Shimer is governed internally by an assembly in which all community members have a vote. According to ''The New York Times'', students "share a love of books () a disdain for the conventional style of education. Many say they did not have a good high school experience".〔 Students, who tend to be individualistic and creative thinkers, are encouraged to ask questions. Shimer has historically averaged 125 students, and enrolled 97 in 2014.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 publisher = Shimer College )〕 Most Shimer alumni go on to graduate studies. == History == (詳細はFrances Wood and Cindarella Gregory, two schoolteachers from Ballston Spa, New York, to come and teach. On May 11, 1853, the new seminary opened in a local church with eleven students. Unable to raise sufficient funds locally, the seminary's founders borrowed money to construct a building in 1854. They were discouraged by the school's finances and sold it to Wood and Gregory, who borrowed money for the purchase.〔 In 1857 Wood married Henry Shimer, a mason who was a creditor of the seminary. In 1864, the overcrowded school began accepting female students only. To ensure the seminary's long-term survival, in 1896 Frances Shimer reached an agreement with the University of Chicago in which the school became the Frances Shimer Academy of the University of Chicago and was loosely affiliated with the Baptist Church.〔 She retired to Florida, never returning to the school, and died in 1901. University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper was the first to champion junior colleges in the United States, and in 1907 Shimer became one of the first schools to offer a junior-college program. The two-year junior-college program, operating with the original preparatory program, was accredited in 1920. The college had a precipitous decline in enrollment and financial stability during and after the Great Depression, weathering the storm under five successive presidents. Its survival was due in part to the reorganization of the six-year preparatory program into a four-year junior college program and in part to steep salary reductions. In 1943, Shimer president Albin C. Bro invited the Department of Education at the University of Chicago to evaluate the college community; its 77 recommendations became the basis for Shimer's transformation from a conservative finishing school to a nontraditional, co-educational four-year college. The school was renamed Shimer College in 1950, adopting the great-books curriculum then in place at the University of Chicago.〔 The university connection dissolved in 1958 after the latter's decision to abandon the great-books plan, and Shimer narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 1957. The great-books program at Shimer continued, and the school enjoyed national recognition and a rapid growth in enrollment during the 1960s. In 1963, a ''Harvard Educational Review'' article listed Shimer as one of 11 colleges with an "ideal intellectual climate". According to a 1966 article in the education journal ''Phi Delta Kappan'', Shimer "present() impressive statistical evidence that their students are better prepared for graduate work in the arts and sciences and in the professions than those who have specialized in particular areas".〔 During the late 1960s Shimer experienced a period of internal unrest known as the Grotesque Internecine Struggle, with disputes over curriculum changes, the extent to which student behavior should be regulated and inadequate fundraising by president Francis Joseph Mullin. Half the faculty and a large portion of the student body left as a result. Its financial problems worsened, and the school's survival was uncertain. Although Shimer's trustees voted to close the college at the end of 1973, the school was saved by intense student and faculty fundraising. Its trustees voted three times in the next four years to close the school, only to reverse themselves each time.〔 In the school's 1977 bankruptcy filing the trustees, in the words of board chair Barry Carroll, "put responsibility for the school's continuing on the shoulders of a very dedicated faculty of 12 and students who volunteered". During the 1978 Christmas break, the faculty and 62 students borrowed trucks and moved the college into two "run-down" homes in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. Shimer emerged from bankruptcy in 1980. During the next 25 years, the college purchased 12 surrounding homes to form a makeshift campus and slowly progressed towards financial stability. By 1988 its enrollment had grown from a low of 40 to 114, and income exceeded expenses. In 1991, Shimer received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities with the help of NEH chair and core-curriculum advocate Lynne Cheney; the grant revitalized the school's fundraising, helping it raise $2 million.〔 In 2006, struggling with a stagnant enrollment, Shimer again moved to the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Although the institutions operate independently, they cooperate closely under a long-term agreement.〔 Shimer received national attention in 2009, when it was embroiled in "a battle over what some saw as a right-wing attempt to take over its board and administration". In February 2012 the college announced the appointment of Susan Henking, former professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, as Shimer's 14th president; Henking is the first woman to head the school since Frances Shimer.〔 In September 2014 Shimer again received media attention when Ben Miller of ''Washington Monthly'' ranked it as one of the worst colleges in America, according to a formula adjusting graduation rates to the percentage of minority and low-income students and factoring net expense to low-income students.〔 In December 2014 Jon Ronson of ''The Guardian'' disputed Miller's claim, citing Miller's assertion that the ranking was "at least partly due to small sample sizes". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shimer College」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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