Are you going back to the wars?"
"Not a war . . . a family dispute." So said Carson Holloway, a board member at Shimer College, responding to a student's half-joking remark. At this unique college, which calls itself "the 'Great Books' school of Chicago," a struggle over academic authority has been raging recently, rife with 1960s-style undertones. The school's embattled president, Tom Lindsay, is facing ideological opposition from faculty and students. Yet he thinks that the resolution of tensions at Shimer could serve as a "bellwether" for colleges nationwide, where for the past 50 years political agendas have too often contaminated the quality of a liberal-arts education.
Everyone at Shimer believes in a great-books education, through which students study the profound questions of Western thought and civilization. The "family dispute" is over how to govern this great-books school. Should a community of scholars call the shots, as it has done over the past 30 years? Or should the school be run by a chief executive, as the college's president thinks? Is Shimer a Greek-style polis, as many Shimerians believe? Or does it need to function more like a corporation, as the president contends?
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