Shimer College

Shimer College is a small school. Very Small. We fit on the campus of another college. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Shimer shares a campus with the Illinois Institute of Technology, renowned for the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, and the McCormick Tribune Campus Center designed by Rem Koolhaas. If those names don’t mean anything to you now, they will. Chicago is a city that celebrates architecture.

At Shimer, you won’t touch a textbook. Our curriculum is built entirely on primary sources, both classics like Aristotle and masters in thinking about modern and contemporary culture. You take a sequence of courses in the classic disciplines (Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences) and electives like Films of Stanley Kubrick, Feminist Theories, and Abnormal Psychology.

There are no lectures, only student-driven dialogue in small classes. Dialogue is not just a conversation or even a debate, but a productive exchange of ideas. In our courses, students and professors explore a text in depth, asking questions, offering interpretations, disagreeing with each other. This kind of dialogue-based education enables you to discern new ideas and expand your thinking.

If you want to learn to better say what you think, and if you’re curious and interested in ideas, a liberal arts education at Shimer might be just the thing for you. Here, we’ll teach you not what to think, but how to think.