Reply #36: all the more reason to get involved

[Shimerco97]

She's right. but the right then and now are different animals. they're still nuts, but they're way better organized. Technically the school never went bankrupt, but oh, so close. If you remember the blizzard of '79, that's the winter (and during the storm) that they moved.
The right wingers actually tried to close the school. that is when the school, without a Board of Trustees, decided to create the Assembly, because legally they needed a governing structure which ought to have been a board.
We are trying to prevent a repeat of that near death experience, the school has been through worse but at such incredible cost. The Assembly is our safe guard. It ensures that the College remains both academically and intellectually free from the whims of donors and loonies. In the 80s, just after the move, the professors, many of them are still on the faculty, chose to simply live on the leavings of tuition, after operating costs were met. This was desperately little money, especially since the student body was absurdly small (maybe 2 dozen in a good year, and I don't mean an entering or graduating class, I mean total student body. I graduated in '97 in one of the largest graduating classes in maybe 20 or 30 years. there were 12 of us).
One of the problems that all small institutions must deal with is the threat of personalities and selfishness. Shimer has done amazingly well in this regard, but we are tiny. The only defense we have is our vigilance.
In the end, i don't believe they right wingers left in disgust. i think they left in confusion. If we had had such a reputation, perhaps they wouldn't have come back. On the other hand, well, perhaps they're just stupid and don't know what they're getting into. Either way, the only way Shimer survives this is by standing together.