By now it was the mid-1960s and there were changes afoot across the nation, including in the somewhat isolated berg of Mount Carroll. Shimer's Dean of Students Albert Bades Fernandez reflected, in a June 2000 presentation at the University of Chicago, that with very few people noticing, Shimer was getting into financial trouble. "The late 60's and the 70's was a period during which quite a few small private U.S. colleges shut down. In the case of Shimer, as I gather from both written records and folk memory, there were many causes for the financial crisis. For one thing, the railway that served Mt. Carroll, which has always been a small town in the sticks, stopped running. The glory of the College in the sixties led to financial hubris. The school did not downsize its budget after enrollment went down. Attempted fiscal cures only made the disease worse. A lethal rift opened up between the administration and the Dean, a conflict known to Shimer oral history as 'The Great Internecine Conflict,' a.k.a., 'The Grotesque Internecine Conflict.'"
Bellairs no doubt thought Shimer idyllic, a step up from the stogy, strict life no doubt found in the Catholic women's college in Winona. "Shimer was full of smart, neurotic kids and with a lovely Georgian campus in a bucolic town with a railway link to Chicago," Pat Thomas says. "I think John loved it in many ways and many of us were brokenhearted by the disintegration of the place over the course of an academic year."
"The intellectual life was intense and exciting, and for those of us who accepted the Shimer philosophy, it was a secure refuge from the foibles of the outside world - including the academic world at large," Alan Dowty says. Dowty was a 1959 graduate of Shimer and was invited, along with his wife Nancy, to the campus as visiting professors for the 1966-67 school year. "It was a possibility that we might stay on if things worked out. Both of us were Shimer graduates had gone on to the University of Chicago, and in 1963 to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but the return to Shimer was in some ways a homecoming. Perhaps under ordinary circumstances John and others, myself included, would have found a long-term home at Shimer; in many ways it was Plato's academy in a rural setting. But it was not to be, because that year at Shimer was one of crisis, and in fact a turning point that set in motion the decline that led to bankruptcy and the loss of the Mt. Carroll campus."
| In Mountus Carollium collegium absurdium est qui (motto) Non minestrere sed pecunia est qui nomina Shimera est Shimera delenda est... |
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lyrics to a
campus song
popular the 1966-67 school year
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What brought matters to a head, explains Dowty, was a letter that former Dean of Faculty David Weiser wrote fairly early in the 1966-67 academic year. Some of the veteran faculty, in fact many of those who comprised the vital core of what made Shimer work, began suggesting that it was time to begin a search for a new president - in short, a campaign for the resignation of Shimer's President, F. Joseph Mullin. Their feelings, based on a long history, was that "his leadership had become increasingly autocratic and was beginning to erode the foundations of the college's excellence; in particular, a number of outstanding teachers had left or been forced out in recent years."
Mullin, who became president in 1954, was a product of the University of Chicago, where he was dean of faculties in the Biological Sciences Division and the School of Medicine – an area not exactly the inner circles that were the source of the Hutchins Plan, or existing Shimer curriculum.
Dowty: “It's not clear how committed Mullin ever was to what made Shimer unique, but he had ‘saved’ the college in an earlier crisis, in 1956, when it was about to go broke. Mullin recruited Nelson Dezendorf, an automobile executive who was reached through a common Episcopalian connection (and thus Shimer's later but brief affiliation with the Episcopal Church). Consequently Mullin solidified his hold by filling the Board of Trustees with his people to the point that the power structure at Shimer was, as described in an independent to the Board of Trustees, "a medieval fiefdom stuck somehow in rural Illinois. There was constant tension between Mullin and the core ‘Hutchins’ people over his total control, his caprices, and his efforts over the years to ‘conventionalize’ the program (though in my recollection, attempts to dilute the Hutchins Plan were only a small part of the conflict). There was always a steady drain of the most committed and most capable faculty over the years, although the program itself continued to attract exceptional new faculty because of what was unique about it. What these new people learned fairly quickly was that there was a large contradiction between the principles that Shimer supposedly represented and the way the college was actually run."
When Weiser approached him about resigning, Mullin reacted “like the tinpot dictator that he was” by running to the Board of Trustees and receiving, practically overnight, a new multi-year contract. This led to tensions and hostilities, as can only be expected when academics feel that their basic values and principles are being challenged, and a split of the faculty into warring factions. This then was what became known as the Grotesque Internecine Struggle.
The splintering put to rest any chance of Shimer becoming a long-term teaching home for Bellairs – perhaps the "perfect campus" image was forever shattered in his mind – because he formally resigned before the end of his first semester on campus. On November 30, 1966, Bellairs sent a typed resignation to the Dean of Faculty, Denis Cowan, saying, "This is to inform you of my resignation as of the end of the current school year. I am going to go to England to write for a year or so."
