"The great tragedy of Shimer is that it was the purest and most perfect test of the power of an enlightened curriculum and a faculty seriously committed to teaching to truly educate essentially unselected students – and that such a stunning accomplishment was never documented. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to teach amazingly gifted, highly selected students and to observe and assess their accomplishments. But for these students we can never know whether the curriculum or the teaching made any difference: they were predestined for great accomplishment. Shimer, desperate for students and democratic in its admissions policies, provided a different and more pure case."