Serendipity and College Recruitment

This past week, Ma'ikwe & Marqis dropped off their 17-year-old son, Jibran (my stepson), at college. It's the start of new adventure—both for Jibran and for Ma'ikwe & me, who will be living together alone for the first time in our nine years of intimacy.

Jibran is attending Shimer College in Chicago (it shares a campus with the Illinois Institute of Technology), a well-aged liberal arts school with the tagline, "dangerously optimistic since 1853." Given that they have fewer than 200 students, I reckon any school that sustains itself on such a shoestring enrollment has earned its optimism. For crying out loud, the school started before the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

In honor of Jibran's rite of passage, I want to share the amazing story of how he came to Shimer, an institution of higher learning that no one in our household had heard of before the evening of Nov 4, 2012—which most people recall as the night that Obama was elected to a second term.

The Front Story of Jibran's Recruitment
Let's go back to that fateful night almost 22 months ago. Ma'ikwe was suffering through another bad year battling Lyme disease, and she and Jibran were just ending a week of R&R with Ma'ikwe's mother—Kay, who lives in nearby Canandaigua and who had dropped them off at the Rochester RR depot in time for the scheduled 11 pm departure of the westbound Lake Shore Limited to Chicago. 

Right before the Amtrak stop, Kay, Ma'ikwe, and Jibran (three generations of Howards) had been watching election results in a Rochester bar, but the Presidential winner was still too close to call when it was time to catch the choo choo. Not possessing a smart phone, and finding no television or internet signal in the Rochester depot, Jibran walked up to a stranger and asked if the woman would mind checking the latest election results on her iPhone. She didn't, and they struck up a conversation as they watched the tallies come in.

Impressed with Jibran's perspicacious political commentary, the woman (Susan Henking), casually asked about Jibran's education. He openly shared that he was only 15 and was being privately tutored at Dancing Rabbit, a budding ecovillage in northeast Missouri. Susan suggested that he consider thinking about enrolling at Shimer College when he was ready to move beyond high school. It just so happened that Susan had recently been appointed Shimer's President.

Whoa! Impressed that a college president would find time for a thoughtful conversation with a odd-duck teenager, Jibran started looking into Shimer and liked what he saw. Among other things, it's a Great Books school, which means that their core approach to learning is reading source materials, followed by lots of discussion and writing. As a budding epistemologist, this appealed to Jibran greatly (who's never met a philosophical podcast he didn't like). In addition, Shimer does not ask applicants to submit a high school diploma, GED, or SAT scores (none of which Jibran possessed)—you just have to favorably impress the admissions office with your essay and interview.

Not only does Jibran come with a minimal academic paper trail, but he's entering college one year ahead of his age cohort. While some colleges may balk at that, at Shimer they don't blink—you're ready when you're ready. (In fact, Ma'ikwe reported that their incoming freshman class this year spans an age range of 15-28, which means that Jibran is not even the youngest.)

In any event, Jibran is now a freshman at Shimer. Talk about a long-shot coming in! To the best of our knowledge, Susan does not make a habit of trolling railroad depots in the wee hours for incoming recruits (but maybe she should).

The Back Story of Jibran's Recruitment
Ma'ikwe got back from Chicago yesterday morning, and one of the first things she shared with me was a conversation she had with Susan, in which the Prez revealed why she was at the Rochester train depot that evening with time enough for a recruitment pitch in her chance encounter with Jibran. Yes, she was also boarding the the train to Chicago, but she was there unusually early because she'd had a tiff with the friend she was visiting and they decided it might be as well to end their visit early, resulting in Susan putting in some serious bench time at the depot. 

Apparently Susan wasn't having her best day, and Jibran turned out to be the silver lining. If she'd arrived right before the train departed—as most travelers do—it's probable that Jibran and Susan would never have met. Then where would we be? Probably still scratching our heads over when Jibran would move out of the Moon Lodge loft and whither he'd be going.

I'm telling you, you can't make shit like this up.