Virtues & Vocations: Conversations on Character and the Common Good, Part 9: Higher Education & Formation with Chris Higgins

As part of the Virtues & Vocations series Education for Flourishing: Conversations on Character & the Common Good, we are pleased to welcome Chris Higgins, the Chair of the Department of Formative Education at Boston College. Join us for a conversation about the purpose of education and how universities can educate for flourishing.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:06

Hi everyone. Welcome to our monthly webinar series, Conversations on Character and the Common Good. We're excited to be back after what seems like a very short summer break and look forward to sharing lunch and conversation with you and our guests each month as we explore how education and work can promote human flourishing. This series is part of Virtues and Vocations, Housed at the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame and supported by the Kern Family Foundation. I am Suzanne Shanahan and I direct the Center for Social Concerns and am host for this series. Virtues and Vocations, as a national forum, seeks to foster a community of practice amongst scholars and practitioners across disciplines who are keen to understand how best to cultivate character and moral purpose in higher education and the professions. Without further ado, I am delighted to welcome today's conversation guest, Chris Higgins. We'll be speaking on higher education and formation. Chris Higgins is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Formative Education in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. There, he directs the program in transformative educational studies. And co directs the Formative Leadership Education Project. Upon his arrival at Boston College, I found a quote, where he describes his work at Boston College. We are building a community of teachers and learners devoted to recalling education to its humane roots and exploring the myriad ways that human beings make use of formative resources. To forge lives worth living. He goes on, We want to catalyze a conversation about the educational dimensions of our contemporary grand challenges from environmental and health crises to entrenched forms of inequality and new threats to democratic governance. These crises are of meaning, purpose, and value. So love that. As a philosopher of education, Chris works with us. To articulate the existential dimensions of teaching and learning, defend the idea of education as a public good, and recall education to its humane roots. He is the author of two books, The Good Life of Teaching, an Ethics of Professional Practice, and the more recent Undeclared, a Philosophy of Formative Education. I just finished reading this book, and I absolutely loved it. I've already ordered 12 more copies to give out to everybody I know. admired the intellectual honesty and humility As well as the fidelity and thoughtfulness with which you pursue the argument to the very end. Welcome, Chris. So happy to have you here with us today.

Chris Higgins 3:02

Thank you Suzanne. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 1 3:04

Great I want to jump right in But hoping you could give us a bit of background. How did you come to this interest in student formation? Was there a particular moment or series of moments about your Career? Intellectual biography, history, how you came to Boston College.

Chris Higgins 3:21

So basically my life story now, I won't have to cut it a little short here. We only have 40 minutes, if I walk you through the educational institutions I attended and worked in, I think they've all shaped me in different ways. I started out, as a kid going to an alternative school. It had no grades. small classes, some designed by the students. You could call it a hippie school, called the Newark Center for Creative Learning. I grew up in Delaware. Huge impact on me thinking right from the beginning. It's the kind of school where as a kid, started thinking, what does it mean to be educated? in some ways, maybe it's not a coincidence, I ended up being a philosopher of education. Then I went to a public high school, and then I went off, to Yale College, in the late 80s, and got to see a very different kind of institution, right? So there I was at an Ivy, then I did grad school at Columbia, at the Ed School of Columbia, Teachers College, then I was hired by Teachers College, where I taught for a while, then I worked at Illinois, at Langrand University, and now Boston College. So I've seen a lot of different institution types. I also had a introduction to the way in which academia shapes us and thought I was doing wonderful work at TC at Columbia, but I was not granted tenure. I had to do the assistant professorship twice, once at TC and once at Illinois, which is a pretty eye opening experience because we have a kind of curriculum we've built to shape academics, to shape scholars, in the book, Undeclared, I offer some critiques of that way we shape ourselves as faculty. I got a good look at it. I also got over the idea that I really have to write to please the next committee, because, it didn't work out for me the first time and I had to rebuild my career. the silver lining is now I'm just writing what I believe and saying it in the way that I think will be the most direct and powerful I'm not worried about, whether I am the most exact scholar of each and every topic I touch on. that's a little bit about my intellectual biography and the inspiration for the new book, maybe I could tell you the story behind the title. I called it Undeclared because one day at Illinois. I did a lecture, Foundations of Education class, and one of the students was following me back to office hours. he seemed nervous and worried. I said, what's up? he didn't want to talk until we got to my office and wanted to close the door most of the way. I said, what's going on? he mumbled something and I couldn't hear, but could tell he was letting me know some kind of shameful secret. I thought, oh my gosh, is he sick? What's going on? then he finally spoke up and his big problem was he was undeclared. it suddenly struck me just how this has become a stigma. That you need to have your major, your minor, three concentrations, four clubs all by the second week of college, right? This mentality of you pick a lane and you put on the gas, which I think really gets it wrong. I think we have on websites that college is a space for exploration, but if the culture of a campus doesn't back that up in palpable ways, the cult of the resume will take over, is there a gap in your resume? And, do you always know, where you're headed? And if not, is there something wrong with you? It's like that Tolkien quote, not all who wander are lost. I wrote the book in part give some backing to people who want to proudly declare. Their undeclaredness, to own it and say this is what I should be doing in college exploring the world of knowledge and oneself and not rushing to, a often premature choice.

Speaker 1 6:52

Thank you. I think what I find so striking about the book is that experience you had, lots of us have had conversations with students who feel bad that they don't have the next 20 years of their life planned and know how they'll use their college experience. education and experience as a linear stepping stone to that broader trajectory. So I think this is a really important moment to have this conversation. In the book there are three sections that I'm particularly taken with one is when you talk about something called soul action. The other is your case study of Black Mountain, which I found very compelling. I wonder if you can share with us what you mean by soul action. the importance of this and the argument you're trying to make about what college ought be.

Chris Higgins 7:46

Absolutely. So I found the phrase in a kind of obscure, article by John Dewey, the relation of theory and practice to education 1902 he talks about it being the fundamental mark of a teacher is their attentiveness to soul action, their ability to tune in to the place where. The human psyche or soul is making meaning and meeting the subject matter. I was taken by the phrase. Then I found, a similar phrase in Emerson. Where he talks about active soul as being one of the key elements of the human condition, but needing sometimes to get activated. it suggests that we could talk about the project of general education and educating the whole person in a way where we acknowledge that it's very much a work in progress. maybe a simplistic way of talking about educating the whole person would be figure out what are the parts of a person you're talking about maybe it's the civic the moral the intellectual and the spiritual. once we have a list, develop each one. that leaves out a couple of things. One is that trying to figure out our nature and what the soul is composed of. Is a wonderful life's work. there's no simple answer we can't develop all parts of ourselves equally. So you have to develop ethical judgment about, what aspects of myself. Are most in need of cultivation for the life I want to live. there's this extra work of developing different capacities but what about integrating them into some kind of coherence of character or unity of outlook, We can't develop these different dimensions of ourselves and keep them each in a little silo. That's not going to work living a life. finally, how do we acknowledge the fact that this is a work in progress that work of integration is complex and ongoing. You're gonna find there are aspects of yourself that don't necessarily sit comfortably side by side. Can you just own that and live with the fact that, we're complex as we, encounter more of the world, we get fresh ideas about, what we're made of and how to be. A person of integrity. soul action for me is trying to acknowledge that in process ness of human beings, we're becomers. We have to keep working at it. the soul is, an old fashioned way of putting it, but I find that talk of the mind or the self. Doesn't quite capture the idea that it takes work to develop a kind of inwardness in which we get to know who we are and what we're made of and discern what might be, a life worth living.

Speaker 1 10:20

Great. Thank you. So a couple of questions just thinking about you and your own experience. how does this notion of soul action in the communities that you travel, how does that resonate, That there's clearly, An increasingly vocational technical emphasis on education, especially in public institutions. How does one, return from this? You talk about higher education being a ruined institution. How are you finding that road back and where do you find this resonating most, You came from, a large public institution. You're now at Boston College that has A different set of priorities, a different ethos. How is this working?

Chris Higgins 11:07

when you say back to me, part of my argument, I realized, that was rather dramatic, a ruined institution. I was leaning on that guy, Bill Reddings, who has a book, The University in Ruins. I do think that universities may have drifted away from their animating purposes. I try to document in the book how, there's a version of that, which can be hard to recognize because there's lots of things happening and they often bear the names of the. Former practices. we say we're doing general education. We have gen ed requirements or a core. But as I try to examine saying you have a gen ed curriculum is not necessarily the same thing as, general education and educating the whole person and, helping students achieve personal, integration. I think We need to do some work of saying, what are these practices really about and have they, in some cases, drifted away from their moral cores there's a lot of calls, for grants and whatnot for, new initiatives and they want you to prototype something. I think great, but I also think a lot of the work we need to do is work of renewal. the practices are there. But they may be running a little bit in zombie mode it's time for us all to wake up say, okay, what are we really doing with that? Maybe we have a living and learning community on campus but what is the relation of living and learning, right? It's not enough to just check the box and have an LLC or have a gen ed curriculum. You have to examine what these things really mean. Where does this talk of soul action resonate and maybe where does it not resonate? It's funny. Cause you took me right back to the first paper I ever gave in grad school. I was writing about Rilke's letters to a young poet. That beautiful book. And I was writing about how teachers of adolescence have to be open to a dialogue with their own former self, their own inner adolescent, if they're going to make contact with their adolescent students in an authentic way. And I used the term soul, and this old fashioned analytic philosopher stood up and gave a response and said, You used the word soul. It's been proven that is metaphysical baggage from an earlier era. Defend yourself, kind of thing. It was just an interesting introduction to academia. it is an old fashioned term, but there's also metaphysical baggage associated with terms like self or character or mind or psyche. The answer is the book's only been out for a couple of months and I'm still finding out what will resonate. And I'm so excited that you bought 12 copies and you should have been my agent. This is fantastic. It seems like it's resonating and I think that people may notice I'm trying to write a book that is neither. Let me back up. There's two genres of higher ed, book and if I can make a simplification. One is nostalgia, romanticism for the idea of a university. An ideal university that we may never even had, in the distant past, we imagine once we really did it right, we formed students or had true liberal education and I wanted to avoid that kind of nostalgic romanticism. On the other hand, I really believe in the idea of the university. I am a true believer as you mentioned in our talk before this started. So I wanted to avoid the second genre, which is just trashing the university, saying it is nothing but the exercise of, social reproduction or, working out of, capitalist inequality. I tried in the book to braid those two styles of reading together. The phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur calls them the hermeneutics of suspicion. And the hermeneutics of faith, recovery or retrieval. How do we read with a critical eye and also read receptive to the truth and goodness of the text in question, in this case, the university itself? So I think some people maybe are resonating with the fact that I'm not out to trash the university and I'm not out to celebrate a bygone era. I am deeply concerned and walking through the university slowly and observing what I see. And asking how we can revive some of these practices that have become ethical zombies.

Speaker 1 15:09

Great. I do love, the line you're walking between this sort of trashing and romanticism. yet still having a love of the university and a belief that it can be better. I think that is in fact, one of the things that's very special about this particular book. If I think about this notion of soul action in the context of any university and how we might wake up the zombies, we knew this particular Dimension of higher education. There are two things that I think about. One is, the way we train faculty, to teach in discipline and the extent to which It may be quite challenging for many faculty to engage in these ways. the second one is, how do we not just create another version of the anemic gen ed or the living learning communities? So we check that box and say, we have one. How does this. You've described this in beautifully prosaic ways about this being a way of life. How do we do that in the context of a university that is really about new bright and shiny boxes that people can check? And then we're back into the box jacking.

Chris Higgins 16:35

Yeah, I don't have a perfect answer to that. People don't always like it when you do the emperor's new clothes moment, right? But you gotta find people who share your passion for living practices with a moral core and build community. I jumped at the chance to. Come to BC because it is a place that, truly believes undergraduate education should be formative. Now we struggle like all universities with the credentialing, the kind of studenting mindset. The absurd social ritual that we have now, the kind of hunger games where young people, define themselves by their ability to get into a place that rejects the most people. Of course the BCs and Notre dames of this world aren't exempt from that, but at BC, there are so many people who truly believe that this is about more than a credential. I was asked to lead a department of formative education, which is pretty amazing, right? I get to lead a faculty where it's understood that questions of meaning and value and purpose are central to educational conversations. I spent a lot of time and energy at past institutions. I worked with great people and they were often supportive, but still, there's a lot of energy you have to spend to clear space for that kind of inquiry. There might be the pragmatist who says, how's that going to fix the school on the corner tomorrow? And there's this kind of, where's your data? How many grant dollars have you brought in yesterday? And it just sounds somehow too lofty and ivory tower to talk about meaning and purpose and value. But it's not education if you're not. Considering those questions, it could be some sort of credentialing or maybe instruction, maybe some form of socialization, but it's not education. If we're not wrestling with what it means to be an educated person. one way to make sure it doesn't become just checking a box is if you can build a culture on campus. Where the question of the aims of education is an open question, and where community of conversation, of course about all of our loving specialties, and I hope that philosophers keep digging into Plato, and art historians keep digging into Jado and whatever it is, we should all be wrestling with the question, what does it mean to be an educated person? if we are, then I think that will cut against the tendency to have things run on autopilot and to feel like you created it, it has a name. It's done. I'm working with the Division of Student Affairs to think about how, dorm life on campus could be renewed as more formative. BC believes that living and learning are connected, and that learning is formative, if it's true higher education. yet dorms become just dorms and RAs maybe become traffic cops on the floor. all of these practices need, renewal. So I was so excited that they invited me to have a seat at the table and to think about how, residential life at BC could be renewed as deeply formative. we need a third space that's not academic per se, but also not anti intellectual. We need a space that's intellectual, but not necessarily in academic terms. And this happens, I think all of us probably remember moments where we had a cool talk with our roommates some late night, in college, or maybe it was in the dining hall, or maybe it was, in some little van as we were getting sick, bouncing over things, we drove to the away game two hours away if we're athletes, it can happen, but it can also get crowded out by forms of social life. the average game of quarters is probably not an intellectual space. by intellectual, I don't mean people are offering learned discourses on Plato and Aristotle. They're asking questions about their lives and their values and how, classes fit together? What do I say to my parents when I go home for Thanksgiving when I feel like I'm now speaking a new language and I've changed? These are the kinds of conversations we hope students are having with each other. How do we create on campus? A culture of conversation that is not captured simply by conversation on an academic topic for credit and for a grade.

Speaker 1 20:34

Great. I love that. Black Mountain. So you have a bit of a case study on Black Mountain. I would love you to talk about the role that case study plays in your thinking. it's also a space where you're not. overly sentimental about what they're doing there, but also share it as a really interesting example of ways of doing and being that we might think more seriously about.

Chris Higgins 21:01

I love Black Mountain. I've been fascinated by it for years and it occurred to me, even though I'm not a historian, I could, work up this case study and for people who don't know, Black Mountain College was small experimental college, which, really flourished, but only for two and a half decades from 33 to 56 or 57 depending on how you count the ending, it was in the, Blue Ridge Mountains and it was, incredible, collection of people came together many of them artists some people mistake it as an art school, even though its founders and faculty throughout kept stressing, we're not an art school. We're not primarily trying to create people. Who will have big shows and museums or gallery space. The arts were put at the center of the curriculum because the founders felt the arts were the best vehicle for general education, you might paint or get involved in drama or some other art form, not because going to be a painter per se. But because working with a medium is a way to make the intellectual life embodied. the founder said, when you work in a medium, you're both thrown back on yourself. What do you want to say or show or make? And. You are pressed by the medium itself to account for the world. You can't just make up things the way you want. If you are writing, then the language pushes back. If you're painting, you have to deal with pigment brushes gravity and so on the medium is a set of enabling constraints, pushes back. they thought it could teach students both. To find their voices and to learn a kind of, discipline. So this was, this amazing experiment, which, you know, financially was never fully, stateable kept having to get fresh infusions of cash and finally ran out of money in the mid fifties. people could say to me, wait, why are you talking about this place they had, even during some of the bigger years, around 125 students served, about 1, 200 students total over its quarter century of life. It, was never, accredited. It was highly experimental. So I imagined right away when I started writing about it, people saying. It's too small, it's too strange, it could never be scaled up, it could not be a prototype, as I mentioned before, for the modern multi versity, and of course that isn't what I was proposing, one of the things I enjoyed was finding these incredibly powerful statements by the founders themselves about how they were quite aware that the small scale they were building at Black Mountain College Made it very different, even from the universities of its day, and they saw that as an advantage. And they asked the question, are you sure that true formative higher education, true general education, that it can happen at any scale? Are you sure that bigger is better? And they pose this question back to their colleagues at larger universities. And they also questioned longevity. Why do we assume that simply staying in business? When you drive up to a university, and it says founded 1863, it's impressive, right? And yet the question is it still alive and true to its values? Not simply have the building stood, is there an unbroken charter? And so Black Mountain. They also said, this experiment may start to run into a groove, at which point it'll be fine. If it ends, it'll be better. And fresh experiments can pop up. The important thing is a truly lively, space where there's true community of persons and process. So I'm fascinated by it and I don't propose it as a model for the modern multiversity, but let me tell a story that says why I do think it's really valuable and then I'll hand it back to you to follow up. So I had this teacher, actually someone you interviewed in your magazine, Jonathan Lear was my undergraduate advisor. If you don't know him, he's an amazing thinker. We had him to Illinois, for a masterclass on Plato for scholars from, Shanghai. for this exchange. at a certain point, one of the visiting scholars asked him, is there a difference between Plato and Socrates, between the historical Socrates and Plato's Socrates, and does this even matter? the answer he gave, with this tone of real passion and seriousness, he said, I think it matters a great deal. I do think Plato's portrait of Socrates is faithful. Yes, he's a literary character and Xenophon's Socrates is a little different than Plato's Socrates, but his portrait is faithful. Yeah. There was a historical figure, this portrait is faithful to it, and that matters a great deal. And the room was quiet. he started to explain, it matters because to know that someone lived this sort of life with radical self examination at its core, to know that even one person did that holds open the possibility for others. For thousands of years later, 2400 years later, we're still reading Plato's dialogues. And we know that it is possible to live a life that is full and rich with self examination. the Black Mountain example for me has a similar kind of status. It's I think in logic, they call it the existential quantifier. There is an X that, there was a place. Where the faculty and the students, ran the school collectively and democratically, there was a place where the arts and the liberal arts work together in seamless fashion, where students were, working on the farm, building new buildings, putting on productions, but also involved in intellectual discussions about. History and literature. It's a late in the evening. that place existed. And it's a different kind of case study that says these things are possible. We can attempt our own experiments of expansion and renewal in our institutions of higher ed. Does that start to answer your question of what I was getting at with this case study?

Speaker 1 27:06

Absolutely. I think the way you describe it, is very faithful to this notion that you're not telling everybody, let's all go out and create Black Mountains. I do wonder though, and I think of you in a new role, this sort of new effort at Boston College, to what extent are you embracing this as that kind of moment? Of renewal on the kinds of things you have deep commitments for, right? Is this your own little version of Black Mountain in some way?

Chris Higgins 27:43

Yeah, certainly. We're one department in a complex school of education and human development in a big, university. I was given the opportunity to lead from its inception, a new kind of department that doesn't really have, a genre. my colleague who's Italian tells me that the word formativo appears in the name of certain departments and institutions in Italy, but not really in the same sense, until someone tells me otherwise, I think we might be the first department of formative education, right? it's a pretty cool and strange enterprise. For example, we have a wonderful young doctoral program. The second group of students has just arrived. The first group came last year and had a wonderful first year, doing great work. But here's what's a little strange about us is we're deeply interdisciplinary. I'm a philosopher of education. I have colleagues who are historians of education, anthropologists of formative experience. People who do design thinking, humanistic psychology. think about it, the PhD, the way you know that you're a real discipline is you have a PhD program, and the way you know you're a real program is that everybody in it speaks the same incredibly narrow disciplinary language. But we don't do that. And we're not the kind of interdisciplinary program where we say we're interdisciplinary, but then everybody has their own little personal shop and their own students. It's a communal program. we spent our first year reading each other's work. We have a colloquium where every disciplinary language is forced to get out of its little bubble and talk about formative questions from different angles. That's very much in the spirit of Black Mountain. Black Mountain, had these Wednesday seminars taught by three faculty simultaneously who had to just constantly experience that humbling thing of realizing that when you sound really smart and articulate, partly that's because you've cast the whole thing in this one way that you know how to, it's like a game of checkers. What a great triple jump. Now, What do we actually think about the question? you find that you're a human being struggling to articulate a sound judgment and to think about the issue clearly and deeply. it sends a message to the students, faculty are lead learners. They're not just experts with their, citation indices and journal articles, they're also still trying to understand these things. In interdisciplinary space, yes, we're trying to create that. A space for whole persons to develop? Absolutely. For example, I run an undergraduate program called Transformative Educational Studies, we were excited to offer our first program retreat last year, where, 25, of our students spent the weekend at, BC's, Retreat center engaged in dialogue about, we call it skole, the Greek term for, there's no good translation. You could say leisure, but that sounds like taking a cruise What the Greeks meant was you can't really get started on your education unless you Pause the kind of to do list mentality. We're all driven by necessity and checking different kinds of boxes right? Life is complicated. The Greeks thought until you had a fresh encounter with your own freedom, that you are more than a creature of necessity, then you couldn't really get a sense of what you're working with and what education's about. so maybe the parody of that is our campuses are these beautiful, quiet spaces but the core is not whether you're literally outside the city, but whether the campus gives you a chance to step back from the pressure to produce on demand, according to necessity to consider things from different angles. So we tried to do that with the undergraduates. It seemed to go really well. When we were wrapping up the retreat, the undergraduates themselves talked about how weird it was going to be to go back to campus, and they were worried they would just snap right back into that mode of when's that next paper due? could they take some of the atmosphere we collectively created and carry that forward, into their everyday lives. that was in the spring and now the students just came back today. So I'm going to find out, how their summer was and whether they've been able to carry that forward. But yes, the new department, I hope is a little black mountain. Just don't tell anybody cause that'll sound, outlandish.

Speaker 1 31:44

Can we talk a little bit about vocation? Cause you have that chapter at the end and, how we should be thinking about vocation. I love the use of remains of the day as an example. Could you just share a little bit about that section and what you were trying to do there?

Chris Higgins 32:00

Sure. So it suddenly occurred to me, I was in all these settings where humanities people were constantly trying to defend themselves. What's the practicality of your major? Are there any jobs for humanities graduates? And there's two basic strategies. One is to play that game and say, yes, there are jobs for graduates and look at actually the earnings for STEM students and business students and humanity students, once you go over time, it starts to even out. So that's one option is play the game of return on investment. The other is to take the high road and say, what we do is something that has nothing to do with the vocational. We're helping to prepare citizens or so on and so forth. And both of them have some truth. We are, of course, about doing things other than the vocational. the job prospects for humanities graduates are not bleak. both are true. But both I think are going to be ultimately unsuccessful. the main problem I have with it is they accept the idea that we're already doing vocational education, that somehow the university is doing that. what I want to do is question that idea and say, what do we mean by vocational education? Or maybe we could use the phrase vocational formation to gesture toward that bigger, more expansive vision. then it occurred to me, actually, there's at least six things that have to be part of true vocational formation. And really we only do two of them. The other ones we do either not at all, or give very short shrift. The two we do of course are. Some kind of technical training and some of the basic knowledge and skills needed in that line of work and credentialing, helping people, prepare their CV meet people network and learn how to get a job in the field. I don't deny that those two things are valuable, but I think they omit at least four things and perhaps the most important things. The first of which is facing up to the great vocational question, what is a worthy form of work to which I'm suited? And of course, students, a lot of them are admitted into a school and major, and they've made some sort of selection. But why do we rush that process? Why do we assume that 17 year olds, without experience of a lot of different human practices and domains, and under shadow of education, Parental pressure. That first major choice, why do we assume that, is truly a process of vocational discernment? most of the time it isn't. So I say, let's take that part seriously and make undergraduate education truly about vocational discernment. And then, the other three would be, some deep ethical reflection about the goods of the practice you're drawn to and how they relate to other, goods in society so that you can be on guard against the corruption of your practice. Don't you think journalists should be asking, is this journalism or is it just entertainment? We in academia should be asking, is this, education or is it, research and development? And shouldn't a teacher be asking, am I a teacher or a warden? These kinds of critical questions, your practice can drift. So you need a kind of moral reflectiveness. About what goods the practice serves and whether or not its current institutionalization helps with that. And then finally, as you follow the student out into vocational life, because of course vocational formation continues beyond just undergraduate preparation for it. We hope that our students continue to learn not only for their jobs, but through their work. How do we prepare people to think of their work as a vehicle for their own ongoing development? And, what if a form of work reveals itself as a kind of ethical or existential dead end? You're not growing, or it has drifted. Then, are we helping students prepare to leave their work if and when the time comes? And that's where Remains of the Day comes in. For those who don't know the novel or movie, I recommend both, it's about, arguably the last butler coming to grips with the fact that he has shaped his whole character around certain ideas of dignity and service, and now the practice has crumbled beneath his feet. Can he move on existentially is the central question of that novel. So that's my, solution let's not fight the universities to vocationalize, let's say it hasn't even begun to be truly vocationalized, let's double down on that idea, embrace true and broad vocational formation, and then we don't have to worry about the humanities because it's clear that this richer conception of vocational formation, the humanities have a central role to play in that process.

Speaker 1 36:21

So I thought that as an example of really what you're trying to do in terms of renewing and returning to what's there and reimagining it for a way forward. questions are teeing up frantically. So great is from Howard Gardner. Of course, students don't come to college as a blank slate. There are powerful messages from high school, from parents, from mass media, etc. Few of which relate to the messages and milieus that you favor. How do you deal with that reality that so much is pushing in a different direction?

Chris Higgins 36:57

Tell, Howard, thank you for that question. I think, the answer is clear. We get Barnes Noble to pick up, the real world of college. Written by Howard and Wendy, and hopefully they'll pick up undeclared as well. we'd start trying to reach, families and try to change this discourse that college is a kind of cutthroat competition for, advantage in the labor queue. I think there's a ready audience for that. I can't be the only parent who watched my girls go through the college process. And said something is deeply wrong with this process that, encourages a mentality of desperately trying to seek the approval of those places that reject the most people rather than just trying to find a place that can help you develop your thinking about yourself and your world and your vocation. it's a tough question because how do we change higher ed when it's part of, larger assemblages. in order to change high schools, we need to change the higher ed admissions process. And to change higher ed, we probably need to change the attitudes of high school and parents. So thanks a lot for an easy question there, Howard, but, it's a fair question and it's a good question.

Speaker 1 38:03

Great. I'm gonna give you two questions that you can take together so we can get a couple more in. Chris, thank you for your book your leadership. I love that memorable, succinct quote, faculty are lead learners. Would you describe ways that you or BC supports the formation of its faculty as lead learners? So question one. Question two, do you have ideas on how to do formative work at large public universities? Where there are tens of thousands of undergraduate students, many living off campus, can it be done? So maybe could jump into both of those if you could.

Chris Higgins 38:38

Yeah, I think that, BC does have a really rich tradition of hailing all of its employees, faculty and staff alike, as people who are still growing. I've been part of some programs as a new faculty. I've been here five years now For example, I went on a pilgrimage with colleagues. At all parts of the university, faculty and staff, we retraced, Ignatius's, journeys through Spain and Italy. this is an incredible opportunity to be there as a learner, learning about a tradition that wasn't my tradition, parts of the world that I don't know enough about, learn about my colleagues and different parts of the university, learn about yourself in ways that you don't necessarily do until you unplug from work a bit, and just see the world. it's an example of BC really investing and saying, you all deserve to keep growing. we don't think that means just keep writing one more referee journal article. I gave you the example of how in our first year in our department, we. Made a point of reading each other's work, and people, responded by saying that so wonderful to get a take on their work that wasn't just from the experts in their sub, sub, sub field. So creating these interdisciplinary spaces, and creating the conditions where teaching can be a learning experience for students. That's what my first book was partly about, it's not easy, Giving teachers some control over the curriculum, some limit to class size. Encouraging them to take some risks. I'm a big devotee of the classic seminar model a group of people around a table or, in a circle where we've read a text together, we've really read it kept the reading short and it's primary, we've all read it and now we work to unpack it together and examine what it holds, both in its own terms and for our lives. I think that kind of pedagogy, when it goes well, is precise, even if it's a text you know well, you see it in new ways, and you keep learning. Now the second question, can you just remind me, and it'll come right back.

Speaker 1 40:35

It was about can you do this in a public university, large community, is that possible?

Chris Higgins 40:41

What part of the question was, what about a place where there's a lot of commuter students that goes back to my comment that in theory, if you have a residential four year university, then you're had this great advantage except unless you unless residential life is not reinforcing the idea That you are on a quest to yourself and the and colleges exploration and meaning making and value defining, then the dorms will not be a huge advantage and, commuters may find their lives lived at home more morally rich. And intellectually, provocative. they come to their classes with another set of ideas fresh to mind. we shouldn't assume, even if we romanticize the idea of a residential four year college experience, that advantage is automatic. you can create things in places with large scale as long as you don't try to create them immediately at scale. creating, sub communities. That people can opt into can be a great way to start. in each place think formatively. For example, if you're on a search committee. What would it mean to hire who's truly a teacher scholar, somebody who does not think of themselves as talking to three fellow hyper specialists, whose favorite colleagues are all at other universities, the high point of their year every year is being on a panel at a conference? Can we find people who are incredibly good at their craft, rounded intellectuals and for whom the intellectual life is connected with the aesthetic spiritual moral and civic. Everybody on a search committee has the chance to start changing that culture right now and recruiting people who could be the kind of lead learner, whole persons in process who model for students What it means to keep the question of who do I want to be and how am I growing and developing to keep that question alive.

Speaker 1 42:29

How do you understand becomingness? what is the end and how do you help students find their own path on this road to becomingness?

Chris Higgins 42:38

some of the biggest, toughest questions for formative ed, right? How do we find our own path? So I'm gonna cheat a little bit and say there's a part of the book where I wrestle with that second part of the question, and I don't know how satisfying it will be to people. I feel like I made some progress, and the question is, can you be an educator, a formative educator, without some idea of Human flourishing and what it means to be an educated person or a vision of maturity. I say, no, you can't, you're in the wrong profession. If you have no ideas about what it means to flourish as a human being or to be intellectually and emotionally mature If you think my job as a formative educator is to shape the student in light of ideal. Like clay being shaped. So I try to gesture towards something I call agonistic progressive education. The progressive piece is. trying to help activate the student's own self led process of formation. Agonistic being that you're not just a wallpaper kind of facilitator in some versions of progressive education. You are challenging the student and pushing them to confront themselves, more honestly and fully. And I have lots of material from black mountain, is richly ambiguous, both of how powerful its potential is and how challenging it is. Some of these teachers of black mountain definitely cross lines and we're real jerks or worse. And they were the people that years later, their students wrote books and said, he saved my life. She saved my life. By pushing me, by challenging me. So this dialectic of influence and individuation is not easy. I really appreciate the question. See what I say. by the way, the book is available, open access. If you don't want to shell out, I should have told you that first before you, but you're by your 12 copies. But check it out, check out the essay, on Black Mountain, the central essay, and see what you think of how I handled that challenge between influence and individuation. And then the first part of the question. Can you just give me a couple words to remind me?

Speaker 1 44:42

what is becomingness? How do you understand?

Chris Higgins 44:46

Yeah, I think once that word's sent back to me, it sounds a little bit vague and poetic in the bad sense and I feel the push. I'd like us to develop clearer language for talking about that. I like what Jean Paul Sartre says about this. He says human beings sometimes lie to themselves. He calls it bad faith. And he says there's two characteristic ways we lie to ourselves. There's the bad faith of pretending that you are simply a product of your past experiences. Your becoming is over. You are who you are. You're your parent's child. You're your teacher's pupil. You're your culture and age's product. And he says that's running away from another aspect of yourself, your transcendence. The fact is, you are, Partly, who you are not yet. You can surprise yourself and others. But he also notes that there's another kind of bad faith. The bad faith of pretending that you're only transcendence. I can be whoever I want. Everything is unwritten. I don't have to acknowledge where I've been and how that's made me. I like how he says that both of these are running away from aspects of the human condition because we are in some ways made and formed and we are still what we are not yet.

Speaker 1 46:00

Great. I love that. Okay. Final, thought from you. If you were to recommend one book that is not your own, because we've already recommended it, what would it be? People interested in formative education, something you're reading.

Chris Higgins 46:17

I'm a nerd about these things right now. I'm reading a book that I'm just loving. It's called Renaissance Self Factioning by Stephen Greenblatt. come for the chapters about Moore and Marlow and Shakespeare and others, but stay for an incredibly observant, intelligent mind working through the dawn of our idea that we have something called a self to shape. What are the problems with that idea? What are the possibilities? That's where my head's at. Cause that's what I'm reading now. But we should create a support site where we can all share, titles with each other because there's so many good books on formation. MIT Press was so generous. They let me have 100 pages of footnotes There's a lot of reading suggestions, in those footnotes. If I can make last plug for my book, yeah.

Speaker 1 47:02

Awesome. Thank you so much. And with that, thank you, Chris. And thank you all for spending this hour with us. So thanks, Chris. This was such a delight, and I really do hope people into this book because it is just, yeah, it's very hopeful, yet honest. Absolutely love it.

Chris Higgins 47:20

Thank you for saying that for invitation. I really enjoyed as well.