‘Undeclared’
For Lynch School of Education and Human Development Associate Professor Chris Higgins, it was a conversation that changed the trajectory of his career, and launched a book.
Some years ago, before he came to Boston College, Higgins met with an undergraduate who had recently, and reluctantly, dropped his computer science major. Describing his situation to Higgins, the sophomore could barely bring himself to say that he was “undeclared,” a status he clearly considered shameful.
This moment crystallized for Higgins how society had lost sight of one of the essential purposes of higher education: the open-ended search for self-understanding. At that moment, he resolved to write a book that would help young people embrace this spirit of discovery, proudly declaring their “undeclaredness.”
“I don’t know how moments like this still manage to surprise me,” said Higgins, the founding chair of the Lynch School’s Formative Education Department. “I am well aware of the stigma. In the modern multi-university, ‘gen ed’ is just a toll booth on the credential highway. Students get the message, loud and clear: Pick a lane and step on the gas.”
Chris Higgins (Peter Julian)
Higgins’ reminiscence of this encounter forms the prologue to his recently published book, Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Education, which comprises three lengthy essays and three shorter pieces that discuss the need to promote a form of learning that is “uncoerced and unscripted.
“I hope Undeclared might speak to other students who are anxious because they have not yet managed to package themselves for the job market,” said Higgins. “And for those whose undergraduate days are behind them, the book offers an invitation to get reacquainted with your inner sophomore.”
To Higgins, the distressed student exemplified what he calls “the efficiency of our miseducation. Here he was, beginning his sophomore year, and he was already mis-categorizing the virtue of the quest as the vice of indecision. He had come to the university hoping for something different from his earlier schooling. Instead, he found himself caught up in what was just a more advanced version of the same old game of ‘studenting’—grinding from exam to exam and from pre-req to pre-req.”
In writing the book, Higgins drew on the variety of educational environments that he’s experienced, as student or teacher, from middle school through college.
The initial essay, “Soul Action: The Search for Integrity in General Education,” addresses what it would mean to take holistic education earnestly. “Wide Awake: Aesthetic Education at Black Mountain College” describes one of the great experiments in the history of higher education: North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, which during its 24 years of operation (the college closed in 1957) explored democratic self-governance and a form of holistic, general education rooted in the arts. “Job Prospects: Vocational Formation as Humane Learning” traces the lines of formation from the university into the work world.
Higgins calls the shorter pieces “interludes”—an allusion to shorter musical passages punctuating a longer composition. “Campus Tour” provides a survey of the distortions of the university when it’s transformed into a business, while “New Student Orientation” addresses the formidable drive to instrumentalize learning. “Public Hearing” outlines how the defunding of public universities corresponds with the deterioration of the arts and humanities.
“The three essays work to expand the higher educational imagination, recovering ideals that have been shoved aside or replaced by counterfeits,” he said. “The interludes intervene where we are prone to lapse into romanticization.”
Ultimately, Undeclared addresses the question of how to prepare people to think of their work as a vehicle for their own ongoing development, said Higgins, who discussed the issue at a recent educational forum: “Vocational formation continues beyond just undergraduate preparation for it,” he said at the event. “We hope our students continue to learn not only for their jobs, but through their work. And we need to help them reflect on the goods served by their calling and to recognize when their work has become an ethical or existential dead end.”
Joining BC in 2019 not only helped Higgins complete the book, but afforded him opportunities to begin enacting its ideas.
“I jumped at the chance to come to BC because it’s a place that truly believes that undergraduate education should be formative. Here it is understood that questions of meaning, value, and purpose are central to the educational conversation. If you’re not considering those questions, then it might be instruction, socialization, or training, but it’s not education.”
Recently he has begun working with the division of Student Affairs to explore and enhance the formative dimensions of residential life at BC.
“At many universities, there is a real divide between living and learning,” Higgins said. “At BC we make sure the quest for meaning and purpose extends beyond the classroom, creating spaces where students can engage in intellectual exploration and personal growth throughout the campus.
“BC is obviously very different than Black Mountain College,” said Higgins. “What the two institutions share is the idea of college as a community of persons-in-process, supporting each other’s efforts to make sense of ourselves, to clarify what matters, to carve out meaningful projects, and to organize our talents in the service of something worthwhile.”