What defines an educated person? What does it mean to live with meaning and purpose? How do we restore education’s humane roots?

Chris Higgins continues to wrestle with philosophical questions such as these as he joins the Lynch School faculty after 13 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An advocate of whole-person formative education, a key area of focus across the disciplines at Boston College, Higgins has long been fascinated by questions of “self-cultivation and human flourishing.”

“What could be more important or moving than the processes by which human beings work to make sense of their world, shape themselves, and chart a direction in life?” he asks. “I am so excited to join a faculty with a shared goal of restoring such questions of meaning and purpose to their rightful place at the center of educational concern.”  

The author of the 2011 book The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley), Higgins plans to collaborate with faculty across Lynch departments and build on 2017–18 conferences he participated in at BC on “Tracking Development Toward Living a Life of Meaning and Purpose.” They were led by Henry Braun, Boisi Professor of Education and Public Policy and Education Research, and Lynch School Dean Stanton E.F. Wortham (whom Higgins first met in the mid-1990s while he was a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Teachers College).

Along with teaching a graduate seminar on democratic education and leading an undergraduate independent study on the philosophy of education this fall, Higgins is crafting a book—tentatively called Essays on Educational Integrity—that presents his vision of humane education. That involves rearticulating the values of humanism, liberal learning, and aesthetic education for the 21st century. It argues, among other things, in favor of the central role the humanities should play in helping students develop their professional callings.

Raised in a family of educators, Higgins recalls his delight when, as an incoming first-year student, he received his Yale course catalog with its opening essay inviting undergraduates to consider what it means to be educated. Today Higgins describes an educated person, in part, as someone who is open to the “otherness” of other people, recognizes the complexity of the world, can tolerate uncertainty, and has “a sense of what they stand for—and of how little they know.”