ADVANCING CLARK
By Jim Keogh
The Higgins School celebrates 25 years, thanks to Alice
A
spring 2012
PADDED ROCKING CHAIR sits in the lounge
clark alumni magazine
62
of the Anderson (English) House. It’s very comfortable, a perfect seat to settle in and read a good book. Alice Higgins paid for the chair, but she wasn’t enamored with the furniture choice. “She was upset with me because the chair has a bit of a rocker to it,” recalls English Professor Virginia Vaughan, who made the purchase. “Alice said she wasn’t ready for a rocker.” No she wasn’t. The longtime Clark trustee (19631974) and benefactor was known for a dynamism that matched her generosity. The wife of one of Worcester’s leading industrialists dedicated herself to improving the University in such a rich variety of ways — through endowments, fundraising, and visionary leadership; she even personally planted tulips around campus — that her name has become almost talismanic in Clark lore. Since the day she joined the board in 1963, finding a Clark story that doesn’t somehow wend its way back to Alice Higgins is nearly impossible. The rocking chair is, in fact, much more than a chair. It was one of the first pieces to furnish the Alice Coonley Higgins School of Humanities, which she endowed with a $1 million gift in 1986. With a few chairs and a table set up in the Carriage House (the school later relocated to Dana Commons), faculty could engage in conversations over coffee or lunch. “Alice would always have you over to her house for a cup of tea to discuss an idea. She understood the importance of that,” says Vaughan, who was named the school’s first director. Vaughan recalls that the idea for the Higgins School was first proposed by then-provost Leonard Berry, who wanted to find a way to maximize Clark’s potential by bringing together related programs, including the humanities. Alice Higgins, who passed away in 2000, was committed to the ideal that a college must educate the whole person. Her philosophy was woven into the Higgins School’s mission to develop innovative programs and fund faculty research in English, history, foreign languages, philosophy and the visual and performing arts. As Vaughan notes, those areas don’t have access to a grant-making organization equivalent to a National Science Foundation, so internal funding for scholarly research is critical.
“I made it a stipulation that if you got a substantial grant, you had to give a lecture about your research,” Vaughan says. “My first goal as director was to try and make the work of humanities scholars and students at Clark more visible.” She and Higgins shared ideas, and as Vaughan remembers, “Alice said to me several times that there wasn’t any problem that couldn’t be solved if people would just sit down and talk to each other.” She wasn’t alone. Following several more directors at the Higgins School, Sarah Buie, longtime professor in the Visual and Performing Arts Department, took the helm in 2004. She envisioned the school as “a kind of ideal forum. What if we could have the best kinds of exchanges human beings could have? What if we could ask ourselves the questions we really need to address right now in our world? The humanities center is the best place within a university to create that kind of forum.”