Timothy F. Higgins ’69
“After PC I taught at a parochial school in Connecticut for four years, did a year of graduate school at Oklahoma U. (American Studies) and left that to manage a new B. Dalton Bookstore in Richmond, VA in the fall of 1974. That led to a 39 year career in the book business working for both booksellers and publishers in several states. I retired in 2013 from Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, one of which was/is the PC Bookstore. Our ninth and final state is South Carolina where we live now. I take a combination of graduate and undergraduate courses in the Humanities at the University of South Carolina, just for fun, one or two per semester. Only one Sociology course thus far on small and large inter-group interactions.”
One thing that Mr. Higgins says sticks with him the most from his Sociology courses is that “nurture blows away nature almost every time, so we should arrange our educational and social and political interactions to always bring out our better selves. Manage for the whole and for the long term.” A favorite SOC class of his “was probably Mr. Scott’s 200 intro class which almost immediately made me feel I was in the right place. Social Statistics (Mr.Murray?) also helped hone my analytic abilities. Sometimes I wonder if I would have made a good pollster, if there is such a thing.”
For advice to prospective students, Mr. Higgins said “You probably won’t make the big bucks but, you’ll likely be better adjusted throughout life than many who do.”
Mr. Higgins said that, rather than direct employment of sociological maxims or principles, “internalized sociological understandings and analytic approaches seemed always to give me an additional perspective for analyzing and decision making, particularly in marketing issues where determining who the customers are, what they want and how they will respond to various conditions, offers, etc. can be critical. For instance, once when I was at B. Dalton headquarters in Minneapolis serving as Director of Marketing and Control for the Merchandising arm, a firm hired to complete an analysis for a long range planning project came back with results that suggested that growth would be a problem as baby boomers aged because older people read less. Through my social stratification and statistical analysis knowledge base, I knew enough to ask if the matter of education levels had been considered and factored in, only to find that it had not. Knowing that my generation was much better educated than those past and were a huge number, I took the position that the results were likely flawed without that missing data. I took some heat but, parts of the survey were repeated, the educational demographics were collected and controlled and the original conclusions were discredited.”
