Riki E. Jacobs, a 1980 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University, served as executive director of Hyacinth AIDS Foundation from 1993 until her death in 2009.

In 2000, Jacobs was named one of the first four Distinguished Alumni by the Livingston Alumni Association of Rutgers University (LAA).

In 2010, the LAA renamed its award for an outstanding graduating undergraduate senior, to the Riki Jacobs Livingston Pride Award.

Hyacinth AIDS Foundation was a “mess” and “about ready to go under” when Jacobs joined, said Jerry McCathern, Hyacinth’s senior director of development at the time of Jacobs’ death. “Riki could have been a hero or the agency could have failed,” McCathern said. “It would have failed under most people, but she took it from there to present, in that we have become the ‘premier AIDS service agency in the state.’”

Under Jacobs’ direction, Hyacinth became the only organization in New Jersey with a public policy and community organizing staff dedicated to protecting the rights and benefits of people living with HIV/AIDS in New Jersey. During her tenure at Hyacinth, Jacobs served as a fellow of Leadership New Jersey 1995.

At the time of Jacobs’ death, New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine called her “a guiding light in the fight against HIV/AIDS in New Jersey for more than 25 years. She was an articulate and compassionate voice who was highly respected for her efforts to ensure health care access for those living with, infected with, and affected by HIV. Riki’s vision and unwavering commitment will be greatly missed.”

Prior to her service with Hyacinth, Jacobs served as a staff attorney and the assistant director for New Jersey’s Commission on Sex Discrimination in the Statutes, where she advocated for laws impacting victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. From 1982 to 1992 Jacobs was the director of development at the New Jersey Association on Correction (NJAC) where, among other responsibilities, she provided AIDS education to inmates in county jails. In the late 1980s she realized the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on the association’s clients. As a result, she developed one of the first pre-release programs in the country targeting offenders living with HIV/AIDS and also created an HIV/AIDS prevention and education program at the Mercer and Middlesex County correctional facilities.

She had been involved since 1986 with organizing local and statewide coalitions. She co-founded the New Jersey Women & AIDS Network (NJWAN), an organization devoted to address the impact of AIDS on women in New Jersey. She was also responsible for the development of NJAC’s first domestic violence shelter in Passaic County. 

Jacobs was strongly committed to the work of the non-profit community. She served on the boards of the Center for Non-Profits and the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She also served on the advisory board of the New Jersey AIDS Partnership. Since the administration of Governor Jim Florio, Jacobs had served as a member of the Governor’s Advisory Council on HIV and other blood-borne pathogens. 

Jacobs received numerous awards and recognition for her work, including: honors in 1998 from NJWAN, the AIDS Benefit Committee of NJ (Humanitarian Award) and the Middlesex County Commission on the Status of Women (Women of Excellence Award for her work in the AIDS field); the Public Policy Leadership Award from the New Jersey Public Policy Research Institute in 2003; and the Humanitarian Award from the Health Care Foundation of New Jersey in 2007.

Jacobs, born on November 12, 1957, and raised in Union, New Jersey, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Livingston College in 1980, and a Doctor of Jurisprudence (J.D.) degree from Rutgers University School of Law (Newark) in 1989.

Jacobs, who died March 14, 2009, was survived by her husband of 22 years, Angel M. Perez; children, William, Eli and Kara; her sister, Ellen; her brother, Robert; and her parents, Harold and Betty.

Bottom photo: New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine with Riki Jacobs in 2007.

Thomas F. Daley, honored in 2002 as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus, was a district attorney, district judge and appellate judge who served in St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana for more than 30 years. He died January 31, 2015, at age 61.

Daley, a 1975 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University, had served as the St. John the Baptist District Attorney from 2009 to early 2015. He bowed out of a December 2014 runoff election, citing ill health.

On February 24, 2015, the St. John the Baptist Council renamed U.S. 51 Park as Thomas F. Daley Memorial Park in his honor.

Before serving as District Attorney, Daley was an Appellate Judge in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeal in Louisiana, a position he had held since 1996.

Daley, a native of South Seaville and Neptune, New Jersey, earned his master of laws degree at the University of Virginia and his Juris Doctor (JD) degree from Loyola University. After graduating from Loyola, he remained in the New Orleans area the rest of his life.

Daley served as an Assistant District Attorney for St. John the Baptist Parish, in private practice, and then as State District Court Judge and Chief Judge. Daley was also an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University School of Law, and served on the Louisiana Supreme Court Committees on Judicial Ethics and Legal Internships. 

In 2007 the Louisiana Bar Foundation honored Daley as a Distinguished Jurist.

His additional service to the community included cleanup efforts throughout St. John the Baptist Parish, developing a program to offer job skills training to inmates and after-school tutoring, as well as leadership within his local 4-H Foundation and church.

Daley’s survivors included his wife,  Margaret Mary (Versaggi) Daley; two daughters, Bernadette Daley of LaPlace and Monique Daley of Baton Rouge; five brothers, Steve Daley of Qatar; Joe Daley of Tuckahoe, N.J., Anthony Daley of South Seaville, N.J., John Daley of Amite and Matt Daley of Woodbine, N.J.; five sisters, Terry Budd of Seaville, N.J.; Mary Anne Azzato of Southport, N.C., Chrissie Ternosky of Sea Isle City, N.J., Rosie Daley of Encinitas, Calif., and Kathleen “Tootsie” Daley of Ramsey, N.J.

Daley had lived in LaPlace, Louisiana, at the time of his death. He is buried at St. Elizabeth’s Cemetery in Goshen, New Jersey.

By Eric Schwarz, LC’92, SCILS’92,’07

[Read more Livingston College Alumni Memories.]

In 1990, Livingston College faced a transition as W. Robert Jenkins left as college dean. (Walton R. Johnson would be the next dean, serving from 1990 to 1993.) In a Daily Targum article from May 4, 1990 [PDF], Dean Jenkins noted that some of the college’s achievements included coeducational residence halls, new academic departments such as anthropology, computer science and journalism, and a diverse student population. Ernest Lynton, the college’s dean from its planning stages until 1973, recently had been honored by the university, which renamed the North and South Towers residence halls on campus for him. (The college opened in 1969.)

Students and administrators in 1990 hoped to secure more development on campus, such as an expanded student center, fraternity and sorority housing, and a Kilmer Village residential and shopping complex. I chronicled these events and reflections as Livingston College correspondent for the Targum.

It would take another 20 years before some of the visions voiced in 1990 would come to fruition at Livingston.

A student center expansion was completed in 2010, enlarging the center from approximately 35,000 square feet to more than 61,000 square feet.

The Livingston apartment complex, the largest single project Rutgers has ever built, total 650,000 square feet, including 25,000 square feet of retail space, and opened in fall 2012. The mid-rise buildings provide apartment-style living space for 1,500 students along with retail on the first level. Read a fuller description of the 2012 housing and retail project [PDF file].

Other major projects (completed or under construction) are listed in the university’s Vision for Livingston Campus site; the site chronicles development on the campus far beyond what had been planned in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Eric Schwarz is a 1992 graduate of Livingston College and the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) at Rutgers University, where he majored in Journalism and Mass Media, and English. He also earned a Master of Library and Information Science degree from SCILS in 2007.

Eddie Jordan, named in 2011 as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus, has led basketball teams on the court, and he’s been a coach for more than 30 years.

As of 2019 he is an assistant coach with the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets.

His careers as both a college player and a college coach began at Rutgers. He returned to Rutgers as the head coach of men’s basketball from 2013 to 2016.

Jordan attended Rutgers University’s Livingston College from 1973 to 1977 but didn’t graduate at that time. He completed his bachelor’s studies at Rutgers in 2015, with a degree from the School of Management and Labor Relations.

Rutgers University also has honored Jordan with induction into both the Athletic Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2004.

When Jordan took to the basketball court in the 1970s, the College Avenue Gym shook with cheers of “Eddie, Eddie,” sparking a wave of enthusiasm and school spirit that captivated the state.

He responded in spectacular fashion, scoring 1,632 points and setting all-time Rutgers records with 585 assists and 220 steals. He led the 1975–76 undefeated basketball team to the NCAA Final Four. (See articles from Rutgers Athletics and from . In May 2016, NJ Advance Media, publisher of The Star-Ledger, placed Jordan at number 17 in its list of “the 50 greatest athletes in Rutgers history.”)

He was drafted into the NBA in 1977 by the Cleveland Cavaliers and acquired by the New Jersey Nets midway through his rookie year. As a Net, he led the league in total steals in 1978–79 and was second in total steals in 1979–80.

He joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 1980, and earned a place on the 1982 World Championship squad. In his seven-year career, he averaged 8.1 points, 3.8 assists, and steals per game.

His coaching career began at Rutgers and included a number of positions in both collegiate and professional basketball. He spent four years as lead assistant coach of the Nets, guiding them to consecutive Eastern Conference championships in 2002 and 2003.

In 2003, the Washington Wizards named Jordan head coach, a position he held through 2008. Jordan led the Wizards to four straight playoff appearances, which includes the team’s first postseason series win since 1982.

Jordan returned to Rutgers in 2013 with an NBA Championship ring and with 28 seasons of coaching experience, including eight at the collegiate level and 19 in the NBA. His first day as head coach was documented in the video on this page (or open the video in a new window.)

At the same time, “Quietly, amid all of the noise about the controversial hiring of his new boss, athletic director Julie Hermann, men’s basketball coach Eddie Jordan was focused on his own tasks,” including studying to finish his bachelor’s degree he started to earn in 1973 at Rutgers’ Livingston College, ESPN’s Andy Katz reported.

Jordan eventually earned his bachelor’s degree in 2015.

<!--Jordan accepted the Livingston College Distinguished Alumni Award at a celebration on May 14, 2011. The LAA also named Gregory Q. Brown, LC'82, as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2011. -->

Union County, New Jersey, on July 29, 2013, dedicated its new county building to the late Colleen Laura Fraser, an advocate for people with disabilities and a 1974 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University.

Fraser was one of the heroes of United Airlines Flight 93 who kept their plane from becoming another weapon of destruction on September 11, 2001; she was 51.

Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All 40 passengers were killed.

The dedication of the $11 million Colleen Fraser Building, at 300 North Ave. East, Westfield, occurred on what would have been Fraser’s 63rd birthday.

Fraser, an advocate for people with disabilities for 20 years, served on the New Jersey Developmental Disabilities Council for more than 11 years. She was appointed chair of the council by New Jersey Governor James Florio in 1990 and served in that position for five years. She also served as the director of the Union County Office for the Disabled from 1985 to 1988.

The Livingston Alumni Association (LAA) posthumously honored Fraser at the 2006 Distinguished Alumni Awards. Watch the LAA’s video tribute to her (1 minute, 33 seconds), embedded on this page, or open in a new window.

Read more about Fraser from The Star-Ledger‘s coverage of the building dedication and from her obituary.

Photos of Colleen Fraser: (top) Courtesy of the Fraser family; (bottom) From the 1974 Livingston College yearbook, We the People. 

Valparaiso University in Indiana tapped Rutgers alumna Andrea D. Lyon to lead its law school as dean starting in June 2014, underscoring the growing importance of hands-on training in legal education.

Lyon, a capital defense attorney and academic clinician, is a 1973 graduate of Rutgers University’s Livingston College and a 2006 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award given by the Livingston Alumni Association (LAA). Read more about Lyon in a November 20, 2013, profile from The Indiana Lawyer.

Here’s how the LAA saluted Lyon in 2006: “In his widely publicized speech in 2003 pardoning several innocent death row prisoners and commuting all death sentences to life imprisonment, then-Governor James Ryan of Illinois singled out for praise DePaul University Law Professor Andrea Lyon, who has spent her career trying capital cases. According to Ryan, Lyon and her students at the Death Penalty Legal Clinic saved the life of inmate Madison Hobley. Lyon is a Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director, Center for Justice in Capital Cases at DePaul University College of Law. She is a nationally recognized expert in the field of death penalty defense and is a frequent speaker on the topic at legal education conferences around the United States.” 

In 2016, Lyon spoke with The New York Times about Valparaiso University’s challenges in a changing market for law school education.

And in 2023, Lucille Lo Sapio interviewed Lyon for episode 47 of Lo Sapio’s podcast, “Not So Famous in NJ – Coffee Talk and Candid Conversations.” Andrea Lyon, Rutgers alumna and former Deputy Public Defender in Chicago, talks to Lo Sapio about defending guilty people, proving the innocence of death row inmates and helping convince former Illinois Governor Ryan to abolish the death penalty while exonerating her death row client. Listen to the podcast.

Watch a short (1:17) video saluting Lyon in 2006 (above), or open the video in a new window.

Pictured: Andrea Lyon at the 2006 Livingston College Distinguished Alumni Awards.

Wells Hamilton Keddie, Professor Emeritus of Labor Studies and Employment Relations and Livingston College Fellow, was posthumously honored on March 20, 2018, with the Livingston Legacy Award, celebrating his key role in the establishment and growth of Livingston College.

Keddie passed away on April 1, 2006, at age 80.

In an interview for the 2018 award, Keddie’s wife, Mary Gibson, said that she and her husband, among other Livingston College faculty members, operated in “a very democratic community” that was disrupted by Rutgers University’s reorganization in the early 1980s.

“Wells inspired his students, and he was inspired by them,” Gibson said.

“The ranks of the labor movement in New Jersey, in New York and Pennsylvania and around the country are filled with Wells’s former students,” she said. “I think he would consider that one of his major contributions, that his students actually went into the work of the labor movement.”

Keddie was well-known for being outspoken about workers’ rights, animal rights and social justice. Even after his 2005 retirement from active teaching, Keddie regularly visited classes in the Labor Studies Department, particularly an introductory level class that he helped to shape.

Keddie was a stalwart in the faculty union, the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), serving in virtually every leadership capacity, including several terms as president.

At the time of his death, he was serving as vice president of the AAUP’s New Jersey State Conference.

Keddie was the first director of Bachelor of Science in Labor Studies degree at Livingston College, according to a history of Rutgers’ Institute of Management and Labor Relations (.PDF file), which lists the Labor Studies bachelor’s program as starting in 1969, though Keddie said that it was 1972.

An ardent advocate of animal rights, and an enemy of class, race, gender, and other systems of inequality, Keddie often described himself as “still pointed in my chosen direction and fighting like hell to get there.”

In addition to his wife, Keddie was survived by a daughter, Heather S. Keddie; a son, Hamilton Keddie; a brother, Douglas Keddie; grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, nieces, grandnieces and grandnephews.

Norman Markowitz, a Rutgers history professor, remembered Keddie as “a true working-class educator.”

“More than half a century ago, as a graduate student at the University of California, he refused to sign the anticommunist ‘loyalty oath’ that the state Legislature had passed,” Markowitz wrote for the People’s World website in 2006. “They never really got Wells, although they kept on trying, at Penn State where he was fired in spite of mass protests, and even at Rutgers. At Rutgers he played a leading role in building the American Association of University Professors and in training students who went out and became organizers and leaders of the labor movement for three decades.”

Bottom photo: Keddie, left, at a May Day picnic at his house in Piscataway, NJ, with Arsenia Reilly (center), an undergraduate student who went on to work in the labor movement, and Rutgers History Professor Norman Markowitz.

Sgt. Francis T. (Frank) Carvill (LC’75) of Carlstadt, NJ, 51, a member of the New Jersey National Guard serving in Iraq, was killed June 4, 2004, when his convoy was ambushed by a roadside explosive device in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad. He was one of five soldiers killed in that attack, during which three other New Jerseyans were wounded. 

In 2004 the Livingston Alumni Association of Rutgers University posthumously honored Carvill as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus.

Sgt. Carvill and the other soldier, Spc. Christopher Duffy, 26, were the first New Jersey National Guard servicemen to die in the Iraq war. The two men, from the 112th Field Artillery unit based in Lawrenceville, Mercer County, were part of Task Force Baghdad, made up primarily of elements of the Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division, said division spokesman Lt. Col. James Hutton. Two other New Jersey National Guardsmen were killed in a similar ambush the following day.

According to his sister, Peggy Ligouri, Carvill had survived both terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. On September 11, 2001, he was working in the North Tower as a paralegal for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He was helping a co-worker with a disability get into a van to go to a court appearance in Brooklyn when he saw the first plane hit the building.

Carvill was the second Livingston College alumnus killed in Iraq. Seth Dvorin (LC’02) was killed March 3, 2004.

• Star-Ledger coverage
  • Friend, Patriot, Good Man to All
  • Fallen Heroes
• New York Times coverage
• Associated Press coverage (via Newsday and Home News Tribune)

Gregory Q. Brown, LC’82, named as a Distinguished Alumnus of both Livingston College and Rutgers University, is a member of Rutgers’ Board of Governors as of 2021, and previously served as Chairman of the Board of Governors.

In 2011, the Livingston Alumni Association (LAA) of Rutgers University named Brown as a Distinguished Alumnus. He had been inducted into Rutgers’ Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2010.

Additionally, in 2016 Brown was honored by the Rutgers Alumni Association as a Loyal Son of Rutgers.

Brown is chairman and chief executive officer of Motorola Solutions, Inc. Brown joined Motorola in 2003 and was elected to the company’s board of directors in 2007. He became president and CEO of Motorola in January 2008. 

He has been a loyal supporter of Rutgers University in many ways. In addition to his service on the Board of Governors, his contributions to the university include:

• Chair of the Presidential Search Committee, which ended with the appointment of Robert L. Barchi as Rutgers’ 20th president, effective September 1, 2012.
• Serving as keynote speaker at the University’s 2012 Commencement, at which he was named the recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
• Hosting the 2013 Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni Awards Gala.
• Donating $2.5 million toward construction of the Brown Football Recruiting Lounge and Welcome Center at SHI Stadium (formerly Rutgers Stadium) in Piscataway.
• Serving as a former member of Rutgers’ Board of Trustees and Board of Overseers.
• He and his wife, Anna, in 2020 committed $1 million in support of Rutgers’ Scarlet Promise Grants.

At Livingston College, Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1982. Brown is an active member of the civic and business communities. He is a member of the Business Council, Business Roundtable, Technology CEO Council, Commercial Club of Chicago and the Northwestern Memorial Hospital board. He is also on the executive committee of the US-China Business Council (USCBC) and is a member of the CEO Forum.

Before becoming CEO of Motorola, he headed four different businesses at the company, including the government and public safety, networks, enterprise and automotive businesses. Brown also led the $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies, the second-largest transaction in Motorola’s history and an important strategic move to strengthen Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility business. 

Prior to joining Motorola, he was chairman and CEO of Micromuse Inc., a publicly traded network management software company. Before that, he was president of Ameritech Custom Business Services and Ameritech New Media Inc. Prior to joining Ameritech in 1987, Brown held a variety of sales and marketing positions with AT&T.

Photo and video: Livingston Alumni Association President Michael Beachem (at right in photo) presents the Livingston College Distinguished Alumni Award to Gregory Q. Brown on Dec. 14, 2011, at Winants Hall, on Rutgers’ College Avenue campus in New Brunswick. (Or open the video in a new window.)

Physician and pediatric cancer researcher Jessie J. Hanna, LC’07, was honored as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus in 2013.

In 2007 Hanna founded the Sean Hanna Foundation in honor of his brother. Sean died on April 28, 2007, at age 20, after fighting cancer for most of his life. The nonprofit foundation assists families and organizations battling cancer and is a lifeline of support for various institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

In 2014 Hanna earned a doctor of medicine degree from Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. 

Research for pediatric cancer is drastically underfunded, making it a “second-class disease,” Hanna wrote in a co-authored 2011 commentary in The Einstein Journal of Biology and Medicine. In addition to his other medical research interests, Hanna is working with the Rwandan ambassador to the United Nations to create a hospital in Rwanda focusing on pediatric cancer.

Hanna has also been active with Jessie’s Wish, The Blood Center of New Jersey, Sigma Phi Epsilon and church groups. Among Hanna’s many awards, he has received scholarships from the dean’s office of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and from the National Arab American Medical Association.

As an undergraduate student, he received Rutgers’ Spirit of Service Award in 2006, and in 2010 was honored with the Rutgers Excellence in Alumni Leadership Edward J. Bloustein Award, recognizing community service outside the university.

In 2007, he represented New Jersey as the recipient of the Jefferson Award, the highest national honor for public service, according to a 2014 profile from Rutgers Today.

Video (2 minutes): Hanna discusses his career and his brother’s legacy. Open the video in a new window.