Livingston College alumni have contributed to society in their own communities and in many professional realms. We highlight here alumni who have enjoyed success and recognition for their work:
The new Livingston Dining Commons opened in late August 2011, and began operating in the fall 2011 semester. The $30.5 million multistory dining facility, adjacent to the Livingston Student Center, replaced Tillett Dining Hall with an upscale, modern environment. The dining commons is about 58,000 square feet.
The Livingston Campus (known as “Livi”) today is a thriving component of Rutgers University, boasting some of the university’s best traditions and innovations in:
Student life (including an expanded student center that opened in 2010, a new dining commons that opened in 2011, and a new apartment complex for up to 1,600 students that opened in fall 2012).
Energy innovation (serving as the home for a large solar panel installation).
Livingston Campus is also home to Jersey Mike’s Arena, known as the “RAC,” which opened in 1977. The RAC is the home of Rutgers’ men’s and women’s basketball teams, concerts, graduations, and other large events held by Rutgers and surrounding communities. A retail complex, boasting restaurants, a movie theater and a “Jersey diner,” opened in 2013.
The renovated and expanded Livingston Student Center had a grand reopening April 7, 2010. The Department of University Relations has shared with us the photos taken by University Photographer Nick Romanenko.
The RutgersZone, which opened in 2010 in the expanded LSC, is a fun hangout, teaches students leadership skills, and can even host parties and events for alumni and others outside Rutgers. Read more in Rutgers Focus.
(Left): Members of the Liberated Gospel Choir perform at the celebration, which marked the first renovation since construction in 1986.
(Right): University President Richard L. McCormick officially cut the ribbon. This $20 million project expands the building from about 35,000 to more than 61,000 square feet.
(Left): Guests are treated to a multimedia demonstration. The former College Hall multipurpose room has been renovated and renamed Livingston Hall.
(Right): Eric Kaplan and Winiris De Moya show off “I Love Livingston” buttons.
(Left): First-year student Harsh Shah lines up a shot in the Rutgers Zone. The facility also features a learning center with connections for computer and video use. (Right): Guests were given biodegradable garden kits.
It is a pleasure to share my favorite memories of my college years at Livingston. Below is my list of joyful memories:
1) “The Black Woman” class (parts I and II) taught by Professor Sonia Sanchez. Professor Sanchez taught the class in a room that had a kitchen, because she often cooked for us! The setting was cozy and intimate. The guest speakers were accomplished women: poets, authors, politicians.
2) “Black Revolutionary Drama” class, taught by Professor Sanchez. Often the class would act-out the short plays that we were assigned. A favorite memory is when we performed, in class, “In the Wine Time,” for the author Ed Bullins.
3) “Forgotten Black Heroes” class. The professor was excellent, of Caribbean descent. I wish I could remember his name. A memory that sticks with me is my class research topic: Kwame Nkrumah, former president of Ghana. My verbal presentation was very emotional, because Nkrumah died shortly before I completed my research.
4) The class trip, for “Research Techniques African American History” to Harlem, to do our research in the Schomburg Library, which was located in the old historic building at the time. Afterwards, the professor took the class to his apartment for dinner!
5) The first Women’s History Month conference, on campus. I believe it was held in 1971. It was exciting, with lots of speakers, and workshops.
6) I enjoyed the fabulous speakers, poets, writers, jazz musicians, and artists that we were exposed to, as college students. Many of these artists were our professors, such as: Nikki Giovanni, Nathan Heard, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Cade-Bambara, to name a few. It was a cultural mecca!
Livingston provided me with the basis of a lifetime of cultural and professional interests. As a recently retired college professor, I had the opportunity to develop and teach classes that directly reflected my experiences as a student at Livingston (“Women of the African Diaspora”; and “Frederick Douglass: Social Justice”).
Patricia Graham is a 1972 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University. She also earned an M.Ed. degree at Antioch in 1974, and an Ed.D. degree from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995.
Coming to Rutgers’ Livingston College in 1971, two years after it opened, was an eye-opening experience for William (Bill) Ciaburri, a Hamden, Connecticut, native who later returned there. (His photo at right is from 2012.)
Ciaburri shared some of his most vivid memories of college life via email, on …
The college:
Zen and Japanese Literature opened up a whole different world and way of thinking for a sheltered Catholic boy from the Connecticut suburbs. Also, Urban Ecology in 1971 was brand new and an incredibly radical outlook on city living.
The campus:
In 1971 Livingston College and its campus wasn’t fully complete yet. Faculty and students intermingled easily. I remember trucking down to the old army barracks where many classes were held.
His fellow students:
In my freshman year, 1971-72, there were many upperclassmen in my dorm who were mentors to the freshmen, and involved us in some of the activities they were in such as working at the radio station, the coffee house, etc.
Living at Rutgers (Livingston’s Quad 1 his freshman year, then off-campus):
I also recall my first day and walking to my room in the dorm in Quad 1 and everyone’s name and hometown was on their room door. Mine said “Camden” (crossed out) and under it “Hamden Court.” I crossed out “Court” and wrote in “Connecticut.” I read everyone else’s signs which all had towns I never heard of like Red Bank, Cinnaminson and even Piscataway. Yet that night when we gathered in the first floor lounge I was welcomed by everyone and was made an honorary Jerseyite!
Faculty influences:
Dr. Janet Walker and Dr. Steven Walker, who were also student advisors/mentors and were always available to students. In many ways they were also like our big brother and sister.
Dr. W. Robert Jenkins, who was an energetic and inspiring biology professor, later became dean of Livingston.
Dr. J.J. Wilhelm, who taught literature so masterly one actually enjoyed reading!
The experience of New York (and New Brunswick):
I learned that the world is an exciting and diverse place. Being so close to New York City and having many field trips there for classes such as art history, religion classes and music classes also helped. For a Veteran’s Day anti-war march down 7th Avenue, in the pouring rain, we took the campus bus into town and then a bus to Manhattan. We returned to New Brunswick soaking wet and had pizza and pitchers of beer at the Hungarian Club with the locals who tolerated us being there.
William Ciaburri is a 1976 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
When I lived in Greenwich Village in the 1980s, residents had a habit of telling newcomers that they had arrived too late for the really interesting times. The exact date of this golden age varied with the teller of the tale, from the days of the folkies in the Sixties to the beats of the Fifties to the Wobblies before World War I. Something similar applied at my alma mater, Livingston College of Rutgers University. I was graduated in 1977, when the college was committed to educational innovation, egalitarian admissions, and urban issues. In subsequent years, when the school was centralized out of existence and fully absorbed into Rutgers, I was convinced that the old Livingston I knew died. But thanks to a forum last week [March 11, 2009] at Livingston, I’m no longer sure.
The gathering, organized by Marty Siederer for the Livingston Alumni Association, featured three faculty members: Ed Ortiz from community development and Gerry Pomper and Gordon Schochet from political science. Together, and in different ways, they all reminded me of the innovation, improvisation, and tough-minded idealism that made Livingston a great undergraduate college. Our course offerings included urban communications, community development, women’s studies and social history. (And zaniness: Where else would students hold orgies and then ask if they could get course credit for participating?)
But what inspired me was to hear more recent graduates — I’m thinking especially of one woman who was at Livingston in the early Nineties — extol “The Rock” as an enduring center for radicalism and innovation. What explains this?
Partly this happened because of an unexpected benefit of centralization: it scattered Livingston faculty and administrators all over Rutgers, where they dramatically improved the place. Also, a few faculty members and grad students really did work to maintain the spirit of the old days, even after the educational structures that supported The Rock were all but gone.
Until now, I felt that I was the graduate of a fine college that was left dead and buried. Now, I feel that some of its best legacies live on.
It wasn’t always easy being at Livingston, a place where ordinary Democrats were depicted as conservatives and the left was defined by outfits like the New Jersey Workers’ Organization (Marxist-Lenninist). That made a democratic socialist like me, an admirer of Michael Harrington, a flaming moderate.
But I’ve always cherished my Livingston years, when I received an education that was not only liberal, but liberating as well. For years I was sorry that younger people didn’t get to experience that kind of learning. Now it turns out that they did, and I’m very glad for that.
Rob Snyder is a 1977 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University. He is pictured above in the 1977 Livingston College yearbook, The Rock. He originally posted this article to his blog, Greater New York, on March 16, 2009. In 2018 the Livingston Alumni Association honored Snyder as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus.
2003-04 Executive Board and Council 
When I lived in Greenwich Village in the 1980s, residents had a habit of telling newcomers that they had arrived too late for the really interesting times. The exact date of this golden age varied with the teller of the tale, from the days of the folkies in the Sixties to the beats of the Fifties to the Wobblies before World War I. Something similar applied at my alma mater, Livingston College of Rutgers University. I was graduated in 1977, when the college was committed to educational innovation, egalitarian admissions, and urban issues. In subsequent years, when the school was centralized out of existence and fully absorbed into Rutgers, I was convinced that the old Livingston I knew died. But thanks to a