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.)

[See also the page on the Livingston Legacy Awards, established in 2009.]

The Livingston Alumni Association, and its predecessor, the Livingston College Association of Graduates, from 1981 to 1999 named the following 26 people as Honorary Members, to recognize their contributions to Livingston College:

Ernest A. Lynton (1981)	W. Carey McWilliams (1982)	Gloria Rojas (1983)	Wells Keddie (1984)
Livingston College Dean	Professor, Political Science	Television Journalist	Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations

Charley Flint (1985)	Albert E. Blumberg (1985)	John C. Leggett (1987)	W. Robert Jenkins (1990)
Professor, Sociology	Professor, Philosophy	Professor, Sociology	Livingston College Dean

Walton R. Johnson (1991)	Edward G. Ortiz (1994)	P. Dennis Bathory (1995)	Lora (Dee) Garrison (1995)
Livingston College Dean	Professor, Urban Studies and Community Health	Professor, Political Science	Professor, History and Women’s Studies

Shanti S. Tangri (1996)	Melvin Gary (1996)	Allen Howard (1996)	Roger Cohen (1997)
Professor, Economics and South Asian Studies	Professor, Psychology	Professor, History	Professor, Journalism and Media Studies

Martin Gliserman (1997)	Gerald Pomper (1997)	Emma Warren (1997)	Abena P.A. Busia (1998)
Professor, English	Professor, Political Science	Director, Kilmer Library	Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, and English

Ernest F. Dunn (1998)	Mary B. Gibson (1998)	Horst Dieter Steklis (1998)
Professor, Africana Studies	Professor, Philosophy	Professor, Psychology

Briavel Holcomb (1999)	Arnold G. Hyndman (1999)	George L. Levine (1999)
Professor, Planning and Public Policy	Livingston College Dean	Professor, English

Video (2 minutes, 3 seconds): Amutah-Onukagha discusses her career and the cultural opportunities she experienced at Livingston College. Open the video in a new window.

Photos: (top) Courtesy of Amutah-Onukagha; (bottom) From the 2003 Livingston College yearbook, Diversity: Roots of Knowledge, Volume XIII.

Educator and historian Nicholas Ferroni, LC’03, was honored as a Livingston College Distinguished Alumnus in 2013.

Ferroni has received national attention for his unique and innovative methodology in successfully mentoring and reaching contemporary and urban students, and has been featured in various academic and scholarly journals.

Ferroni, a former actor turned teacher, writer and host, was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in America for his commitment to education reform as well as developing a “Teach the Truth” campaign to incorporate more minority figures and groups into the high school social studies curriculum.

Ferroni was also named one of Men’s Fitness magazine’s “25 Fittest Men in the World,” “The Man of Appeal” by Rutgers magazine, and “The Sexiest Teacher Alive” by People magazine. As of 2021 Ferroni is a history teacher at Union High School in Union, New Jersey.

He has written for HuffPost about education, diversity, and his pride in New Jersey, among other issues. 

Ferroni has said that since he can’t do history, he teaches it.

His activism inside the classroom, in the media, and online, though, promises to change the history of those he teaches.

His continuing lessons to his students include:

• Advocating for the LGBT community;
• Conducting a social experiment to teach about the underrepresentation of women in Congress;
• Organizing a crowdfunding campaign to help a student and his family recover from a housing crisis.

“Most teachers, including myself, see our students as our ‘kids,’ ” Ferroni told People in 2018. “They are not just students to us, and we care as much about their success in life as their success in class.”

Follow Nicholas Ferroni on Twitter.

Videos: (Center) Ferroni discusses his career and passions. (Bottom) Ferroni’s acceptance video. Or open the videos in a new window.

Wilson Carey McWilliams (1933–2005), known as Carey, was posthumously honored in 2015 with the Livingston Legacy Award for his role as a distinguished political scientist throughout most of Livingston College’s history.

McWilliams was a political scientist at Livingston College and Rutgers University for 35 years.

McWilliams was born in Santa Monica, California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, then served in the 11th Airborne Division of the United States Army from 1955–1961. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the same university. He was also active in the early stages of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the student activist group SLATE.

Prior to teaching at Rutgers he taught at Oberlin College and Brooklyn College. He was also a visiting professor at Yale University, Harvard University and Haverford College. He came to Yale in spring 1969 with a timely and provocative seminar on “American Radical Thought.”

McWilliams was the recipient of the John Witherspoon Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, conferred by the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, and also served as a Vice-President of the American Political Science Association.

McWilliams was the author of several books, including The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973, University of California Press), for which he won the National Historical Society prize in 1974. In this book, McWilliams argued that there was an “alternative tradition” to the dominant liberal tradition in America, which he variously traced through the thought of the Puritans, the Anti-Federalists, and various major and minor literary figures such as Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Ellison. He argued that this tradition drew philosophical inspiration from ancient Greek and Christian sources manifested in an emphasis upon community and fraternity, which was properly the means to achieving a form of civic liberty. McWilliams was also a prolific essayist.

McWilliams died on March 29, 2005, at age 71. He had been married for 38 years to the psychoanalyst and author Nancy Riley McWilliams. Carey and Nancy have two daughters, the musician Helen McWilliams, and Susan McWilliams, an associate professor of politics.

McWilliams "really cared about individual students," his spouse Nancy Riley McWilliams tells us in the embedded video. "He made the ideas of long-dead thinkers be alive and relevant to students”>(You may also open the video in a new window.)