The Livingston Alumni Association (LAA) and the Livingston Theatre Company (LTC) Alumni Association have partnered with the Internet Archive to scan and digitize the printed programs from the Livingston Theatre Company’s productions — from the first production in 1999, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, through the final production of the 19th season, Oklahoma!, in 2017.

The LAA has partnered with the LTC to offer All-Alumni Theater Night/Afternoon events.

This project is made possible through financial support received from the Rutgers University Alumni Association.

Links to the individual printed programs are below:

[Editor’s Note: The following text was included in a memorial program for Wells Hamilton Keddie, a Professor Emeritus of Labor Studies and Livingston College Fellow who died in 2006. (PDF copy of the memorial program.)]

In Spring of 2005, in preparation for the inauguration of the Wells H. Keddie Scholarship Fund (scholarships to be awarded to Rutgers undergraduates who combine solid scholarship with social activism), Wells was asked to provide a brief account of his own life of activism. This is what he wrote:

A Life of Troublemaking

When I was seventeen and editor of the Cactus Chronicle, the student newspaper at Tucson Senior High School, I wrote an editorial extolling the virtues of socialism for the United States. That I still believe in the virtues of socialism is proof that hope springs eternal.

When I was 21 and editor of the San Diego State College student newspaper, I wrote an editorial extolling the virtues of unions for workers in all occupations. That I still believe in the virtues of unions for workers in all occupations is further proof that hope springs eternal.

But I did not get my first union card until the Summer of 1947 when I was a student at Stanford on the GI Bill (thanks to a two-year hitch in the Navy during World War II). I was working in the warehouse of a Nehi Bottling distributor loading trucks with case after case of bottled soft drinks. I became a card-carrying member of the Teamsters union.

The Nehi job was the scene of what was really my first (of many to follow!) serious conflict with The Boss. Truck drivers were putting in long hours without overtime pay, under a deal with the union that during the off season they could go home early without losing pay. The catch for me was that during the off season I would have gone back to my part-time job as a non-union laborer for the Stanford Corporation Yard. The answer to my problems was obvious: I claimed unpaid overtime pay on my last day on the Nehi job.

What an uproar that caused! The union, at my insistence, pursued my claim, and I won back pay. I noted at the time the sympathy expressed by the union lawyer not for me but for the management attorney for having to appear before whatever board finally settled the case.

The die, as they say, was cast. I was completely enamored of the power collective action brings and equally enamored of the need for union democracy — twin principles that have served me well during a turbulent life of trouble-making-for-The-Boss (including the occasional Union Boss…).

Some “before Rutgers” examples of trouble-making stand out in my fading memory:

After graduating from Stanford, I was in pursuit of a Ph.D. in economics (viva! GI Bill) when the University of California Board of Regents decided they needed a loyalty oath from the faculty members at all of the University’s campuses throughout the state. Resistance was most pronounced at the Berkeley campus, where a handful of professors were fired for refusing to sign the oath. As a teaching assistant I was not yet required to sign the Regents’ oath, but I did become one of the organizers of a group on the Berkeley campus opposed to the oath called the Non-Senate Academic Employees, as close as we could come to collective action, or so we thought in those days. (Unions in higher ed? Forget about it!)

In 1950, all state employees were required to sign a “loyalty” oath, and since I refused to sign, I was promptly fired from my TA position. Since the GI Bill had long since run out, graduate work was put aside as I changed from part-time blue collar work to full-time.

Full-time work included a stint at Linde Air Products as a warehouse worker, once again as a Teamster. While on that job, Dave Beck — a Union Boss if there ever was one — arranged with the employers our Teamster local union bargained with to deduct from our paychecks payments for life insurance that Dave Beck’s son just happened to be selling. A huge meeting of outraged Teamsters represented by our local rejected the deal. Next paycheck, the deduction remained intact. At the next meeting of the local, minutes of the last meeting were read, and lo and behold, no mention of the membership’s rejection of the insurance deal was made. I brashly moved to correct the minutes, was ejected from the meeting, and told to look for other work. My desire for union democracy was reinforced. …

I ended up at GM’s Fisher Body plant in Oakland, California, where we assembled Chevrolet bodies from parts shipped by rail from various locations in the East. I joined the UAW immediately, and eventually became a shop steward as well as a delegate to the Alameda County CIO Council. From that Council, I was a delegate to the California CIO State Convention at which we voted to join with the AFL to form what we know today as the AFL-CIO — it’s all my fault, folks! It was at the end of the convention when the president of the Alameda County CIO Council uttered these immortal words to me: “You are cheating the Communist Party out of dues!” It was not the first nor the last time I was red-baited over being a union activist who perversely thought that collective bargaining done right would lead to socialism. …. (Talk about being perverse!)

As luck would have it, I injured my back on the job, and I now have a Body by Fisher — if you don’t remember the ad, the play on words admittedly loses something. I went right back to graduate school, this time seeking a secondary teaching credential so that I could get a job teaching economics at a “junior college,” as community colleges were called in California. But I could not be placed for “apprentice teaching” once the school principal learned of my UAW background. I ended up at Claremont Graduate University (my then-wife had a teaching job in the Claremont Undergraduate Colleges system). While I was being smuggled into the apprentice teaching system by a really wonderful professor of education, I made contact with an equally tolerant professor of economics, and I was back in pursuit of the Ph.D. after a long lapse.

After a Ford Grant year in Iran (there is truth to the rumor that I was given the grant because of my work at General Motors), gathering material for a dissertation in development economics, I discovered there were no jobs for me in California thanks to my being on a privately generated “red” list because of my UAW activity. That’s when Lehigh University decided I was just the person to teach labor economics to its all-male undergraduates: The university had the quaint notion that these future industrialists needed to know what union-generated morass they were headed for.

The job at Lehigh made me available for teaching union members a variety of subjects under the newly formed Union Leadership Academy run in Pennsylvania by the Penn State University’s Department of Labor Education. The experience of teaching union members in labor education classes opened a whole new academic field to me, and as soon as I could I left Lehigh and economics behind me, taking a job I hadn’t known existed: in Labor Studies, at Penn State, teaching both union members and undergraduate majors. Seven years later, after trying unsuccessfully to bring the AFT to Penn State and after getting into the thick of the anti-Vietnam War struggle, I was denied tenure, the first such rejection of a department’s recommendation in the history of the school.

I then had the great good fortune to be hired as a one-person Department of Labor Studies at Rutgers’ Livingston College. I was appointed to this job by John Leggett — things were casual at Livingston College in 1972! The job came with a union in place, and the AAUP became my bargaining representative and my union stamping ground.

One of the great compliments ever paid me was said at a Livingston College faculty council meeting when President Ed Bloustein looked down the length of the table to where I sat and proclaimed: “The biggest mistake I ever made was giving you tenure.”

I have tried to live up to that standard ever since — and before, too.

Photos, from top: Wells Hamilton Keddie, around the time of his high school graduation; In the Navy; In an undated photo in or near San Francisco, California; At the State Convention where the California CIO voted to join with the AFL; At the Steelworkers Institute in 1969.

Noah Hart, Jr., a 1973 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University who attended the college for two years, edited its 1973 yearbook, Livingston in the Retrospect, 1969-1973. In the yearbook he included the following reflections on Livingston’s first four years:

On September 11, 1969, Dean Earnest Lynton addressed 300 students and faculty members on the newest branch of Rutgers University, Livingston College. One of the few times in the history of higher education in the United States had a dean of a predominately white higher education institution addressed such a racially mixed student body, and faculty.

Twenty-five per cent of Livingston’s student population was Black or Puerto Rican, the highest in the nation for a predominately white higher education institution. The faculty was composed of scholars from throughout the United States and the world. There too, minority people composed at least twenty per cent of the total.

On May 31, 1973, the students who entered Livingston that day in September, 1969 will graduate. They will be among the first official graduating class from Livingston College.

Then University President, Dr. Mason Gross called the opening of Livingston “A historic event,” because it was something new.

Livingston is still “something new”, and has a great deal to accomplish. From the 700 students who made up the original Livingston College class of 1969, has sprung a student body of 2800.

The college has grown from the mud coated, and pebble ridden, always growing embryo of 1969, to a modern and attractive addition to the Piscataway Township landscape.

Student life centers around a large games room in Tillet Hall, numerous dormitory lounges, and a huge newly completed gymnasium in the rear of quads II and III.

After only four years, the student population of Livingston College has sent men and women into many leadership roles in neighboring communities, and to many graduate schools.

The student body at Livingston College also has it’s own intercollegiate athletic program, which competes with teams on a small college level. Livingston teams compete in the Metropolitan Club Football Conference, in which they are the 1972 champions, and compete in the National Club Sports Association, which has recently ranked the football club as the 13th best in America.

Livingston has grown quite a bit since that day in September 1969. The student population has grown, the physical structure has been vastly improved, the student body is a great deal more stable, and education is the main topic of discussion.

Of all the classes which came before, and that will follow the class of 1973, non deserves more credit and acclaim than they.

Following four years of trekking to classes through mud, incompleted buildings and a host of other physical and social obstacles, the class of 1973 has found the endurance to set the pace for the many classes to come.

Noah Hart, Jr., ’73

Noah Hart, Jr., Ed.D., is the Coordinator of First Year Advising at Monmouth University.

[See also the Alumni Newsletters page.]

Tamar Kieval Brill (pictured), then Livingston College’s Assistant Dean for Special Projects, compiled the Livingston College Monthly Updates, posted online from March 2005 through February 2007. PDF copies are available here:

• March 2005
• April 2005
• May 2005
• Summer/September 2005 
• October 2005
• November 2005
• February 2006
• March 2006
• April 2006
• May 2006
• Summer/October 2006
• November/December 2006
• January/February 2007

Kevin Anthony Bernardo Apuzzio, a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician (EMT), died on April 11, 2006, in the line of duty while attempting to rescue a woman in a house fire. He was 21, and the woman, Betty Scott, was 75.

A month later, Rutgers University’s Livingston College posthumously awarded him a bachelor’s degree. Also in 2006, Apuzzio was presented posthumously with the Rutgers University Alumni Federation’s Edward J. Bloustein Award for Community Service.

In 2009 the Livingston Alumni Association honored Apuzzio as a Seth Dvorin Distinguished Young Alumnus.

At age 16, Apuzzio, a lifelong resident of Union, New Jersey, had trained to become an EMT. In 2002 he graduated from Union Catholic High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

Apuzzio had worked as a part-time EMT in Rutgers Department of Emergency Services for more than three years, and for about two years as a volunteer firefighter with the East Franklin Fire Department, Station 27, in Somerset, New Jersey, where he obtained his Firefighter 1 certification and was promoted to foreman.

Apuzzio, who had studied criminal justice at Rutgers, wanted to become a police officer in New York City. On the day of his death, his family received his police exam test results in the mail. Apuzzio achieved an almost perfect score of 99.6.

A 2009 tribute video to Apuzzio (embedded on this page) interweaves recollections from his parents and from Dan Krushinski, East Franklin Fire Chief.

Joseph Apuzzio called his son a role model. “If he even knew you just a little bit, he’d do anything he could. … He volunteered for just about anything.”

At the fatal fire, Chief Krushinski said, Apuzzio answered the call and entered the burning house “without hesitation, without doubt in his mind.”

His father also remembers taking Kevin fishing: “The first time I took him fishing, I guess he was 6, maybe 7 years old. And he caught a trout, a good size trout, OK? So he drags the trout onto the shore, and I got to pick it up and he saw where the hook was and he got very upset. He said he didn’t want to hurt the trout.”

Krushinski remembered Apuzzio as “a gentleman and easy-going, but he wanted to help people.”

“I think if you drove down (Interstate) 287 and passed five people with flat tires, he probably would have stopped and helped all five people change their tires.”

In 2007, one year to the day after Apuzzio’s passing, members of the Rutgers community and the Apuzzio family gathered in the university’s Public Safety Building to honor him by renaming the training facility the Kevin Apuzzio Training Center.

“Kevin personified the best of Rutgers students: hard work, community involvement and a desire to help others,” said Richard L. McCormick, then president of Rutgers. “We use this training center to prepare public safety personnel to serve and protect our community. It is only fitting that it bear Kevin’s name.”

In December 2013, the voting members of the East Franklin Fire Company established the Kevin A. Apuzzio Memorial Foundation to provide funds and support to student firefighters following in Apuzzio’s footsteps of community service. In June 2014, the foundation officially incorporated as a New Jersey nonprofit corporation. Funds raised support the foundation’s mission to carry on Apuzzio’s legacy through scholarships and outreach programs.

On the 10th anniversary of his death in 2016, friends and family remembered Apuzzio, with the Union Township Committee and the Union County Sheriff presenting commemorative resolutions to his family.

Apuzzio was survived by his parents, Joseph and Marili, and a sister, Leila. He is buried at Mount Olive Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey.

Read more about Apuzzio:

• An EMT and selfless hero who was devoted to others (The Star-Ledger, April 12, 2006)

• A hero, a role model (Coverage of his funeral, April 19, 2006)

Watch the LAA’s interview and video tribute to Apuzzio (2 minutes, 32 seconds), embedded on this page, or open in a new window.

Photos courtesy of the Apuzzio family and the East Franklin Fire Department.

Rutgers University has honored Paula K. Van Riper, a former assistant dean and director of advising for Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and previously for Livingston College, with a tribute plaque erected on a bench outside the James Dickson Carr Library (formerly the Kilmer Library) on Livingston campus.

Rutgers dedicated the plaque to Van Riper’s memory at a ceremony on Saturday, September 24, 2016.

Van Riper, 67, of Branchburg, New Jersey, passed away on August 20, 2015, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma.

Van Riper had served as a dean at Rutgers in various roles since 1992. Prior to joining the university, Van Riper served on the Piscataway, New Jersey, Board of Education as a member, Vice President and President, and as President of the PTA Presidents Council.

Diagnosed with myeloma in 1999, Van Riper founded the Central Jersey Multiple Myeloma Support Group, providing information, guidance, and support to many fellow patients and their families. She had spoken and written extensively in support of the myeloma community, and had appeared as its advocate before legislative bodies. She also started a yearly 5K race to support multiple myeloma research. In fall 2015, shortly after Van Riper’s death, the proceeds from the race funded a research grant in her name.

A fund-raiser for Van Riper’s memorial plaque, which ran from August 10-September 12, 2016, raised $8,840, with $7,000 earmarked for Rutgers and $1,840 for scholarships for Piscataway High School students. 

“Thousands of students remember her fondly as the advisor ready with a word of good advice, a smile and a gentle push forward,” her colleague, SAS Assistant Dean Robin Diamond, said in a video explaining the fund-raising campaign (also embedded on this page). “Need someone to talk to who would give it to you straight while still caring about your experience? Paula was your person.”

Among other accomplishments, Van Riper established a connection between the radio stations at Rutgers and Piscataway High School, allowing them to merge and serve both the university and the high school since 2000.

Garth Patterson, an academic advisor in SAS since its founding in 2007, remembers Van Riper as a professional mentor “and in uncountable ways, influenced my growth as a person.”

Jason Goldstein, a 2002 alumnus of Livingston College, remembers Van Riper from an open house event he attended before entering college.

“As a dean, Paula Van Riper provided remarks, led a panel discussion, and provided insight when answering questions from the audience. She showcased her warmth, energy, and love for students, a disposition that represented Livingston College very well,” said Goldstein, who is also a former President of the Livingston Alumni Association. “As an inquisitive high school student, I had a million questions. After the event ended, I approached Paula in the hallway to introduce myself and learn a little more. Paula spent what must have been a half hour with me and my parents sharing her passion for Livingston College and tips to be successful at Rutgers and in life. I felt there was now a face, with a beautiful smile, on this intimidating university.”

Sabrina Lauredent, an alumna from the SAS Class of 2015, remembers Van Riper as “thoughtful, kind, witty and very honest to me about everything.

“Dean Van Riper was thoughtful, kind, witty and very honest to me about everything. Dean Van Riper guided me through a lot of my academic and personal struggles, and was always willing to meet with me in between work and classes,” said Lauredent, a secretarial assistant at the Livingston Advising Center. “During each advising session she encouraged me to try harder and simply do better, and I always left feeling a little more confident in my abilities and myself.

“There were plenty of fun conversations too, about puppies, the weather and our hair. I loved everything about Dean Van Riper from the way she appreciated everyone around her, the way she spoke, the pretty scarves she wore, her cute green Prius, and the hugs she gave me before and after every long break.”

Van Riper was born in 1947 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and graduated from Franklin High School in 1965. Van Riper earned a B.S. in Business Administration from Rider University in 1969, and a Master’s in Social Work from Rutgers in 1997.

She is survived by her son Ryan Van Riper, daughter Renee (Whitman) and her husband Eric Whitman, brother Richard Bonopane, sister Bonnie (Fochi), brother Alan Bonopane, and grandson Alexander Whitman. She is predeceased by her parents, Vincent and Frances Bonopane.

George Warren Carey, who served as Livingston College’s Acting Dean for one year, from 1973-1974, was a Professor and Chairman of the Division of Urban Studies at Livingston College, affiliated with Rutgers’ Center for Urban Policy Research.

He also had been a professor of Urban Geography at Columbia University.

Carey died on January 10, 2012, at age 85. 

His research includes the 1969 book, Teaching Population Geography: An Interdisciplinary Ecological Approach, co-written with Julie Schwartzberg; the 1972 monograph, Urbanization, Water Pollution, and Public Policy, co-written with several other researchers; and a 1974 study on “hypocritical decision-making” for the journal Human Ecology, co-written with Michael R. Greenberg, an Associate Professor of Community Development, Geography and Planning at Livingston College.

In 1974 he spoke at Vassar College on “Demography, Education, Urban Renewal and the Washington, D. C. Ghetto: A Statistical-Cartographic Analysis.”

Carey, born January 1, 1927, was the son of the late George Anthony and Florence Kearns Carey of the Bronx, New York.

Carey received a B.A., an M.A. in economic history and a Ph.D. in geography from Columbia University, according to a notice of his wedding to Janet Lipschultz, published on October 31, 1988, in The New York Times.

He served in the Army Air Corps from 1944-1946.

In a November 21, 1988, New York Times article, Carey spoke of his conversion to Judaism, “after a lifetime of seeking, of reading in philosophy, of reading in religion, of experiencing what life has to offer.”

At the time of his death, Carey lived in Old Chatham, New York. In addition to his wife, he was survived by multiple children and grandchildren.

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.

Livingston College’s innovations in academics, student life and governance, especially in its early years, have been the topic of multiple published articles, both popular and scholarly. Here is a selected bibliography:

Clemens, P. G. E., & Yanni, C. (2016). The early years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting the “college of good intentions.” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 68(2), 71-114. [Full text online]

Livingston College’s innovations in academics, student life and governance, especially in its early years, have been the topic of multiple published articles, both popular and scholarly. Here is a selected bibliography:

Clemens, P. G. E., & Yanni, C. (2016). The early years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting the “college of good intentions.” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 68(2), 71-114. [Full text online]

Abstract: Livingston College was planned in the late 1960s and opened in fall 1969 as part of Rutgers University-New Brunswick/Piscataway.  Ernest Lynton, its first dean and chief architect, envisioned a college that emphasized interdisciplinary studies, that had a faculty and student body who would carry what was learned in the classroom into the community, that would empower students to shape the college and their own education, and that would recruit significant numbers of new students from historically disadvantaged minority groups.  This “college of good intentions” fell short of Lynton’s hopes.  This article examines why this happened, but also seeks to illustrate the many ways the hopes for educational reform embodied in the college’s design foreshadowed what many universities, including Rutgers, would accomplish in the future.

Hann, C. (2012, Spring). Great expectations. Rutgers Magazine, 92(2), 50-55. [Full text online]

“More than 40 years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, a bold experiment in higher education got under way at Rutgers. It was called Livingston College. During its formative years, the college’s ideals—from its progressive curriculum to its goal of serving underrepresented students—attracted distinguished faculty from top universities and ushered in the diversity that today is a hallmark of Rutgers.”

This article details and celebrates the history of Livingston College, which was one of Rutgers-New Brunswick’s undergraduate units from 1969 to 2007. A sidebar article details the transformation of the Livingston campus “into a state-of-the-art center for business and professional education.”

Hidalgo, H. (1973). No one model American: A collegiate case in point.  The Journal of Teacher Education, 24(4), 294-301. [Excerpts from the article]

Abstract: An examination of Livingston College at Rutgers as an example of some of the difficulties and successes in the implementation of the “No One Model American” statement.

Horowitz, I. L., and Feigenbaum, J. (1980, July). Experiment perilous: The first year of Livingston College of Rutgers University. Urban Education, 15(2), 131-168.

Abstract: Livingston College was established to provide a terminal social science program, particularly for lower-income minority students, though the majority of its students are Jewish and middle class. Despite efforts to make Livingston a model college, however, external social, racial, and economic variables cannot be controlled.

Siederer, M. (2020, Spring/Summer). Livingston at 50: Celebrating the college built on ‘Strength Through Diversity’. 1766 [alumni magazine], 37(1), 14-19. [Full text online]

When Livingston College welcomed its first students in September 1969, many of the campus’ buildings, sidewalks, and landscaping were still under construction, with piles of mud throughout, giving rise to the original name of the student newspaper: The Mud Pile. Between 1969 and 2010, when Livingston had its final commencement, the Piscataway-based college was a hub of innovation for Rutgers University. Livingston  adopted the slogan “Strength Through Diversity,” which is now a foundation of the overall Rutgers University experience.

Photos courtesy of Rutgers Magazine.