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. 

Livingston and Rutgers faculty, staff, alumni and friends paid tribute to Edward G. Ortiz, one of the pioneering professors in the beginnings and development of Livingston College, at a memorial program on December 2, 2010, at the Brower Commons, College Avenue Campus, in New Brunswick.  (View photos from the memorial.)

In May 2009 the Livingston Alumni Association (LAA) honored Professor Ortiz with the Livingston Legacy Award in recognition of the key role he played in the establishment and growth of Livingston College and its mission, and contributions to the overall Rutgers and global communities. 

The LAA named Ortiz as an Honorary Alumnus in April 1994.

The memorial program was sponsored by Friends of Ed Ortiz, The Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, The Rutgers Center for Latino Arts and Culture, The Rutgers Vice President’s Office for Academic and Public Partnerships, and the Livingston Alumni Association. Ortiz died on March 13, 2010.

By Patricia Graham, LC’72

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”).

(Contact Patricia via email.)

By William Ciaburri, LC’76

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.

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.

By Rob Snyder, LC’77

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.

Livingston College Dean Arnold G. Hyndman issued The Dean’s Annual Report. Online copies of the report are available for the following years:

• 1997-1998 (HTML)
• 1998-1999 (HTML)
• 1999-2000 (HTML)
• 2000-2001 (PDF)

Photo: Dean Arnold G. Hyndman, from the 2001 yearbook, Diversity, Making Connections Vol. XI.

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)

Arnold G. Hyndman, dean of Livingston College, wrote the following letter to the Class of 2002, included in the college yearbook, Diversity: A College Tale.

To the Class of 2002:

It is with fond memories and best wishes that on behalf of Livingston College, I bid you farewell. This class is uniquely positioned in history. Your time at Livingston College bridged two different centuries, and due to the events of September 11, 2001, very possibly crossed between two distinctive periods of American and World History. Regardless of what the future holds, I am confident that Livingston College prepared you well for the challenges of these new times. This includes an appreciation for community, a global perspective on life, and the leadership skills to work effectively with others.

As you prepare for your tomorrows, I encourage you to engage and change the world in simple, and yet critical and lasting ways. Strive to be a better son or daughter, a faithful friend, and concerned neighbor. If you have learned the lessons of Livingston, then you will also go on to be a concerned citizen, a competent employee or employer, and perhaps a supportive spouse or loving parent. Nevertheless, in whatever you do and whomever you interact with, your goal will be to leave each place or person in a better condition than when you found them.

May the true peace that surpasses all understanding rule and guard all that you do from this day forward.

Arnold G. Hyndman, Ph.D.

Dean

Walton R. Johnson, dean of Livingston College, wrote the following letter to the Class of 1992, included in the college yearbook, Diversity, Volume Two: A Style of Our Own.

May 25, 1992

TO THE LIVINGSTON COLLEGE GRADUATING CLASS OF 1992

Commencement is truly the beginning of the journey of life. The fellows, staff and administrators of Livingston College wish you all the best. We take pride in your accomplishments and are grateful to have played a part, however small, in your attaining a degree.

Starting an important journey is always fraught with anxieties. That is especially true in this time of economic recession and uncertain social and political climate. Nevertheless, you should embark upon this journey with confidence. Livingston College has prepared you well.

Although it was perhaps not always clear while you were enmeshed in daily life at Livingston, you should remember the college’s tradition of being at the educational frontier. We have stressed teaching and learning, social responsibility and community service, pride in diversity, and social justice.

These uniquely Livingston values in your Rutgers education have prepared you well for the journey you are now starting. They will continue to serve you well. Carry them with you as you venture forth.

We are anxious that you always remember where your journey began. Please plan to return something to Livingston College. We hope to see you here often and, of course, we anticipate your becoming active members of the Livingston Alumni family.

Bon voyage!

Walton R. Johnson
Dean