Livingston College. Office of the Dean

Livingston College: An Early History

The 1960s were typified by a new consciousness and social change within American society and its universities. Many traditional institutions were subject to scrutiny and, in some cases, altered: the family, the government, the business community, the religious establishment, and the schools. Questions of social equity and legitimacy were articulated in unprecedented measure, and social movements such as the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the women’s movement, Vietnam War teach-ins, equal opportunity legislation, and the hippie culture were pervasive on campuses.

During this period of social turmoil, American universities underwent enormous growth in population size and scope of programs, and also experienced profound changes in values. Rutgers, as a major urban state university, was subject to all the pressures and problems created by social and political tension, the urban crisis, and the changing nature of mass higher education.

Like other American universities in the 1960s, Rutgers University witnessed unprecedented growth and development under the leadership of President Mason Gross. In 1959, the first of three bond issues was passed by the citizens of New Jersey, enabling the University to embark upon a $75 million building program. By 1964, enrollment had doubled with more than 12,000 full-time undergraduate students. A second public referendum yielded approximately $19 million for Rutgers. Gross continued to campaign for funds for the University and an additional $68 million was secured in 1968. As a result of increased public support, construction took place on every campus of the University. Livingston College was born of these trends: “the growth and expansion of Rutgers to full university status; the pressure to deal with equality of opportunity for minority students and faculty; alterations in curriculum, student life and governance; and the impact of New Jersey state government-coordinated planning for higher education.” (1) In 1964, Rutgers acquired 540 acres of the former Camp Kilmer army base from the federal government. That same year, construction began on what was to become Livingston College.

The plan for the new Kilmer-area college underwent a number of iterations. The University had to submit a proposal to the U.S. Defense Department detailing the educational purposes for the land. An Advisory Planning Committee was arranged by the Provost, Richard Schlatter, to discuss these plans with the Deans of the other colleges. The committee members approached the development of Camp Kilmer with different philosophies and the discussions ended in total disagreement. The committee could not decide whether the new site would be conceived as a cluster college or a federated college. A Federated College Plan was formulated and revised in 1966, only to be found unacceptable in May 1967 due to divisions within the university system over autonomy. Meanwhile, a new initiative was spearheaded by Professor Ernest A. Lynton, then the professor in the Arts and Sciences Physics Department, and G. Reginald Bishop, the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Their proposal became known as the Bishop-Lynton plan, which proposed a federated approach to the initial planning for the site. “Douglass, which represented the anomaly in the system in 1963, became the model for all the undergraduate colleges by 1967. That is, each college was to have not only its own faculty but its own student-life and student-services apparatus and its own turf as well. In the process of devising a plan to coordinate a group of liberal arts faculties and strengthen the basic disciplines, the University in fact ended in 1967 with a number of relatively autonomous residential, multi-purpose colleges.” (2) Along with President Gross’s own eleven-point plan, these proposals became the foundation for the new Kilmer college, which would provide a liberal arts education similar to the Rutgers University College of Arts and Sciences.

Livingston College, named after New Jersey’s first governor, William Livingston, opened in September 1969 with close to 700 students and Ernest Lynton as Dean. The new undergraduate, co-educational, liberal arts college made an effort to recruit its students from the urban poor, whether from an ethnic or multicultural background. The college functioned as part of a federated plan along with Douglass and Rutgers Colleges. Under this plan, the schools maintained their own faculty and student-life while allowing students to take courses throughout the University.

From the beginning of his administion, Lynton ran the college according to his own beliefs. He first created an Academic Planning Committee to help generate educational policies. Lynton began to reflect on the campus’ relationship to the rest of the University while expounding on his ideas about collegiate organization. His ideas began to veer from the federated plan in the Bishop-Lynton memorandum. Lynton supported the autonomy and the identity of each college. He believed that each college should have its own faculty, the members of which would be appointed by the dean of that college on the recommendation of the disciplinary departments. Each faculty would determine its own educational policies and graduation requirements; there need not be identical curricula for each college. Though he believed that each college should have their own budget, Lynton also proposed that each school should have a representative department on the New Brunswick campus. These departments would be tasked with pooling all budgetary allocations to both strengthen the discipline and meet the distinctive needs of each college. The deans of each college would occupy equivalent positions and would work cooperatively with one another and with the Dean of the Graduate School. Differences between deans would be resolved by the Provost.

Lynton believed that the goal of a liberal arts education is to create awareness of fundamental social, economic, and political problems and the manner in which the methodologies of relevant academic disciplines can address them. More specifically, Lynton cited the rapid, uncontrolled, and unbalanced growth of urban complexes, the explosive and often chaotic development of non-European nations, and the inability of Western countries to assimilate scientific and technical problems as areas around which the staff and curriculum of the new college might be organized. He proposed interdisciplinary majors relevant to each area including urban studies, comparative literature, and programs in city and regional planning. This gave the new college a special focus and identity.

The themes that drove the development of Livingston stretched those of traditional college educational policy and organization. Livingston came to embody the ideal of a liberal arts education focused on awareness of social, political, and economic problems. This emphasis made Livingston a very different college than its counterpart institutions. As the first coeducational, liberal arts college of Rutgers University, Livingston tried to incorporate many of the changes being tested elsewhere in the nation. In contrast to the rest of Rutgers University – and to higher education in general – Livingston attempted to alter:

The mission of the College was progressive and contemporary; students were expected to understand and respect different cultures, have a working awareness of contemporary social issues, and learn to be responsible leaders of their communities.” (3) From the outset, Dean Lynton wanted Livingston to be “innovative…the MIT of the social sciences” (4), and attention “was paid to [designing] a small, intimate, college environment for students.” (5) Early focuses were “the themes of the social sciences, urban and international affairs, a cross-disciplinary approach, and the use of computer science.” (6) Many of these themes were implemented when Livingston College opened its doors in 1969; yet, “the school that opened…bore only a passing resemblance to the “MIT of the Social Sciences” that was first envisioned.” (7) Consensus over university-wide reorganization was slow to develop, and racial tensions in the area were at a boiling point. Yet, Lynton, the planning staff and faculty all played a part in developing a multiracial populated college which “proposed many ideas and programs during this period, some of which later became institutionalized, such as pass-fail grading, internships, and problem-oriented courses." (8)

Cultural pluralism was a sought after goal as early as 1968, as Livingston’s Admission Committee “made a commitment to recruit and admit…high potential, high risk students.” (9) A special summer program was instated in order to focus on skills development, academic support services, and financial aid resources. As a result of these efforts, “there are strong indications that Livingston College, with an initial class almost one-third black and Latin, had the highest ratio of black and minority group students of any non-black institution of higher learning in the United States” (10) at the time. The majority of American higher learning institutions in the late 1960s typically admitted less than two percent minority students among their freshman; by comparison, Livingston College’s freshman class was comprised of 25 percent. The hiring of minority faculty was also outlined in 1968, and Lynton did his best to achieve this goal.

Steps were taken to alleviate the “racial pluralism and its attendant problems [that had become] one of the strongest forces influencing Livingston’s development” (11) and its relationship with the surrounding community. The college was viewed in a negative light by many in the university and State and it sought to assuage these concerns with investigations, outreach programs and the further strengthening and defining of the administrative structure. “Lynton [repeatedly sought to] reaffirm the commitment to a multiracial institution" (12) but the struggle to maintain this pledge continued unabated long after he left the school.

Early struggles also arose over the nature of interdisciplinary curriculum. “The overall interdisciplinary curriculum which had been the subject of much rhetoric during the early planning stages was realized only to a limited extent during the first four years of operation. A critical obstacle was the college department structure. Since faculty lines and courses were departmental, no structural mechanism existed to facilitate, promote, and reward interdisciplinary faculty efforts. With the major exceptions of Urban Studies and Literatures, Languages and Linguistics, most departments reflected standard disciplinary association. As a result, the traditional disciplinary departments dominated.” (13) However, among these were a number of innovative programs. Livingston was the first college to institute programs of study in Computer Science, Urban Studies, Journalism, Social Work, and Physician Assistant. To this day, Social Work and Physician Assistant are Livingston-only majors.

A physicist by training, Ernest A. Lynton was born in Germany in 1926 and immigrated to the United States in 1941. He married his wife Carla and had two sons, David and Eric with seven grandchildren. After obtaining a physics doctorate at Yale, he eventually settled in Princeton and joined the physics department at Rutgers University in 1952. A proponent of experimental education, he became the first dean of Livingston College from its planning phases in 1964, through its opening in 1969, and until 1973. Afterwards, he became senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Massachusetts, where he joined the faculty in 1980 and assisted in establishing a doctoral higher education program. He also simultaneously served as a co-founder and senior associate of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education from 1988 until his death in 1998. He remained in contact with Livingston College and initiated a scholarship for students with high academic standing and community achievements. Mr. Lynton died in 1998 at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts at the age of seventy-one. He published numerous articles and two books. (14)

Lynton’s views, perspective and style were key to the development of Livingston College. After all, “the forces influencing Livingston’s development through the academic year of 1966-67 were mostly personal. The major influence, then and throughout the early history of the school, was indisputably Dean Ernest Lynton….His personal stewardship of every aspect of planning, policy development, and personnel recruitment defined the emphases and directions of Livingston….[He was] the single most pervasive force…[and his] departure...is a distinct demarcation line in the life of the college.” (15)

His highly personalized leadership was criticized, as was his lack of attention to administrative structure. However, it was also noted by his critics that he always “kept clearly before him the mission of the college…[and] he left an indelible personal stamp on the institution…[with] his candid and grateful acknowledgement that there was a ‘constant sense of discovering on Tuesday that something should have been done on Monday.’” (16)

(1) Kehl, Shelley Sanders. (1977, June). Academic Change in Process in Undergraduate Education: A Case Study at Livingston College. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 84.

(2) McCormick, Richard P. (1978, November). An Alternative to Federation: A Model for Academic Organization in New Brunswick. Unpublished work, Rutgers University, NJ, 35.

(3) Livingston College. (n.d.). About Livingston College: History Retrieved April 17, 2005, from http://livingston.rutgers.edu/about/history.php

(4) Kehl, Shelley Sanders. (1977, June). Academic Change in Process in Undergraduate Education: A Case Study at Livingston College. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 122.

(5) Ibid ., 121.

(6) Ibid ., 122.

(7) Ibid ., 126.

(8) Ibid ., 128.

(9) Ibid ., 144.

(10) Ibid ., 146.

(11) Ibid ., 185.

(12) Ibid ., 188.

(13) Ibid ., 199.

(14) Nugent, Meg. (1998, March 21). Ernest A. Lynton, 71, pioneering educator. The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J., page unknown.

(15) Kehl, Shelley Sanders. (1977, June). Academic Change in Process in Undergraduate Education: A Case Study at Livingston College. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 127, 256.

(16) Ibid ., 256.