From 1969 to 2007 Livingston College was one of the residential colleges that comprised Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey's undergraduate liberal arts programs. It was located on Livingston Campus in Piscataway, NJ. In the Fall of 2007 the New Brunswick-area liberal arts undergraduate colleges, including Livingston College merged into one School of Arts and Sciences. A Livingston College graduation ceremony was still held each year until May 2010. The last vestiges of Livingston College will end when the students who had enrolled before the 2007 merger graduate.
Named after William Livingston, the first post-colonial governor of New Jersey, Livingston College was founded in 1969 as the first coeducational, liberal arts college of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (Rutgers College was men only and Douglass College was women only). The University states: "Livingston embodied the spirit of social responsibility and cultural awareness demanded by students of the time." The College was created in response to the socio-political changes in the United States during the 1960s. It was seen as a "safe" experimental college in that though only four years old, it was part of a 200 year old university. Academic departments created at Livingston college which had never previously existed at Rutgers included Journalism, and Urban Studies and Planning.[1]
Like the other former liberal arts colleges — Douglass College, Rutgers College, University College (the night school), and the liberal arts facet of Cook College — Livingston College maintained requirements for admission, good standing, and graduation distinct from the other colleges. In 1982 Rutgers merged the faculties from these various colleges into a new Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Many questioned how long the various colleges would continue to exist under centralization, and by the turn of the century, many in the University's community were questioning whether these multiple colleges and their disparate academic requirements were serving the purposes for which they were each founded, or whether they had simply become redundant and inefficient - perhaps even victims of their own successes.