Experiment in "Relevance"

When it comes to black students, most U.S. colleges are still asking that old white question: What do they want? The answer is: education that can help them wipe out black poverty, strengthen black culture and combat U.S. racism. Whether or not that tall order can ever be filled, a few schools have started experiments that could benefit not only blacks but students of all races. An example of this trend is Livingston College, a new undergraduate school opened seven months ago by New Jersey's state-run Rutgers University.

Livingston College (named for the state's first post-colonial Governor) has gone far beyond most "integrated" U.S. campuses, which typically remain about 98% white. The pioneering freshman class of 629 students is 75% white, 20% black and 5% Hispanic. Almost 20% of the faculty is black and Puerto Rican. Most students come from New Jersey, but from quite different social classes. In high school some were successful and others had spotty records, but all jumped at the chance to help start a new college. Livingston will eventually grow to 3,500 students, and it has already attracted 3,600 applicants for next year's freshman class.

Reverse Approach. Unlike most schools, Livingston emphasizes one field: urban problems. As if to make this subject even more "relevant," the college admitted 125 ghetto youths with poor academic records but with other kinds of achievement, notably community activism. "We started with the premise that these kids could be educated," says Professor Samuel Sanderson, black chairman of the community development department. "Then we decided to test what was wrong with present colleges, and not assume that something was wrong with the kids."

According to Dean Ernest A. Lynton, a 43-year-old white physicist who was one of Livingston's key planners, a major problem is that college has become compulsory in U.S. life. Millions go because they have to, not because they want to. "The burden of proof is on us, and it starts with concern for the students' own interests," says Lynton. Livingston thus reverses the usual curriculum: students start with real problems, then learn how theory may solve them. The hope is that a new respect for academic disciplines will follow.

Livingston's courses range from English and political science to "Pop Music" (especially rock) and "Contemporary Youth Movements." Individual projects abound. A girl in an urban studies class is exploring what happens when a black newspaper is started in a town formerly served by a single white paper; another is charting the probable effect of a proposed highway through the college community. Three students are making a documentary film to see if it communicates better than print. Others are analyzing the "power structure" of a local city. Their method is to identify the city's key decision makers and then trace how their ideas become realities.

Livingston makes no pretense of governing in loco parentis; students are fully responsible for dormitory rules and hours. "The administration is just a third party," says one white student. "We feel that people who have to live with decisions should make them."

How do blacks view Livingston? They have already demanded and won an all-black dormitory. Just a bit startled, the faculty likes to view a stay in the dorm as a temporary phase for most black students. Says Donald Phifer, a black admissions officer: "When they discover that they are holding their own with whites in class, they will want out of that black dorm." So far, the dorm remains black, and it is overflowing into part of an adjoining building.

"Livingston isn't anything but a test tube," says a black Viet Nam veteran. "We have great potential in the urban studies program," he insists. "But when we begin to take those new ideas out into the cities and try to put them into action," he worries that Rutgers--"Big Father across the river"--will block student projects that become too radical. Says another black skeptic: "If Livingston takes the revolutionaries off the streets, who's going to be left out there running the business?" But he adds: "You got to have college to survive."

No one yet knows whether Livingston can satisfy black and white students with sharply different backgrounds and expectations. The experiment may collapse--or furnish a prototype for colleges across the country. As of now, Livingston's main claim to fame is that it has not temporized in what it set out to do. That alone makes it worth watching.

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