Livingston alumni honor Roger Cohen

Livingston Alumni Association honored J/MS Professor Emeritus Roger Cohen this fall when it gave him the Livingston Legacy award for his role in “strengthening the college’s mission.”

Cohen, Rutgers College ’65, was a radio journalist when he joined the Rutgers Radio and Television Center in 1970 and began teaching in Livingston’s Department of Journalism and Urban Communication as a volunteer. He went fulltime in 1980, teaching radio production, broadcast newswriting and TV production, both beginning and advanced.

When Rutgers was implementing a campus-wide cable TV system, he designed a course that not only examined how TV executives develop and schedule content but produce programming for the channel, now RU-tv.

Cohen, who retired in 2004 and lives in Monroe Township, served as J/MS Department chair for seven years. For almost two decades he ran the student internship program and started the department newsletter, Alum-Knights. 

Along with Cohen, Jessie Hanna, a Livingston graduate from 2007, was honored with a Distinguished Alumni Award. He founded the Sean Hanna Foundation in memory of his brother Sean, a J/MS major from Piscataway and an active member of WRSU, who died from pediatric cancer in 2007. He was 20.

One of the organizers of the event, which took place at the Rutgers Club, was Eric Schwarz, J/MS ’92. A quality analyst for due diligence and risk and compliance at Dow Jones & Co., he serves as the association’s vice president.