Marc Eckō was born in Lakewood, New Jersey, in 1972. His talents and interests led him toward graffiti art, skateboarding, and hip-hop culture. While in high school, he blended these themes by creating handmade, airbrushed T-shirts for friends. When it came time for college, he enrolled in Rutgers’ College of Pharmacy, his father’s alma mater. Eckō maintained a strong interest in clothing design and, in 1993, at age 20, he left school to follow his passion for art. He launched a men’s urban apparel line with a $5,000 investment from business partner Seth Gerszberg and a handful of graffiti-inspired T-shirts he had created in the garage of his parents’ house. His twin sister Marci graduated from Rutgers in 1994 and joined her brother in running the business.

Today, Marc Eckō Enterprises is one of the world’s most recognizable clothing brands, and its founder is one of the most successful fashion designers and entrepreneurs. The company has more than 1,000 employees and has included up to 12 separate Eckō Unlimited and EckōRed apparel and accessories lines, the contemporary Marc Eckō “Cut & Sew” collection, G-Unit Clothing Company, Zoo York, Avirex, Complex magazine, Complex.com, and Marc Eckō Entertainment, a video game and multimedia entertainment division. Marc Eckō Enterprises has close to 100 freestanding stores in the United States and 86 stores internationally. More than 5,000 department and specialty stores in more than 50 countries also carry Eckō merchandise. Eckō believes Rutgers played a significant role in his design sensibility, and in 2007, he signed an international co-branding agreement for the production of a line of Rutgers sportswear that was launched last year.

Beyond the business world, Eckō and his wife Allison, whom he met while attending Rutgers, are dedicated to a number of socially conscious initiatives, including the plight of the world’s rhinoceros population, and he uses a rhinoceros as the logo of his Eckō Unlimited line of clothing. He has also generously supported the Tikva Children’s Home for orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children in Odessa, Ukraine. His passion for reform of K–12 education in the United States is evidenced in part by the fact that his company launched Sweat Equity Enterprises, a four-year, after-school design and mentoring program for New York City students, particularly underserved urban youth. Eckō also supports graffiti artists and their First Amendment rights. Marc Eckō is the youngest member of the Board of Directors of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

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Doctor of Laws

A businessman, attorney, and social activist, Alfred C. Koeppe has made major contributions to the economic well-being and workforce development of the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey. He holds a B.A. degree from Rutgers’ Newark College of Arts and Sciences and a J.D. degree from Seton Hall University School of Law. Koeppe began his career with the New Jersey Bell Telephone Co. and later became a trial attorney for the New Jersey Department of the Public Defender and, subsequently, an attorney for AT&T.

In 1993, he was elected president and chief executive officer of Bell Atlantic-New Jersey and later joined the Public Service Electric and Gas Co. (PSE&G), becoming president and chief operating officer of that firm in 2000. Under his leadership, PSE&G began the South Ward Urban Initiative to address the plight of that inner city Newark neighborhood by marshaling PSE&G assets and other resources to build a revitalization model for the community. Celebrated by President Clinton as a national model, one of the organization’s major successes was the completion and occupation of the South Ward Industrial Park Building, which created new jobs and greater family stability for Newark residents. Koeppe believes in a collaborative approach where business, government, educators, and community leaders contribute to the common good. While at PSE&G, he worked with state labor leaders, high schools, and community colleges to establish a first-in-the-nation program to develop a skilled and diverse utility workforce to fill the company’s positions.

After his retirement from PSE&G in 2003, Koeppe became president and chief executive officer of the Newark Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works with private, government, and educational entities to improve economic conditions and the quality of the educational system in the city of Newark. Koeppe is active in a variety of service organizations and currently serves on the boards of New Jersey Resources Corporation, Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Jersey, and Seton Hall University. He is a trustee at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark and the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and has served as chair of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce.

Koeppe chaired the $25 million capital campaign for the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Children’s Hospital in New Brunswick and currently serves on the leadership committee for the Rutgers Campaign. Widely honored for his many accomplishments, dedication, and vision of a better tomorrow, Koeppe was inducted into the Rutgers University Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2003.

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Doctor of Letters

A renowned artist, author, teacher, social activist, and humanitarian, Faith Ringgold is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught art from 1984 until 2002. Ringgold grew up in New York City’s Harlem and is a graduate of the City College of New York. She began her artistic career as a painter and today is best known for her painted story quilts, an art form that combines painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling. Ringgold was greatly influenced by her mother’s work as a fashion designer and has gone on to incorporate textiles in many of her artworks. She has exhibited in major venues throughout the world, and her works are held in the permanent collections of such museums as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Throughout her career, Ringgold has used her art to voice her opinions on racism and gender inequality. Other themes addressed in her creative works have included rape, human equity, the importance of family, and health. In the 1960s, she gained notoriety as an advocate for social change, particularly for women and African Americans. She worked to ensure that African-American artists gained equal opportunity to show their work at galleries and museums and, in 1972, helped found the Women Students and Artists for Black Liberation. She was a founding member of the National Black Feminist Organization.

Ringgold was also the driving force behind the establishment of a children’s museum in Harlem and established the philanthropic “Anyone Can Fly Foundation,” which educates children about artists of the African Diaspora and funds scholarly research on African-American artists. She has published 15 books, including the award-winning Tar Beach. Ringgold’s writing has had a profound impact on the cultural imagination of children’s literature. She has received 20 honorary doctorates and more than 75 awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts awards.

A resident of New Jersey, she has exhibited her artworks at Rutgers’ Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, which she often notes as having mounted her first retrospective; has exhibited several times with the Dana Women Artists Series; has created projects at the university’s Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions; has lectured on all three Rutgers campuses; and, in 2003, donated her papers to the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists in the Margery Somers Foster Center and Special Collections and University Archives of the Rutgers University Libraries.

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Doctor of Fine Arts

Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins was born in 1930 and grew up in Harlem not far from the Apollo Theater. He lived around the corner from the Savoy Ballroom and almost on the doorstep of his idol, the pioneering jazz tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Rollins began playing the piano, but soon changed to the saxophone and, as a teenager, fell under the spell of a musical revolution called “bebop.” He came under the wing of piano legend Thelonious Monk and was first recorded in 1949, when he was only 19. During the next five years, Rollins played with performers such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis. He started to gain fame as a saxophonist and composer, and recorded with the Modern Jazz Quartet and with Miles Davis. Rollins joined the renowned Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet in 1955. His widely acclaimed album Saxophone Colossus was recorded in 1956.

In 1957, he pioneered the use of bass and drums as the only accompaniment for his saxophone solos, and in that same year, he won the prestigious Down Beat magazine poll as “new star of the tenor saxophone.” But by 1959, Rollins felt dissatisfied with his own output and with the music business, questioning the popular acclaim that he was attracting. He spent a good part of the next three years playing his saxophone on the Williamsburg Bridge, deep in a rigorous practice regimen. When he ended his self-imposed exile in 1962, his music was marked by an intensified creativity that continues to characterize it to this day.

Rollins continued to diversify his work in music, providing the soundtrack to the movie Alfie and recording with the Rolling Stones, appearing on the group’s album Tattoo You. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and was inducted into the Down Beat magazine Hall of Fame. Rollins was designated a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1983. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded Rollins his first performance Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for This Is What I Do in 2001 and his second for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo for "Why Was I Born" in 2005. He received the Grammy organization's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Rollins also received the Polar Music Prize 2007, one of the world’s most prestigious music awards, in Stockholm. In December 2008, the results of the annual Down Beat readers’ poll saw Sonny Rollins named Jazz Artist and Tenor Saxophonist of the Year. And although he still views himself as “a work in progress,” he stands today as the great living jazz soloist, the most formidable of jazz improvisers, and the art form’s most exacting, exhilarating, and inspiring practitioner.

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Doctor of Science

A professor emeritus at Stanford University, Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo is internationally recognized for his scholarship in social psychology and his dedication to making that discipline more accessible to students, teachers, and the general public. A graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale University, Zimbardo taught at Yale, New York University, and Columbia University before joining the faculty of Stanford in 1968. Over his long and distinguished career, his research has addressed such areas as evil, time perspective, heroism, persuasion, cults, violence, shyness, terrorism, and classroom teaching effectiveness. One of his most famous studies is the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which demonstrated the power of situational forces to distort personal identities and overwhelm ordinary, good people, causing them to act divergently from their cherished values. The experiment was ended early because of the extremity of the behaviors that the situation induced in the participants—abusive behaviors by the guards and psychological distress in the prisoners.

Some of Zimbardo’s recent research has examined the factors that contribute to terrorism and prisoner abuse, with implications for explaining the events that took place at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Zimbardo has authored more than 350 professional publications, including 50 scholarly, text, and trade books. He is coauthor of the widely used introductory psychology textbook Psychology and Life, and his book The Lucifer Effect was a New York Times bestseller. Zimbardo’s latest release, coauthored with John Boyd, Ph.D., The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, provides the reader with cutting-edge research along with self-help tools to make the most of one’s time. He also created, cowrote, and hosted the popular PBS television series Discovering Psychology, which is shown in many psychology undergraduate classes at Rutgers and in other colleges and universities throughout the United States and abroad. The series earned Zimbardo the Carl Sagan Award from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents for promoting the public understanding of science.

Even in retirement, Zimbardo remains active. He currently serves as the executive director of Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism. Over the past 50 years, Zimbardo has taught introductory psychology to tens of thousands of students, employing a teaching style that brings together rigorous scholarship, accessible presentation, and his subject matter’s relevance to real life. Widely honored for his professional accomplishments, Zimbardo served as president of the American Psychological Association and is a former chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, which represents more than 60 science, math, and education societies with more than 1.5 million members.

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