Donovan Livingston crashes back into Carolina

In his first year at Carolina, Donovan Livingston never imagined he’d wind up teaching at a university.

“I was a tenth of a point away from academic probation my freshman year,” Livingston said. “In that moment, I had a choice to make.”

The choice, as he says, was to engage with his campus through his personal love of music and develop more connections with his fellow Tar Heels. It’s that mindset that has brought him full circle back to Chapel Hill.

A 2009 graduate with a bachelor’s degree in history, Livingston is now the director of College Thriving and a teaching assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ music department.

“When I was here as a student, the thing I was chasing is the thing I’m living right now,” Livingston said. “The journey to get here was the beautiful part.”

That journey took him to Columbia and Harvard universities, where he earned master’s degrees in arts and education, respectively, and UNC Greensboro for a doctorate in educational leadership. Livingston’s experiences have prepared him to inspire new students at UNC-Chapel Hill.

College Thriving is a required course for first-year students, helping them learn the best ways to study, find their place within the campus community and foster their own sense of well-being.

“It’s the type of curriculum I wish I had in my time here,” Livingston said. “We’re trying to deliver a course where the knowledge that students are receiving is applicable to their broader life experiences on campus.”

While higher education is one of Livingston’s strongest passions, he also loves hip-hop and is teaching its history, culture and composition. Livingston describes himself as an “arts-based qualitative methodologist.” As such, he researches the art of mix tapes and how they can be used as a unique form of analyzing phenomenon within the student experience.

He joins the likes of music department professors Mark Katz and Maya Shipman (professionally known as Suzi Analogue) in bringing the musical genre into Carolina’s academic circles. Katz’s work on hip-hop is the subject of two performances this semester.

Having been told by his teachers that he would not be allowed to rap at his high school’s graduation ceremony, Livingston is happy to see the perception of hip-hop evolve within the world of academia.

“We didn’t really have a hip-hop class during my time at UNC, but there are new opportunities on campus that are starting to reframe the art form,” Livingston said. “Hip-hop deserves to be put on the same pedestal as we put the classics or these other disciplines. It deserves that level of rigor, and I’m excited to continue the work that others at Carolina have done to carve out a path for this type of cultural exploration.”

In a now-viral video of Livingston performing the spoken-word poem, “Lift Off” at his 2016 Harvard commencement, he says, “A crater is a reminder that something amazing happened here.” So what crater does he want to leave on his alma mater?

“The way students felt when they got that acceptance letter or when they first unpacked in their residence hall or when they arrived at their first class: I want that feeling of joyfully embracing the unknown to be sustainable,” Livingston said. “I want to leave behind a crater of collective liberation, where students, staff and faculty feel empowered to pursue their creative curiosities, to use poetics and storytelling as a means for building community across difference and carving out spaces for every Tar Heel to feel a sense of well-being, belonging and purpose.”