ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN ELECTS NEW BOARD CHAIR
The Art Center College of Design announced yesterday that Robert C. Davidson Jr. has been elected chairman of its board of trustees—the first African American to take that top leadership role at the Pasadena institution, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Davidson, sixty-four, succeeds John Puerner, the former Los Angeles Times publisher who had chaired the board since 2007 and is now leaving it after having served three three-year terms, the maximum under current bylaws.
Davidson, a board member since 2004, chaired the search committee that last year recruited the school’s new president, Lorne M. Buchman, from San Francisco.
Buchman began his job five months ago, capping a turbulent chapter at Art Center. The tumult had begun in May 2008, when the sudden resignation of the school’s leading academic official sparked student protests over rising tuition fees and what many students and alumni perceived as then president Richard Koshalek’s lack of connection with students and misplaced emphasis on expanding Art Center’s two campuses while seeking to raise its profile by sponsoring design conferences at home and abroad.
