When Wellington “Duke” Reiter took over as president of the venerable School of the Art Institute 18 months ago, he had plans to reinvent the place. An alarmed faculty resisted his attempts to tame what they saw as creative chaos, and both sides dug in for what looked to be a prolonged struggle.
Reiter came to SAIC from Tempe, where he was dean of Arizona State University’s school of design and the force behind a high-profile new downtown campus. If second-tier ASU seemed like an improbable stepping stone to prestigious SAIC—regularly ranked as one of the top art schools in the nation—Reiter had other chops, including a Harvard graduate degree, a position at MIT, and a reputation as a pragmatic, corporate-style administrator who could rustle up change and manage it. That last bit must’ve looked especially good to the board of trustees. Unwieldy and idiosyncratic, the SAIC was loaded with $140 million in debt, mostly due to real estate deals. About 70 percent of operating expenses were being funded by a combination of hefty tuition (around $35,000 a year, excluding room and board), and a steadily growing student body. But the growth might end soon, the school’s prognosticators were saying, with both the physical plant and the economy likely to top out.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So much for top-down administration.
