SCAD has lousy "climate for academic freedom," says profs' group

The Savannah College of Art and Design, although perhaps the country's largest arts college, has always been an odd outlier in the world of academia. It isn't a member of the prestigious Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, along with such peers as Parsons, the Rhode Island School of Design and NYC's School of Visual Arts. Nor is it accredited by the industry-standard National Association of Schools of Art and Design. And the private, intensely for-profit school has fostered a reputation of secrecy and top-down totalitarianism that occasionally surfaces in complaints over suppression of student and/or instructor expression.
Now comes the American Association of University Professors, which issued a report this past month censuring - or rather, re-censuring - the school for its Soviet-style repression of academic freedom.

The irony is that SCAD brought the new criticism on itself by inviting AAUP's scrutiny. The group had censured the college back in 1993 - long before it came to Atlanta - when SCAD had sacked a couple of teachers it suspected of encouraging student demonstrations. Apparently, last year the school asked AAUP to consider removing its censure and, in return, agreed to implement a handful of progressive policy changes and to offer settlement packages to former staffers it had terminated under dubious circumstances. All that was left was a brief, on-campus visit from an association representative.

Then things went south. According to the new censure report (PDF), after the college agreed on a date for the visit, SCAD President (and owner) Paula Wallace canceled the appointment and then issued a set of outrageous conditions, including the demand that the AAUP inspector could only see what the school wanted him to see.