Art Center controversy: some interesting details.

LA Weekly published a complete article about Art Center controversy giving new details about the problem that school management and students are currently living.

Here a small part of it:

Nathan Cooke* isn’t a miscreant. He isn’t a troublemaker or a misguided teen. He is a 26-year-old industrial design major in his final two trimesters at the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Cooke’s a good student too — a rare Art Center scholarship recipient and an active force on campus. He’s the president of the EcoCouncil, a student organization designed to promote environmental responsibility on campus and beyond.

It started with Styrofoam.

Despite branding itself as a world leader in sustainability education, Art Center’s cafeteria uses disposable Styrofoam dishware. For nearly two years, Cooke says, EcoCouncil, fellow students and even some faculty lobbied Art Center’s administration to ditch the Styrofoam in favor of something more environmentally friendly. Some recycling bins around campus wouldn’t hurt, either, they argued.

“But, we were consistently told there wasn’t enough money,” Cooke says.

One day after Cooke’s post, Art Center’s Chief Academic Officer Nate Young resigned under curious circumstances — with Koshalek hinting it was due to Young’s handling of a $1.1 million educational budget deficit. A short time later, Young’s assistant, Rachel Tiede, fresh off maternity leave, was fired after speaking up for her former boss at a student government meeting.