QUICK TAKES - July 9, 2009

Lorne M. Buchman, former president of a design college in San Francisco, has been named president and chief executive of the recently strife-ridden Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

The campus was riven last year by dissension and protest over its future and its educational priorities, leading to the resignation of longtime president Richard Koshalek after the school’s board of trustees denied him a contract extension and sidelined an expansion and construction program that ranked high on the agenda he had been hired in 1999 to pursue.

Buchman, who was president of the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) from 1994 to 1999, will start his new job in October. Since 2006 he had been president of Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, dedicated to an approach to human and social improvement known as humanistic psychology.

“I learned new and different things, and was eager to bring it back to an art and design school,” Buchman said Wednesday. “My training and background is in the arts, and my heart is in design education.”

-- Mike Boehm