January 25, 2002

Trial by Fire: a Tale of Gender and Leadership

By CAROL BECKER

I never intended to be a dean. A writer, always, that was a childhood desire, but never a dean, and certainly not a dean of an art school, not anything at an art school. Had you asked me before I started teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago what an art school was, I would have answered in the most rudimentary way, probably able to imagine only Cooper Union or the Rhode Island School of Design, because I grew up on the East Coast. And even then, I had only a vague notion of