THE NEW SCHOOL
Thirty-five years ago, resources were extremely limited for design educators looking to restructure or start a new program. Most universities borrowed heavily from the traditional Swiss or Bauhaus schools, which, although historically valuable, were losing ground to the counterculture of the late 1960s. These institutions were regimented, rigid, and run almost exclusively by men.

In 1971, Katherine McCoy became one of the first women in the country to head a graphic design program, a position she shared with her husband, Michael, at Cranbrook. Given a great deal of freedom when beginning their tenure, the McCoys were able to provide the first truly alternative academic experience for design students, one suddenly infused with social and cultural relevance.

“Kathy flew under the radar,” says Louise Sandhaus, director of graphic design at Cal Arts. “Any transformations she made, I don’t think they were as noticed. I don’t think there was anyone there to stop her because no one was taking it seriously enough.”

Slowly, other graduate programs began to take note of the experimental education that was churning out a very different kind of designer. “Cranbrook was almost a tribal environment,” says McCoy. “It was a demonstration of the ‘it takes a village’ idea.” Cueing their own careers from McCoy’s example, two women who graduated during that time went on to disseminate this approach in schools on opposite sides of the country.

Meredith Davis headed to Virginia Commonwealth University, then to North Carolina State, where she was the first female chair of the graphic design department and currently one of the nation’s most active figures in design education. Davis had multiple degrees in education and design and was naturally drawn to the classroom, but for her classmate Lorraine Wild, the path was more serendipitous. When Wild was lured to Cal Arts three years out of grad school, she found herself immersed in a liberal academic environment pioneered by Sheila de Bretteville’s establishment of a women’s design program in 1971, and the previous tenures of April Greiman and Laurie Haycock. Drawing heavily upon their Cranbrook discourse, Davis and Wild engineered graduate programs that both lured and produced the most influential design educators in the country.

A WOMAN'S WORK?
The field of education has traditionally been conducive to women who preferred its schedule for tending to households. Yet for a designer, making the choice to return to academia is often not one of pure convenience. Although education does afford flexibility, most design educators maintain practices on top of their faculty commitments. For these women, becoming active in education was a way to push issues that were important to them, and in a safe and collaborative environment—one that was, at first, slightly more accommodating than the professional arena.

“I think where maybe myself and other women educators were going was not to deny the way the design field worked, but rather to open it up,” says Wild. “It was really critical to me that we look at design as culturally important, socially important, and not just a trade practice. Why was it that women were doing that? All I can think of was because the other areas of design were less flexible and not as open to reform.”

Sandhaus, who assumed the graphic design directorship at Cal Arts after Wild, notes that at the time, women were the outsiders in design. “I think because women felt so ostracized from their environment and could feel a sense of not belonging, in some ways we started our own world. A world we thought was actually going to acknowledge reality.”

“If the doors are closed to you because you don’t fit for whatever reason—race, gender, whatever—and you’re clever and motivated and have some sense of agency, of course you’re going to search out other ways of having an impact and being involved,” says Anne Burdick, a graduate professor at Art Center, who studied under Wild and alongside Davis and de Bretteville.

Today, these trailblazers are still considered the strongest voices in design education, and are at the center of a tight-knit group of female educators who lead the nation’s academic agenda. Many of them head graphic design programs at the influential graduate level. Others are revolutionizing the role of design through research. And many more female design educators have taken on national leadership roles, where their writing and contributions through organizations are devoted to an ongoing dialogue about the way not just education, but also design, must evolve.