The Savannah College of Art and Design

Look, Scad isn't all bad. I thought some of the professors were really great, the weather is nice and warm, and if you're 21 theres about 15-20+ bars downtown.

BUT, Scad is basically an empire cleverly designed as an art school.
The Digs:
Paula Wallace has 3 mansions on Forsyth Park plus another being restored for prospective investors. If you're in the dorms, you will be paying $700.00 plus another $150.00 an month for room ( a converted motel room which you share) and mandatory meal plan. The room is NOT worth the price. If you're really determined to go, please, please, don't throw away your money; Get out there, contact some ppl. and rent a place.

The Food:
I'm skinny, but I like my eats. The food from the madatory meal plan is basically cafeteria food all over again. SYSCO, the company Scad gets their food service from, is the same company which PRISONS buy their food servies from. And we know we splurge on prisoners... Scad claims that you may be exempt from the meal plan if you show a valid dr.s notice, so in threory, the crappy meal plan is no biggie. Just get a notice, and your off. Wrong. I was suffering from various allergies, got the Handwritten, faxed, emailed and phone-called versions of my dr. notice, but was turned away by the officals, because Food Allergies don;t count.

The "Palmetto Bugs"My first day I saw a guy about 200+ lb.s come shreiking out of his room, screaming somthing about a 'moving turd'. This was the first of a long line of aquantances with "Palmetto bugs". The large, skittery, brown, shiny, creepy bugs which swarm all over Savannah. One of the few times you will see the staff laugh is when one of the bugs takes off after some student. Despite what they told us at orientation, we knew there was no way those weren't cockroaches, Big, Bad, Will-Carry-You-Off-In-The-Night cockroaches.

Here is a good history on the early years of the school and the student revolution: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/Savannah.html

The SCAD.info controversy included a resigned Professor that refused to accept a fraudulent degree from the institution while teaching, in order to just have a masters. He setup a website for teachers, faculty, parents, and students to p ost their stories of their experiences at the school. For a while, (while I attended in 2003), SCAD had the website SCAD.info blocked on all computers connected to their network due to the dissenting information about the school. Crazy, eh? I wish I could find a cached page of the website, but since then the school has obviously stretched its financial muscle and had the site taken down all together.

SCAD has now exercised WAL-MART like practices by setting up a campus in Atlanta and putting the Atlanta College of Art "out of business" through a merger that didn't include the opinions of students there. Here is an interesting point of view here: http://www.wiredatom.com/blog/2005/07/26/scad-says-resistance-is-futile-you-will-be-assimilated/

If you are considering attending this school. Don't. Go to a state university, get a well rounded education and go to one of the NASAD accredited Art Institutes schools for your art vocation. Because essentially that is all SCAD really is, a vocational school.