With the academic year getting under way this month, several art and architecture schools recently announced new leadership appointments.

In New York, Parsons The New School for Design has two new leaders: Joel Towers and William Morrish. In April, Towers became the dean of the design school after Tim Marshall became The New School’s interim provost. A cofounding partner of SR+T Architects, Towers formerly served as director of Parson’s Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology program. Morrish was named dean of the School of Constructed Environments, previously led by interim dean Laura Briggs. Trained in urban design, Morrish worked on the Phoenix public art plan and helped found the Charlottesville Community Design Center. Morrish is leaving the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, where he has taught since 2001.

On July 1, Dagmar Richter, professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA since 1989, was appointed chair of Cornell’s Department of Architecture. Richter is the principal of DR_D, a design practice in Los Angeles and Berlin, and has held professorships at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union, Columbia University, and the Art Academy in Berlin and Stuttgart. She succeeds the interim chair, Mark Cruvellier, who will continue teaching at Cornell.

Another notable architecture professor, Kim Tanzer, AIA,  took over as dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture on July 1. She replaces Karen Van Lengen, who led UVA’s architecture school for the past decade. Tanzer, who taught at the University of Florida for 21 years, has received local and national awards for her work in Fifth Avenue/Pleasant Street, a historically black neighborhood in Gainesville, Florida. She also coedited the book The Green Braid: Towards an Architecture of Ecology, Economy, and Social Equity.

Tim de Noble, AIA, became dean of the College of Architecture, Design and Planning at Kansas State University on July 1. He replaced Dennis Law, who has been dean of the college since 1995. De Noble comes to Kansas State from the University of Arkansas’s School of Architecture, where he had helmed the architecture department since 2005. He holds a B.Arch. degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, and an M.Arch. from Syracuse University.

Evan Douglis became the new dean of the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on August 1. A Harvard graduate, Douglis recently served as chair of the undergraduate department in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute and is principal of New York-based Evan Douglis Studio. He succeeds Mark Mistur, who had served as acting dean of the School of Architecture since fall of 2008.

Appointed in the aftermath of controversy, Lorne Buchman will be the new president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, after the school decided not to renew Richard Koshalek’s contract for 2009. Some 1,400 students and alumni signed an online petition in June 2008 against Koshalek’s $150 million expansion scheme, which included a Frank Gehry building, claiming that the plan put too much money into growing the campus instead of ensuring quality education. Buchman served as president of the California College of Arts and Crafts and Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center and is the principal of Buchman Associates, a firm that consults on private investments in nonprofit organizations.

On January 1, 2010, Sarah Whiting, an expert in urban and architectural theory, will become dean of Rice University’s School of Architecture. With a bachelor’s degree from Yale, an M.Arch. from Princeton, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Whiting is no stranger to academia. She has taught at Princeton, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Kentucky, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Florida. She worked at OMA in Rotterdam and founded WW Architecture with her husband, Ron Witte, in 1999.