The Rhode Island School of Design, one of the country’s top art schools, sent an email to students and faculty on Wednesday, announcing a variety of measures to cope with its plunging endowment, which has lost some $125 million since peaking at $375 million at the end of 2007. Foremost among them is slashing about 20 full- and part-time staff, through layoffs and early retirements, to be implemented alongside a package of wage freezes and reductions in employee retirement-plan contributions. The school’s RISD Museum will also go dark for the entire month of August, a move director Hope Alswang told the Providence Journal was "the least bad option."

In a statement accompanying the notice, RISD president -- and super-designer -- John Maeda said, "We have had to make some difficult decisions, but I am fortunate to lead an organization with such clear guiding principles." Maeda, incidentally, is also active on Twitter (see www.twitter.com/johnmaeda), where he often shares aphoristic bits of wisdom. The day before the announcement, he offered the following: "When people ask if I've stopped designing I say, ‘No. I'm designing how to talk about/with/for our #RISD community.’"