Word is designer Ron Arad—he of the fluid metal objects and chairs you can’t and don’t want to curl up in—is leaving his position as head of the Department of Design Products at London’s Royal College of Art. Official reason is that “twelve years is a long time, and I think the course deserves someone new,” as he tells DesignWeek. Slightly more truthiness-sounding reason is that “I also find myself not having enough time to do the course in the way I want to,” which sounds closer to the world of academia we know and do not love so well.

It’s easy to forget the role education plays when we focus so much on the latest in launches and buildings and groundbreakings—although now that those are slowing down, we hear teaching’s the next big thing—but most of the architects we truly throw ourselves into a tizzy over do spend hours and hours in studios doing desk crits with overcaffeinated and underslept students. Benny van B did some of his best syncopated time-space continuum research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt; Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WorkAC rock a Princeton studio with some regularity; even The Zaha taught for years before that whole Pritzker and devoted-Nicky thing. You know all those guys who do speculative projects and constantly enter competitions? You ever wondered how they supported themselves? Backbone of tuition, baby.

When we were on the other side, we remember wondering how our professors came up with our semester-long studio projects. How did they decide we were going to be designing a chair? 10,000 square feet of Class A office space for Lower Manhattan? (Happy September 14, 2001.) A performance space with room for a cafe? It wasn’t until we were freed from the shackles of our own making and started spending time in our and others’ professor’s offices that we realized that, more often than not, the project the kids are working on is exactly the same project their teachers are. Which first made us knee-jerk a little—we remember our friend Drew’s Ground Zero viewing platform, and how it caught the lingering eye of Liz—but later made us accept that it’s a two-way street. Which was sort of cool, actually. That we could contribute something, that the ideas could go both ways, that Jesse Reiser might have got more than just a kick out of our, uh, “chair.” (Scratch that; the truth is out there.)

So we wonder why Arad’s leaving. True, twelve years is a long time. But academia? It’s pretty cushy. Regular income. Nice office. Chance to see what the people of today are designing. He might just be getting too famous—a Centre Pompidou retrospective opened last year and is on its way to MoMA and then the Stedelijk in Amsterdam—or too busy—we bet Benda’s keeping him productive—but there might be something else happening. Speculations? Rumor-mongering? Slanderous libel? You know what to do.

Ron Arad to Leave Royal College of Art [Design Week, via Otto]