Chancellor tarnishing UC Davis

The University of California at Davis is an exemplary school and one of the nation’s most underrated. Its faculty is stellar. Its campus is as diverse and inclusive as they come. Its research is groundbreaking. Forbes magazine rated it as the nation’s best school for promoting women in the sciences, technology and math.

Why, then, does the chancellor of such a fine institution repeatedly find herself at the center of what could only be termed public relations hurricanes?

Chancellor Linda Katehi has accomplished many things at the school (see above), but once again she is publicly apologizing for a gigantic UC Davis public relations misstep. It’s time for her to resign.

It is no small irony that the latest transgression stems from an attempt to clean up one of the school’s previous disasters.

The Sacramento Bee revealed last week that UC Davis had spent $175,000 with two consulting firms to scrub the Internet clean of references to the now-famous 2011 incident in which campus police repeatedly pepper-sprayed nonviolent student protesters.

Video of the event spread worldwide and severely tarnished the UC Davis brand. The university eventually paid a seven-figure settlement and Katehi restructured the campus police force, saying she had learned her lesson about public perception.

However, last month it came to light that Katehi was being paid handsomely for serving on the boards of textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons and for-profit college company DeVry Education Group.

Although legal, the pub- lic perception — or optics, as politicians call it — was deadly. So much so that a number of Democrats in the Legislature called for her to resign. They were not alone. Some UC Davis students occupied her office building for five weeks demanding the same.

Then came the news that UC Davis signed a contract proposal with Nevins & Associates in Maryland for “eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor.”

Katehi apologized Monday for the hiring of the image consultants. Earlier this week, she assured the public that “none of our communications efforts were intended — or attempted — to erase online content or rewrite history.” She said the intent was only to offer Internet searchers a full picture of the university.

She then dropped this little beauty: “In hindsight, we should have been more careful in reviewing some of the more unrealistic and ridiculous scope-ofwork claims in the written proposals of our outside vendors. What might be accepted industry hyperbole in the private public relations world falls far beneath the high standards of a public institution of higher learning.”

So let’s get this straight: Either you paid $15,000 a month for a service you believed was “industry hyperbole” and ridiculous, or you believed the hyperbole and were “falling far beneath your university’s high standards.”

With all due respect, Chancellor, either one is a blot on the university and your leadership of it. It’s time to go.