Pepper Spraying Chancellor Resigns…Took 5 Years.

By Professor Doom

     Earlier I covered a public university spending a huge sum of money, over $400,000 (they’re still trying to figure out exactly how much), more than enough for full scholarships for a hundred students at a fairly priced university, instead the money was spent just to bury some minor bad press on Google.

     Obviously, the mainstream news won’t repeat scuttlebutt, but the rumor was a fat cat administrator (at the risk of being redundant) had a hand in students being pepper sprayed during some (non violent) protests on campus, and she paid firms to bury this information. Yes, my title is a little misleading since she didn’t pepper spray the students herself…bear with me.

This isn't her first terrible adventure in "reputation management." At her previous job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she forced her aides to edit her Wikipedia entry -- over their protests -- when it emerged that children of big-ticket donors were given admission preference to the university.

--it never ceases to amaze me how when administrators leave in disgrace from one university, how casually they pick up another plum job somewhere else.

      Naturally, the mainstream story is she had nothing to do with it, and she was simply paying public money to bury public information, to preserve the good name of her school. 

      After 5 years of investigations, “official news” and rumormongering, the administrator finally resigns. After years of covering for one of their own, the Poo Bah decided it was time to cut losses:

The other – put forward by UC President Janet Napolitano – was of a deeply flawed administrator who, investigators found, had shown poor judgment, violated multiple university policies and misled, even lied to, her superiors, the public and the media.

“In these circumstances, Chancellor Katehi has now offered to resign, and I have accepted that resignation,” Napolitano wrote Tuesday in a letter to the UC Davis community. “These past three months and the events leading up to them have been an unhappy chapter in the life of UC Davis. I believe it is in the best interest of the campus, the Davis community, and the University of California that we move forward.”

--yes, political wonks, it’s the same Janet Napolitano. There’s a bit of revolving door between government and higher education, because there’s so much fat loot in education.

     The nonstop fraud that goes on in higher education is truly remarkable. Because any chimpanzee can hold an administrative position, and the “ask questions and you’re fired” power they hold, the amount of nepotism and buddy-system hiring here is amazing. The Poo Bah can get away with it until it hits ridiculous levels, but this admin was already on thin ice (well, ice that can break after 5 years of screw-ups, anyway), and so the Poo Bah at UC Davis wasn’t about to let more abuses pass by:

Napolitano ordered an investigation in April in response to allegations that Katehi had violated conflict-of-interest rules in the hiring and promotion of her son and daughter-in-law at UC Davis.

      Naturally, when administrators investigate themselves, they find nothing, and for the most part, that’s what they found here (read the 100 page report with your own eyes if you like). Bottom line, people are really getting tired of the open fraud that seems to define all our institutions now, and just didn’t give a damn about yet another biased self-investigation revealing nothing.

  Katehi, the report said, also misinformed Napolitano about her $70,000-a-year board seat with the DeVry Education Group, falsely stating that she had not yet started service when she actually had attended two meetings at which she had learned that DeVry was being sued by the federal government for allegedly defrauding students…

     Isn’t it amazing that, in addition to the half-million a year she gets for being admin at UC Davis, she gets to pull in another pile of money working at another institution? How does she have time for the extra job? I again emphasize how minimal administrative jobs are.

She also failed to show “diligence and judgment” by joining the board of King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, the report said, even though she knew of allegations that it improperly inflated its research statistics.

      Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money. Please understand this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and I’ve exposed many administrators in this blog double and triple dipping, raking in piles of money from multiple sources. How can we justify paying these people so frickin’ much when they’re allowed to do this?

…also had received $420,000 over three years for service with textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons. 

      Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money again. Please keep in mind, this is where the money from those super-expensive textbooks goes. It’s so funny how admin must screw students out of every dollar, must keep faculty pay as low as possible, even as they receive piles of loot from various sources because of the administrative position they hold. And then they shamelessly ask for more money “for education.” 

      Again, I’m forced to consider the good that could have been done by the money that went into this deanling’s pockets. This kind of money could have paid for the education, four year full scholarships, of dozens of students, at the finest schools. Instead, it went to someone who has zero impact on anyone’s education. 

   

In 2014, 49 of UC’s 180 senior managers reported income from outside activities, totaling a combined $1.77 million.

--she’s really not alone in double/triple/quadruple dipping. I was told that the reason I was paid so little as a professor was because I could seek contract work. Why doesn’t that work for admin, too?

      To appease protesters, the front page will show that the university will totally disavow the behavior of the supposed “rogue” administrator:

      “Chancellor Katehi has engaged in a pattern of misrepresentations, … has repeatedly exercised poor judgment when confronted with challenges, has consistently disregarded the impact of her actions on the campus and the university as a whole and has failed to mitigate troubling management practices,” said UC spokeswoman Dianne KIein. “This behavior is not fit for a UC chancellor or anyone in a leadership position.”

     This is, of course, crap, and it doesn’t take much digging to see she’ll be well taken care of, because she knows too much. The deanling will receive rich, rich rewards for keeping her mouth shut:

Under the settlement, Katehi will remain on administrative leave for a year as chancellor emeritus, receiving her $424,360 annual pay… 

     That’s right, she gets a year of paid leave, paid an amount faculty, or most any American, could only dream of. Of extraordinary insult is the tile of “chancellor emeritus,” meaning “chancellor out of merit.” That’s what will go up on a magnificent golden plaque in one of the gorgeous halls in one of the lavishly decorated administrative palaces at UC Davis.

      Years from now, all anyone will know is she was a chancellor of merit. The rest of the news concerning her behavior will be buried as much as possible. 

      One more insult:

…with the promise that she will return as a faculty member.

      That’s right, she’ll be a tenured faculty member (the article I’ve linked misses this detail), probably won’t have to even teach. Tenure has been denied to most professors now, and if professors step even a little out of line, they’re fired, quickly. Meanwhile, administration has no problem awarding it to themselves, even when caught red-handed engaging in outrageously foul behavior. I’m sure the reason this admin got her tenured position is much the same reason the Poo Bah who oversaw the cover up of the Sandusky affair at Penn State received a $600,000 a year tenure position: to keep quiet about the true, universal level of fraud going on.

      Please, gentle reader, put this in perspective: it took 5 years of serious investigation to get even a glimpse of the kinds of things administrators do, and the admin gets full pay and a golden parachute on the way out. Even a tenured faculty can find himself on “leave without pay” for a year or more, just on the basis of a blog post. I can’t emphasis strongly enough how the administrative takeover of campuses has not been good for anyone but admin.

Sweetheart settlement! Im sure it will remind other UC officials that unscrupulous conduct will be severely rewarded!!

--From the comments section.

     Ultimately, the reward for all this nefarious behavior is a tenured position where she’ll probably never have to do another thing until the day she dies. That’s…not what tenure was supposed to be for, but as long as administrators, and not educators, control higher education, that’s all it means now.

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