A Year After Her Ouster, Linda Katehi Still Can’t Resist a Fight

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A year after Linda P.B. Katehi was placed on leave from her role as chancellor of the University of California at Davis — a leave that would end up becoming permanent — there’s still bad blood.

In March, the office of the UC system’s president, Janet Napolitano, responded to a newspaper’s records request by revealing that the system had spent about $1 million during an independent investigation it commissioned last year into some of Ms. Katehi’s dealings as chancellor. In a statement, Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for the system, wrote that the investigation “could have been avoided” if Ms. Katehi had simply resigned earlier, rather than waging “a public campaign” to keep her job.

Ms. Katehi wasn’t going to take that lying down. “The claims by Diane Klein are erroneous and unbelievably untrue,” she tweeted. “The UC Communications Office should stop lying.”

The claims by Diane Klein are erroneous and unbelievably untrue. The UC Communications Office should stop lying. https://t.co/CsWP63PGHL

— Linda Katehi (@lindakatehi) March 26, 2017

In an email to The Chronicle, Ms. Klein wrote, “I don’t think it’s helpful to engage in Twitter warfare — with anyone.” And Ms. Klein wrote that she stands by her statements on the investigation. “Ms. Katehi continues to deny that she violated university policy and believes she was unfairly and wrongly targeted,” she added.

Why is Ms. Katehi still fighting? It’s the result, the former chancellor said in a recent interview with The Chronicle, of a combativeness that she’s trying to resist as she prepares to rejoin the faculty in the fall.

After she resigned as chancellor in August 2016, following a three-month investigation and public tug-of-war with Ms. Napolitano, it was finally time to take a break, Ms. Katehi said. During her sabbatical leave, she said, she spent time thinking about future projects and traveling. Travel included a trip to Europe, a conference in Florida to see former students, and visiting to other universities to visit colleagues to “get a sense of what they do and what they see as they next step.”

Learning to walk away and not always jump to defend herself is something Ms. Katehi is trying to do, but it’s not easy. Her tenure at Davis was marked by a series of controversies that often raised questions about her leadership. She believes being the campus’s first female chancellor didn’t help. Throughout her term in that office, some of Ms. Katehi’s faculty supporters felt that she had fallen victim to forces of sexism in an era of increased scrutiny of university leaders. Now, after six years in the spotlight, Ms. Katehi said she’s happy to take a step back to the faculty, where she’ll be a “distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and gender studies.”

“I think it was the right thing to do, to leave the university at that point and to go back to the faculty and to start thinking about things that I truly enjoy doing,” Ms. Katehi said.

String of Controversies

Ms. Katehi took the helm of UC Davis in 2009. Much of her tenure was dominated by controversies, public responses that failed to defuse the crisis, and calls for her to resign, which the chancellor habitually defied.

The Katehi Years at UC-Davis

Linda P.B. Katehi served as chancellor of the University of California at Davis from 2009 to 2016, a period marked by controversy and conflict. Here’s a look at her record.

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The most notorious incident came in November 2011, when a campus police officer broke up a student protest by pepper-spraying peaceful demonstrators’ faces. A report by a task force convened by the UC system found numerous failures of leadership and communication in the incident, including that Ms. Katehi had failed to clearly communicate to the police not to use force to break up a campus protest. The incident led to mounting pressure from students, faculty members, and community members for Ms. Katehi’s resignation. Student protesters were insistent — on one occasion an eerily silent crowd surrounded the chancellor as she left a news conference and embarked on a painfully awkward walk to her car.

Every few years, whether the issue was her role on corporate boards or tuition increases, Ms. Katehi faced a new controversy and calls for her resignation, followed by a statement saying she would not step down.

When records requests from The Sacramento Bee in 2016 revealed that the campus had paid consultants $175,000 to, among other things, “expedite the eradication” of references online to the pepper-spray incident, Ms. Katehi again held on. The university’s independent investigation later found that Ms. Katehi had misrepresented her involvement with the consultants’ contracts to several media outlets, including The Chronicle, and to President Napolitano.

It was during the controversies over the records request and her seat on the board of the DeVry Education Group, a for-profit college accused of deceptive recruiting, Ms. Katehi said, that she began to realize that she no longer wanted to be an administrator. By then, calls for her resignation were coming in from state lawmakers, students, and some faculty members.

The Sacramento Bee’s pursuit of these stories “created this sentiment of people asking me to resign,” Ms. Katehi said. And if there’s one thing she can’t stand, Ms. Katehi says, it’s being accused of something without defending herself.

When she gets defensive about her work or responds to criticism on Twitter, even her family members sometimes ask why she bothers. Most of the time they’re right, she said.

Days before Ms. Napolitano announced the independent investigation into questions about Ms. Katehi’s conduct as chancellor, Ms. Katehi told faculty members and the university president that she would not step down. When the two leaders initially met before the investigation, Ms. Katehi said she told Ms. Napolitano that she didn’t do anything to intentionally abuse her power as chancellor, and when she was asked to step down, it felt like she was being asked to leave in the middle of the night.

“Why would you do it if you felt you did nothing of this?” Ms. Katehi said. “You’re supposed to leave? No, you will try to defend yourself, all right.”

Ms. Katehi resigned only after an independent investigation found that, among other things, she hadn’t been completely honest with Ms. Napolitano and the news media about her role in contracting consultants to clean-up Davis’s online image after the pepper-spray incident.

Almost a year later, Ms. Katehi says she still thinks about last spring and the investigation that followed. “I have more questions as time goes by rather than answers.”

Part of the reason that she keeps returning to her resignation is the small trickle of news invoking her name since she stepped down. For example, in December The Bee published a story detailing that Ms. Katehi was “in line” to lead the campus’s Feminist Research Institute, and one week later the paper reported she was not in the running for the position. In August 2016, when The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the University of California at Berkeley had spent $200,000 on consultants to promote Nicholas Dirks, the departing chancellor, the story quickly drew comparisons to the consultants hired at Davis under Ms. Katehi.

Still, she says she is trying to be less reactive on social media. She compared her experience with online trolls to that of Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

“The things that I’ve heard, or the things that I was called by many, some of them by the newspaper, and by others it was very similar like what Hillary Clinton had really heard throughout her campaign,” Ms. Katehi said. “It’s not just the person anymore. I think there is something deeper here and that’s why I started speaking about women’s issues.”

Back to the Faculty

Ms. Katehi said she’s done plenty of thinking on how she will evolve into her role as a faculty member. The only problem, she said, is narrowing down her ideas.

She wants to start up a “number of” centers and identified subjects she wants to study, from improving access to technology to speaking out about women in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Though the transition from administrator to faculty member may be challenging Ms. Katehi said she isn’t too worried. Before and during her investigation, many faculty members stood in her corner. They expressed support for Ms. Katehi’s work to correct mistakes made during the pepper spray incident and wanted her to keep leading the university. “The thought that there were still folks in the faculty who really supported me is very calming.”

Ms. Katehi is confident that her relationship with faculty members as colleagues will only improve. After all, not long ago and true to her form, Ms. Katehi said she was also one of the critical faculty members for administrators. “There’s always a divide, there’s always a gap between faculty and administrators,” she said. “I used to be one of the most severe critics of administration when I was a faculty member.”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a breaking-news reporter. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.