After an Unusually Public Clash of System and Campus Chiefs, UC-Davis Surveys the Damage

After a grueling three-month investigation into Linda P.B. Katehi’s conduct as chancellor of the University of California at Davis, a campus fatigued by scandal now grapples with whether there is anything to be learned from the downfall of its leader — or from the aggressive tactics of the system president who wanted her gone.

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Ms. Katehi, who had been on administrative leave, resigned Tuesday as chancellor of Davis in conjunction with the release of an investigative report that examined her service on corporate boards, the employment of her family members at the campus, and her role in a social-media campaign that sought in part to improve her online reputation.

The chancellor, who will return to the faculty, characterized the report as something of a vindication. But the document raised serious questions about her judgment and truthfulness, and capped off a highly public process that professors and administrators viewed as unnecessarily damaging to the university.

“It’s been a puzzle to me,” Ralph J. Hexter, Davis’s acting chancellor, said in an interview Wednesday. “I’ve been in academia for a rather long time, and usually even difficult situations are managed without so much public muss and fuss. I regret that.”

For reasons that may never be fully understood, Ms. Katehi and Janet A. Napolitano, the system’s president and a former U.S. secretary of homeland security, proved incapable of reaching a private resolution of their differences. Both parties dug in their heels, with Ms. Katehi refusing to resign and Ms. Napolitano publicly airing a litany of allegations, some of which investigators found to be without merit.

Mr. Hexter, who was elevated to acting chancellor from the position of provost, has inherited a campus that he describes as disrupted yet capable of executing its mission.

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“There’s been choppy water, if I can use that metaphor, but the current has continued,” he said.

Even so, Ms. Katehi’s tenure became synonymous with a fractured administrative culture. Advisers said they felt reluctant to offer alternative ideas and were handicapped by a constantly evolving communications strategy devoted in part to restoring Ms. Katehi’s damaged reputation. Despite Davis’s perennial position as one of the nation’s top-ranked public research universities, the campus has struggled to overcome a 2011 incident in which student protesters were pepper-sprayed.

“Anyone coming in would realize that you have some repair work to do with morale,” Mr. Hexter said.

One of the central critiques contained in the report released this week was that Ms. Katehi was less than truthful when questioned about her role in hiring public-relations firms to enhance her online reputation and that of the campus. What the report does not explore is the extent to which Ms. Katehi’s misleading statements were crafted and endorsed by communications personnel who remain on staff.

Emails first published by The Sacramento Bee show that communications officers provided the chancellor with talking points that created distance between her and the campus’s controversial social-media strategy, which included proposals to soften or remove mentions of the pepper-spray incident from Ms. Katehi’s Wikipedia page. Some of the very language that her public-relations officers signed off on, according to email records, was described by investigators as “misleading, at best, or untruthful, at worst.”

Asked about this, Mr. Hexter expressed confidence in the leadership of the communications office. Ultimately, however, he said it is his responsibility to shoot straight.

“You don’t say something or you don’t accept a note if you know it to not be true,” he said.

Dana Topousis, Davis’s interim leader of strategic communications, said Wednesday that she viewed the crafting of talking points as a collaborative process. Any language the communications team helped to develop reflected Ms. Katehi’s positions, she said.

“We were doing our best to serve her,” she said.

A Divided Campus

The investigation of Ms. Katehi is the most significant personnel matter overseen to date by Ms. Napolitano, who nearly three years ago came to lead what is often regarded as the nation’s most-esteemed public research university system.

For all of the peculiar details of this episode, the president’s approach is being described by observers in California as a precedent-setting action that may signal intense executive oversight of campus-level decisions and a predilection for public accountability.

Not everyone likes what they see.

Richard P. Tucker, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at Davis, said that Ms. Napolitano appeared intent on trying the chancellor in the court of public opinion.

“She didn’t inspire much respect from the faculty for how she handled this,” said Mr. Tucker, who is equally critical of the chancellor for her leadership dating back to the pepper-spray incident.

The report, Mr. Tucker continued, revealed that most of the serious charges Ms. Napolitano had levied against Ms. Katehi “were actually exaggerations at best and, most likely, were just not correct.”

If the investigation’s findings struck some professors as thin gruel, they struck others as inconclusive. John T. Scott, chair of the political-science department, criticized the report for treading too lightly. Its use of vague language, he said, raised suspicion about Ms. Katehi even when the investigators found no clear-cut evidence of a policy violation.

“It struck me as being pretty fair and balanced, maybe even balanced to the point that in the end we didn’t have very much resolution,” Mr. Scott said.

The lack of resolution may feel especially unsatisfying after a process that many saw as unorthodox and ugly. Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the law school at Davis, praised Ms. Napolitano for spearheading a thorough review of what he considered to be serious allegations. But he acknowledged that the drawn-out battle between the president and the chancellor had carried consequences.

“Usually these things are done much more quickly, much more amicably, and without a lot of statements from public-relations firms and press offices,” he said. “This was actually quite public, quite painful, and quite lengthy, and that’s very different from what you ordinarily see when it comes to the departures of higher-education leaders.”

Ultimately, Mr. Tucker said, the chancellor probably found more faculty support than she might have had otherwise because “they thought she was being treated unfairly by Napolitano.”

Lynette A. Hart, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, said Ms. Napolitano erred in not consulting professors before opening an investigation of a chancellor known to have faculty support.

“The way some of these things played, especially the way Napolitano handled it, did convey a kind of hostile environment that isn’t conventional in a university setting. It’s more like she’s dealing with the army or something,” Ms. Hart said.

A President’s Message

Despite the faculty discontent that surrounded the investigation, Ms. Napolitano’s message remains clear, said Dean R. Florez, a former majority leader in the California State Senate.

“Janet Napolitano is going to put the institution above any individual chancellor or friendship or relationship that she may have built in the system,” Mr. Florez said. “The message is really, you know, we’ve got to clean the place up.”

The investigation and its public report also serves as a warning for other system chancellors, Mr. Florez said. By making Ms. Katehi’s case a model, Ms. Napolitano is telling university leaders to strictly adhere to policy and showing them the consequences of cutting corners.

Ms. Napolitano’s University of California does not operate under the deferential model many in higher education are used to, Mr. Florez said. Mistakes aren’t dealt with behind closed doors, and investigation reports are made public once they are released.

Ms. Napolitano and the board might be making an example of Ms. Katehi, said Jim Newberry, a higher-education lawyer with Steptoe & Johnson LLC, but that tactic isn’t completely inappropriate.

Mr. Newberry said the president’s transparency helped further plug her overall message: Integrity matters.

“If your business practices are less than forthright, you may well have the same set of issues to deal with that you saw at Davis,” Mr. Newberry said. “That’s a good message for the board to send.”

Clearing Her Name

Despite the difficulty of the last three months, Ms. Katehi saw the investigative process as a necessary step toward securing her reputation in academe, the former chancellor’s lawyer said Wednesday.

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.

• A Year After Her Ouster, Linda Katehi Still Can’t Resist a Fight
• The 5 Missteps That Toppled Linda Katehi
• The Slow-Motion Downfall of Linda Katehi
• In Fight Over UC-Davis Chancellor’s Future, Where Does the Faculty Stand?

“These baseless allegations were announced to the world, and at that point Chancellor Katehi was not going to resign with those charges pending,” said the lawyer, Melinda Guzman. “At that point she wanted to continue with the investigation and clear her name.”

In Ms. Katehi’s view, she was cleared of the most serious charges, which included allegations of nepotism, the misuse of student fees, and mischaracterizations of her involvement in Davis’s social-media strategy. In actuality, investigators found reasons to quibble with the chancellor in two of these three areas, only dismissing outright the charge that she had misused student fees by diverting them into physical-education programs.

But the report finds no evidence that she tried to enrich her family members, and it leaves open the possibility that she was merely “misleading” instead of “untruthful” about her role in the social-media contracts.

Still, Ms. Katehi’s resignation is a welcome development for faculty members who came to view her as a distraction. Mr. Tucker, for example, says the investigation reinforces misgivings he has had about Ms. Katehi since 2011, when he felt she should have resigned for the good of the university.

“She was all about the Katehi brand,” Mr. Tucker said, “and she just wanted to try to defend her reputation until the very end.”

Under her agreement with the university, Ms. Katehi will become a tenured faculty member with dual appointments in the department of electrical and computer engineering and the gender, sexuality, and women’s studies program.

Details of the agreement, as described by a university spokeswoman, stipulate that Ms. Katehi will receive her chancellor’s salary of $412,000 for one year before returning to the faculty. She will forfeit that money, however, if she does not serve as a professor for at least one year. She must vacate the chancellor’s residence by October 31.

Both parties have agreed not to sue one another.

Ms. Katehi, who has spent most of the past two decades climbing higher education’s administrative ladder, said in a letter Tuesday that she is “happy to go back to what I always have aspired to be, a faculty member.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

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