More than a year and a half after University of California at Davis students were pepper-sprayed in a botched police operation, the campus’s chancellor still vividly recalls the emotional toll the incident took on her and her family.
Linda P.B. Katehi, whose days as chancellor appeared numbered in late 2011, said on Wednesday that the incident had proved a grueling introduction into the life of a leader in crisis.
“It’s not easy,” she said. “It’s horrible as a matter of fact.”
On November 18, 2011, Ms. Katehi became the target of international outrage over the treatment of protesting Davis students. In a moment captured in videos and photographs that went viral on the Internet, students involved in an Occupy Wall Street demonstration were doused in their faces with pepper spray by a campus police officer.
Ms. Katehi spoke on Wednesday with reporters here at The Chronicle’s offices, where she was asked to reflect on how the incident had affected her. The chancellor said she had been encouraged by her closest advisers and Mark G. Yudof, the system’s president, to stay on the job.
But her husband, Spyros Tseregounis, a lecturer in chemical engineering and faculty coordinator for corporate relations at Davis, was less sure about the wisdom of that decision.
“There was a time when my husband would wake up in the morning and say, ‘When are we leaving?’” Ms. Katehi recalled.
The chancellor’s family was not spared from criticism, she said. As the story gained momentum, reporters in Ms. Katehi’s native Greece surprised her mother, then 85 years old, with telephone calls, asking if she knew that her daughter had signed off on such aggressive police tactics. (A Davis task force’s report on the incident later faulted the campus’s administrators for not clearly articulating that the police were not to use force in breaking up the protests.)
In the days after the pepper-spraying incident, many students and faculty members held Ms. Katehi personally responsible for the police response. Appearing at a campus rally, the chancellor was jeered with cries of “shame” as she expressed how “horrible” she felt about what had occurred. “I’m here to apologize,” she told the crowd.
‘I Did Not Trust the Police’
Ms. Katehi came to Davis in 2009 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was provost. Even before the pepper-spray incident, the chancellor said she had noticed the Davis police were “a lot more militarized” than those she had encountered in the Midwest.
“After November 2011, I did not trust the police,” Ms. Katehi said.
In the wake of the incident, the leadership of the Davis police force was overhauled. The department’s captain and all three lieutenants were replaced, Ms. Katehi said. Of approximately 30 officers now in the department, more than one-third were hired after the protest, she said.
“The reform of the police force is fundamental,” Ms. Katehi said.
The chancellor has said she was taken aback by what happened on that fateful November afternoon, but the Davis police expected all along that they would meet resistance and respond in kind, according to the Davis task force’s report, issued in April 2012.
The police department’s operations plan, which was outlined three days before the incident, said that “the use of force is highly likely in this type of situation.” But Ms. Katehi said on Wednesday that she had not read the plan, and still does not think it is the chancellor’s place to delve so deeply into the details of a law-enforcement operation.
“I would not even read it now,” she said. “I am not trained in police matters.”
Yet Ms. Katehi was criticized for making tactical decisions better left to law enforcement. Evidence suggests that it was the chancellor who directed the police to disperse the protesters’ encampment in the afternoon rather than overnight, when a confrontation would have been less likely, the Davis task force concluded.
A Silver Lining
Nearly eight months ago, Ms. Katehi formed a committee to review the campus’s progress on reforms suggested by various campus groups. A report issued by the committee this month expressed support for a number of proposals, including the creation of a new police cadet academy that involves students in public-safety operations.
If there is a silver lining to the pepper-spraying incident, Ms. Katehi said, it is that she became aware of problems on her campus that simply were not on her radar before.
She started a listening tour across Davis’s approximately 150 departments, finding that many professors had legitimate grievances well beyond the scope of campus safety. Some faculty members had lost their office phones due to budget cuts. Others described a broken system for student advising. Those are issues that can and should be addressed, Ms. Katehi said.
“When there is a crisis in an organization,” she said, “you see things you would not normally see.”
Ms. Katehi acknowledged that other campus leaders in her situation might have thought it best to step down. But she said her resignation would not have been a remedy for the campus, and probably would have “frozen” the institution in a state of turmoil until a new leader could be named.
“It really does not resolve the crisis” to resign, she said. “You are going on to a new page, but you have not closed the last chapter.”
