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Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The Katehi Resignation

As you have probably heard, Linda Katehi submitted her resignation from the position of Chancellor of UC Davis today.  I don't have the time to offer an analysis of the central documents but I wanted to provide links for those of you who would like to look further into the investigative report and the various responses to it.





Chancellor Katehi's Letter of Resignation

Statement of Davis Academic Senate Chair Knoesen regarding the resignation.

Report of Investigation of Chancellor Katehi (with redactions).

Text of President Napolitano's Statement on Chancellor Katehi's Resignation.

Statement by Chancellor Katehi's Attorney Melinda Guzman in response to Report and Resignation.

On President Napolitano's confidential letter to the regents on Chancellor Katehi (Cloudminder)


4 comments:

Vanessa Vaile said...

and now the LA Times: UC Davis chancellor resigns following probe into ethical violations ... with surely many, many to follow...if only they had done this years ago...

Roddey Reid said...

The UC Davis Academic Senate Chair's letter goes beyond the routine politic, neutral acknowledgment of Katehi's resignation expected in such matters to take the liberty of praising the disgraced Chancellor and burying her record of astonishing lapses of judgment and poor leadership under her "interactions" with Janet Napolitano. An astonishing letter in its own right.

Chris Newfield said...

This is true about the slant of the Senate letter. My sense is that the investigation largely cleared the chancellor of the "new' charges that had caused the investigation in the first place (especially the nepotism), and that LK had already addressed the others, particularly the board service, which hadn't resulted in her termination before. The reason for her resignation now seems to be that president Napolitano has decided that she can't trust her as a line manager, especially given the confusing and partially contradictory statements about her involvement in the ludicrous effort to get the 2011 pepperspraying of student protestors off the Internet. But that indictment is in the president's confidential letter to the regents and that hasn't been part of the reporting.

The other background issue, I think, is that UCOP has never been held in lower regard on the campuses than these days, so faculty would reflexively favor their chancellor in any conflict with corporate HQ.

That said, the Davis faculty was split on Linda Katehi, and the divisional chair did a poor job of representing the whole.

I'm also sorry about another result, which is that the coverage located all the criticism in the students, which reinforces the false contrast between student and faculty interests that is one of UC's biggest weaknesses right now--politically and educationally.

Brian Riley said...

Here's the California Aggie coverage. It looks to me like the spin-machine, in the end, veered into a kind of self-destruct mode, which in my opinion was inevitable, given the history and circumstances of it all.

https://theaggie.org/2016/08/09/breaking-katehi-resigns-as-chancellor

The reader's comment posted under the article (dated August 14, 2016) seems particularly apropos...


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