University of California at Davis chancellor resigns after ethics probe

Former UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, left, talks to students at a protest in 2014.

Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, an electrical and computer engineering scholar, said Tuesday that an investigation launched this spring had cleared her of accusations of nepotism, retaliation, and inappropriate travel expenses.

SAN FRANCISCO The embattled chancellor of the University of California, Davis resigned on Tuesday, the university system president said, after allegations the school spent $175,000 to quash negative internet posts prompted an ethics probe. UC President Janet Napolitano has accepted.

“A search for Katehi’s successor will begin immediately”, the same spokeswoman told the Times.

Katehi will reportedly remain on the school’s faculty as a tenured professor in the school’s engineering department.

Katehi’s attorney, Melinda Guzman, read the same report and offered a completely different interpretation. UC President Janet Napolitano announced Katehi’s resignation in a campus-wide email sent to UC Davis students on Tuesday afternoon.

Despite Katehi never asking permission to accept the position, Napolitano originally defended Katehi for taking a $70,000-a-year seat on the DeVry Education Group board – a for-profit education company that is being investigated for fraud – as relatively common for university senior staff.

She appeared to be less concerned with what the pepper-spraying had done to the violated members of the student body than with what it had done to her own image.

Katehi’s resignation ends months of turmoil at the Northern California public university known for its agricultural and veterinary studies.

In Katehi’s letter, she admits the investigation did not completely exonerate her, “regarding the social media contracts, the investigation team felt that I had minimized my knowledge of or role in the contracts and that my statements were “misleading, at best, or untruthful, at worst”.

Katehi was also accused of violating conflict-of-interest policies and misusing student fees by directing them toward unapproved instructional purposes, Napolitano said in the letter.

Then Napolitano’s office found documents indicating that the chancellor had misled the president in asserting she was not involved in the social media contracts, UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein said. In it she wrote that, on April 25, she met with the chancellor to discuss what she called “a series of misjudgments and policy violations of such a serious nature that she should resign her position as chancellor of UC Davis”.

One student protested the decision, saying “with all the financial reasons she was involved in a year ago I know that affected a lot of students, so her having any involvement as a mentor or a professor on campus shouldn’t take place”.