Comments on: Legislators demand campus change

By: Police, Student Protesters, and Pepper Spray | LA Progressive

Police, Student Protesters, and Pepper Spray | LA Progressive — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:01:29 +0000

[...] was a 2009 UC Davis graduate.The use of pepper spray will remain a contentious issue since UC president Mark Yudof testified in Sacramento on December 14, in response to evidence provided by this writer, that the University would fund an independent [...]

By: why hasn't she been fired

why hasn't she been fired — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:00:46 +0000

UCD deserves better than Katehi. Her employment needs to be terminated, since she doesn’t have the strength of character to step down.

By: Greg Kuperberg

Greg Kuperberg — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:39:58 +0000

I have to say that I don’t like and didn’t expect the sensationalist tone that has developed at the Davis Enterprise with some of its stories. There is nothing wrong with reporting this hearing — in fact I wanted to read about it — and as far as I know there is nothing all that wrong with the facts as reported.

What is not so good is that when I went to the web site, it said “LEGISLATORS DEMAND CAMPUS CHANGE” in giant letters, followed by “State lawmakers on Wednesday grilled UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi on chain of command and urged university leaders to rewrite rules for policing protests and use of force.” That’s not the way that the Daily Californian put it. Their headline is, “State legislators question university officials about November protests” and the lead sentence is, “Over the course of a more than four hour joint legislative hearing in Sacramento Wednesday, state legislators sought answers from UC and CSU officials regarding police use of force against nonviolent protesters in recent weeks.”

Why did you the Enterprise verbs like “demand” and “grill” to describe what must have been a fairly standard hearing, or at worst fairly standard theatrics, in Sacramento? For a number of reasons, state legislators aren’t actually in a position to “demand” much from UC Davis or Chancellor Katehi. One reason is that they can hardly threaten to cut funding more than they already have cut funding and probably will cut funding no matter what. Another reason is that legislatures don’t run universities and can’t run universities. A third reason is that, even though the pepper spray incident was entirely out of place for Davis, it’s not on the same scale as some of the injustices with police and prisons elsewhere in the state. It’s not like the Rodney King beating, the BART police shooting, the riots in badly overcrowded California prisons, etc.

I wonder if the Davis Enterprise has something to learn from the Berkeley student paper. Namely, that when a news organization sensationalizes stories, it wins attention and loses respect. I just didn’t expect to see it in our traditional city paper.

By: John

John — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:25:24 +0000

I can only hope that she was either misquoted; or that the quotes were reported out of context – that is an incredible statement for a leader to make. Maybe it’s time for her to pursue an engineering career.

By: Ron Smith

Ron Smith — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:24:33 +0000

Another incredibly inept and naive comment by the Chancellor that her background as an educator and engineer precludes her giving directions to the police as to how to deal with the students she is responsible for. She can’t do both — say she is fully responsible and then claim not to know what to do. If you examine her explanation of what happened in her previous position with admissions at the University of Illinois you can see a pattern of denying responsibility for things she should know about.

Can we not find a more suitable public servant to lead UC Davis? Her family income is $550,000 (Her husband is a faculty assistant to a Vice Chancellor and makes $150,000). That means with salaries combined that the Tseregounis family grosses a little over $10,500 a week, almost enough to pay annual tuition for one UC Davis student. (They could be grossing more depending if they are paid on academic 9 month year or for 12 months). And they get complimentary housing too. All this and she says she feels inadequate to explain to the police about what kind of actions to take on her campus?