UCD faculty come not to bury Katehi, but to praise her
In response to calls for the resignation of UC Davis’ chancellor by many in the English and physics departments, the board of the Davis Faculty Association and thousands who signed an online petition, Walter Leal produced a letter of his own Tuesday.
“We strongly believe that Linda Katehi is well-qualified to lead our university through this difficult healing process and oppose the premature calls for her resignation; this is not in the best interest of our university,” wrote the entomology professor.
In a day, 206 other professors had signed on.
And at a town hall meeting Tuesday, about 510 faculty and staff inside Freeborn Hall largely seemed to reject calls for Katehi to step down.
Instead, in the wake of the Nov. 18 pepper-spraying of Occupy Davis protesters, they urged her to follow through on promises to reach out to students and redouble efforts to reverse state budget cuts.
Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of epidemiology, urged the chancellor to take to heart the message of students decrying diminishing opportunity.
“Many of the things that you’re proposing are great — talking to the students, opening up a dialogue, making sure that the civil discourse here really does begin to grow — but I also think there needs to be leadership at another level,” Hertz-Picciotto said.
“It’s not just mentoring the students and listening to them. They’re really at the forefront of this. They’re the ones that are really tackling the big issues of the day.”
Katehi told faculty and staff that the furor following the use of force against nonviolent protesters has “tested the soul, and torn at the heart, of our university,” but that they should not to lose sight of what was most important.
“I’m talking about a family where the father and the mother work to make ends meet, and the kids come here and have four or five jobs,” she said. “We have many kids like that, they’re in the thousands — 40 percent of all students receive a form of financial aid. They work very hard to pay back the loans.”
Katehi said she planned to: assemble a council to resolve conflicts, reach out to parents, urge greater alumni support of student scholarships and faculty, and rethink the role of law enforcement on campus.
By talking more often with those on campus about their concerns, including to small groups of students in the dorms about where UCD’s money comes from and how it’s spent, she said she hoped to begin earning trust.
Aparna Sinha, a teaching assistant in the School of Education, said she hoped Katehi would deliver.
“If you go to the Quad you’ll see a lot of students saying, ‘Our university!’ I hope you’ll bring the change so that we can say, ‘My chancellor,’ ” Sinha said.
Economics professor Ann Stevens said a “large, silent group” of faculty and staff believe that while the pepper-spraying needed to be investigated, “We should not lose sight of the battle that was being waged before this happened, in particular the battle to keep the university strong in light of reduced state funding.”
Professors lined up to praise the third-year chancellor for her efforts at a time when the state has cut about 25 percent of the general funds received by UC and CSU since the beginning of the recession.
“Chancellor Katehi is not responsible for the financial problems of the state of California,” said Shirish Mahajan, a chemical engineering professor, who blamed Prop. 13 and an unwillingness to raise taxes.
Emanuel Epstein, a member of UCD’s class of 1940, a plant physiologist and professor emeritus, called Katehi “an outstanding leader — second to none at UC Davis.”
Tilahun Yilma, a veterinary virologist who came to UCD in 1965 as an undergraduate, said that forcing Katehi to step down before a thorough investigation would compound one “disaster” with another.
“We’ve been waiting for such a leader for long time; for me, more than 40 years,” he said.
Bob Ostertag, a professor of technocultural studies, said that just as damaging as the actions of police, however, were Katehi’s statements immediately afterward. They gave “the impression that the leadership of the University of California is living in a bubble,” he said.
Ostertag wanted her to know he had been “inundated” by email messages from alumni responding to a blog post he’d written about what happened.
“Wow, are they angry,” Ostertag said. “I think that failure of leadership has hurt the institution.”
Katehi’s most ardent critic, English professor Nathan Brown, the first to call for the chancellor’s resignation, recalled that, in 2009, student fee-hike protesters at a Mrak Hall sit-in were arrested, UC Berkeley students were beaten and UCLA students Tasered, all in a matter of hours.
“There is every reason to expect that when riot police are called onto campus to disperse a student protest, those students will be beaten by the police,” Brown said.
When a moderator cut him off, the audience clapped for 30 seconds as Brown tried to continue speaking.
Mark Reyes, an undergraduate adviser in the history department and a former student, took issue with Brown’s call to take cops off campus.
“I don’t think anything would be more irresponsible than having a police force that protects this community disbanded,” he said.
Brown’s English department colleague, Joshua Clover, emphasized that no one had been hurt at demonstrations except protesters and except by the police. He said it was unfair of Katehi and others to raise the specter of the Virginia Tech shootings, because armed police had not prevented it.
Katehi said that while she was willing to consider different ways of policing, it was unrealistic to imagine a campus without security.
“You may not see it in the news, but we have people who are raped. We have students threatened. On every day, there is an event on our campus,” she said.
“If you can develop a construct where 60,000 people can live without having the means to protect themselves, I would like to understand how it can be done.”
Without pointing to the chancellor’s own $400,000 salary directly, a few speakers said large salaries sent a message of misplaced priorities. Laura Grindstaff noted that as a sociology professor she earns $30,000 per year less than Lt. John Pike, the officer seen pepper-spraying protesters.
Erik Loboschefsky, an environmental engineering graduate student, urged administrators to think of how many students the same money could support when approving raises.
On Tuesday, the UC Board of Regents approved several pay raises, among them a 21.9 percent raise to UCD counsel Steven Drown, pushing his annual salary to $250,000.
Rebecca Ambrose, a professor of education, called for voluntary pay cuts from those earning more than $180,000 — the amount over which families don’t qualify for financial aid.
Said Ambrose, “I know there’s a lot more to the budget than the salaries of those making more than $180,000, but the message that would send to the kids out there would make all the difference.”
Katehi is set to meet with graduate and professional students from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday in 66 Roessler Hall.
— Reach Cory Golden at cgolden@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8046. Follow him on Twitter at @cory_golden
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=111015
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on Nov 30 2011.
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I am speaking up here as the Chair of the UCD Physics department. The first sentence of this article gives an incorrect representation of my department. While many members of the department did sign a letter as individuals calling for the Chancellor’s resignation, this is not an official physics department position . The Physics Department is very large and far from monolithic. About 40% of the regular faculty have not requested the Chancellor’s resignation. Many physics faculty are reserving judgment until they have full information about the events of Nov 18. It is inaccurate and disrespectful to the diversity of views in the department to report the situation the way it is reported here. I hope that any future reporting you may do on this subject correctly reflects the situation.
Thank you Mr. Golden for making this rapid correction.
The original wording of this story did not include the word “many” in the first paragraph. I’ve made that change because, as Prof. Albrecht has pointed out here, a significant portion of the physics faculty did not sign the letter and it was not fair to them to imply that they had. Unfortunately, it’s too late to make the same change for today’s print edition. There will be a correction in tomorrow’s paper. We’ve done our best to be accurate in covering an often complicated and emotional story, and I apologize for the mistake.
If I might clarify this minor but significant misquote of my remarks: it is not simply that no police have been hurt in any student protests, but that not a single person of any kind has experienced bodily harm as a result of campus protest, unless that harm came directly from police. There is a literally infinite ratio between people hurt by cops/people hurt by protestors. In short, the only threat to health and safety as regards protests is the police force. This is simply a fact.
Prof. Clover: That, too, is a fair criticism. I’ll make that change now.
Cory, thanks very much for making that partial correction; I appreciate it. ANd I hope you’ll understand that, being a person who teaches writing for a living, I am committed to getting these things right — as I know all sincere journalists are. I notice it now says “emphasized that no one had been hurt at demonstrations except protesters” — which is true, as far as it goes. But it isn’t quite what I said, in the meeting you are citing. I said that no one had been hurt by protestors, and that everybody who had been hurt (which is to say, many) had been hurt by police. This is both what I said and a verifiable fact; I’m sure there’s no reason to pass over it in silence, and I’m grateful for the clarification.
Prof. Clover: There’s that old adage about not getting into fights with folks who buy ink by the barrel. Perhaps there should be another about trading precision with poets. I’ll change the story to better reflect what you wanted to say.
Cory: but we struggle for justice and accuracy together! Many thanks, Joshua Clover
Close to 110,000 people have currently signed the online petition calling for the chancellor’s resignation. It’s a bit of an understatement to call that “thousands”, don’t you think?
Here are some other facts:
Joshua Clover did not follow the meeting protocol whereby those whose numbers were drawn got called. He jumped the queue. He seems to think that his views are more important than other peoples.
Joshua Clover seems to require more accuracy from others then from himself. He verbally attacked the chancellor yesterday for bringing up the incident at Virginia Tech, claiming that it was factually wrong that police presence on campus deters this kind of violence. But he is exactly wrong: precisely such an incident was averted by campus police within the last year:
http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=13200
I have a high regard for Chancellor Katehi, but faculty exhibiting the lack of critical thinking exhibited by Clover and Brown cause me to wonder what has happened to the humanities at UC Davis.
I understand Nathan Brown also did not follow the meeting protocol by jumping in without a number and speaking way beyond the time limit, even when being told to stop. I think he has made his point numerous times before but seems unwilling to let others make theirs.
One would should logically ask: Of the 206 professors that signed, how many of them did NOT get a raise?.
I don’t want to split hairs, Jack Prais, but the article you cite states that city police, not campus police, arrested the suspect. In what way did UCPD act as a “deterrent” in this case?
Jack, I’m happy to repeat the actual argument (which the Enterprise hadn’t the space to include but which, if you were there and paying attention, you would have heard) to save you having to argue from anecdote and fearmongering. It goes like this:
If we are to believe that having armed police on campus had a demonstrably deterrent effect on “active shooters” (in the lingo), then we would inevitably discover that there are more frequent cases on campuses without armed police. This however is not the case. Thus the deterrence argument fails the most basic application of scientific method.
It is impressive to see that the letter by Professor Walter Leal was signed by 200+ professors. One thing that needs to be added, though, is that the administrators used the administrative email list to send out a request to sign this letter.
No such e-mail reached me in any such form from “the administrators”. The only e-mail that I saw spread virally among campus faculty. I know that in some departments it was posted to the faculty mailing list for that department, but even then, not usually by the department chair as far as I know. In fact I learned about the letter on Wednesday, the day after it was sent to the Enterprise.
No I did not receive the letter from administrative lists. I got to know the open letter through private communication with other faculty members.
I received an email from College of AES Dean’s office with “High” importance. It was sent to: caesiraescefac@ucdavis.edu.