University of California President Janet Napolitano said she would appoint an independent investigator to look into “serious and troubling” questions raised by the actions of Chancellor Linda Katehi.
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Napolitano wrote: “Your daughter-in-law, who directly reports to one of your direct reports, has received promotions and salary increases over a two-and-a-half year period that have increased her pay by over $50,000 and have resulted in several title changes”.
“I am deeply disappointed to take this action”, Napolitano said in a statement.
“I’m appalled to see the President of our UC system recklessly impugn the character and cast arbitrary, unfounded accusations against a good public servant without offering a shred of substantive evidence to support them – for the sole objective of justifying a purely political decision”, Guzman said.
Napolitano also expressed concern that the academic program where Katehi’s son has a paid research position was put under his wife’s supervision and that student fees may have been used inappropriately to finance the move.
Later, it was discovered that Katehi’s administration paid almost $200,000 to consulting firms to bury online stories about a 2011 incident when campus police pepper-sprayed students during a protest.
In a statement last week, Katehi apologized for “a series of highly publicized missteps” that she acknowledged had overshadowed the university’s accomplishments and “been a setback to our reputation and hard-earned prestige”.
“This smacks of scapegoating and a rush to judgment driven purely by political optics, not the best interests of the university or the UC system as a whole”.Students who were active in the five-week sit-in outside Katehi’s office on the fifth floor of Mrak Hall were not quite as supportive.
Napolitano removed Katehi from her post, which she has held for nearly seven years.
On Wednesday night, Katehi’s attorney Melinda Guzman released a statement defending Katehi’s reputation.
Some critics lost faith in Chancellor Katehi in 2011, when she presided over the brutal pepper-spraying of Davis undergraduates lawfully assembled on a campus quad. On April 16, the day after the occupation of her office ended, students marched in the campus’s annual Picnic Day parade holding “Fire Katehi” signs. Adding to the speculation, a spokeswoman for Napolitano told the Bee that “Katehi is still chancellor”, but did not respond to questions about whether Napolitano has asked her to resign. The university had been trying to pay a company to flood the Internet with items about Davis such that Google searches about the university wouldn’t start with the pepper spray incident. “Despite public statements to members of the media, as well as to me, that you were not aware of or involved with these particular contracts, documents prepared in response to a Public Records Act request indicate multiple interactions with one of the vendors and efforts to set up meetings with the other”. He is acting chancellor while Katehi is under investigation for several policy violations.
Kathy received $420,000 to be a board member from 2012-14 for John Wiley & Sons, a publisher of science and math textbooks, and accepted a $70,000-a-year seat on the board of the DeVry Education Group in February, The Sacramento Bee reports.
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Katehi, a scholar in electrical and computer engineering, became chancellor in 2009, and as the Los Angeles Times reported, “has been widely criticized for questionable moonlighting activities” as well as the scrubbing contract.
