UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi is in the midst of a controversy after it was revealed that the university paid a large amount of money to remove controversial images from the internet. The said photos were related to the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students by campus police.
According to Time, the student association of University of California called for UC Davis Linda Katehi to resign and vacate the post after it was disclosed that the university paid to have some controversial images taken out. The images show a university police officer spraying student protesters with pepper spray. The university was said to have paid a public relations firm at least $175,000 in 2013 to help them in rejuvenating the school's reputation and thwart the images from Google.
The student association's president, Kevin Sabo, blasted the Chancellor for the method she used to cover up the event and the 2011 incident. He added that the incident "shaped student protest and campus response for the last five years."
In a statement on Thursday, as reported by LA Times, UC Davis officials defended the efforts taken by them as an important part of an overall communications strategy. They said "It is important that the excellent work underway at UC Davis with respect to educating the next generation of students, pursuing groundbreaking research, and providing important services to the state is not lost during a campus crisis, including the crisis that ensued following the extremely regrettable incident when police pepper-sprayed student protesters in 2011."
The Sacramento Bee wrote that according to the documents obtained through the California Public Records Act, UC Davis hired two firms after the incident to try and repair the damage online to both the school and Katehi.
One document even revealed that the school paid Maryland company with $93,000 after it offered to make an online branding campaign designed to clean up negative attention. Meanwhile, the school said there were no efforts to scrub anything off the Internet, arguing that the companies were hired instead "to improve capacity in expertise in digital communications."
