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Dorsum in 2011, and so-police officer Lt. John Pike and the Academy of California, Davis came to national attention when Davis was videoed and photographed aggressively pepper-spraying peaceful student protestors. The protests were part of general unrest directed at the University of California'south leadership, which had approved significant pay increase for administrators at the same time it furloughed professors and raised educatee tuition. Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi also came nether burn for her actions both before and after the protestation — scrutiny that'southward going to resume now that we know UC Davis spent $175,000 attempting to scrub both its own online epitome and that of its chancellor.

Katehi

University Chancellor Linda Katehi

The school contracted with multiple SEO firms trying to push down results that highlighted the school'south failure to accost student concerns and the deportment of its police officers during the November 18, 2011 protest, according to The Sacramento Bee. This, despite the fact that the university'southward own investigation into the incident found that "Lieutenant Expressway's use of force in pepper spraying seated protesters was objectively unreasonable," and that "the evidence does non provide an objective, factual ground for Lt. Pike's purported belief that he was trapped, that any of his officers were trapped, or that the condom of their arrestees was at issue."

The University contracted with reputation-management firms as office of "an aggressive and comprehensive online entrada to eliminate the negative search results for UC Davis and the Chancellor."

This new report comes as Katehi is once more under burn, this fourth dimension for accepting questionable corporate lath positions. She recently took (and and then quit) a board position with DeVry, a for-profit visitor under federal investigation for possibly making fraudulent claims about job placement rates and expected earnings. She besides served on the board of John Wiley & Sons, a textbook manufacturer who paid her $420,000 a year. The DeVry position was paid, which has led California legislators to ask why Katehi, who already earns a $424,300/year salary from UC Davis, has plenty time to moonlight on multiple other corporate boards for as large incomes.

I suspects UC Davis is about to get a lesson in the Streisand Effect — and every bit calls for Katehi to resign have mounted, there were few more potent ways to ensure that the events of 2011 would be refreshed in everyone'southward listen than to try to pay a reputation firm to brand the university's behavior go abroad. A spokesperson for the university, Dana Topousis, claimed that the payments were only made in the service of portraying the academy "adequately." That's corporate-speak for "We don't like the style our own actions have made us look," and "We'd really like this to go abroad."

Sometimes that works. In the Internet age, it mostly doesn't.