
UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet - splat
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article71659992.html
======
tymekpavel
I'm surprised the chancellor hasn't been forced to resign yet. Beyond
authorizing the pepper spray incident, she's made many more questionable
decisions.

1\. Serving on the DeVry board without permission from the UC President, and
receiving a generous paycheck. All while DeVry is under federal investigation.

2\. Serving on the board of a company selling textbooks to students and
receiving stock-based compensation totaling half a million.

3\. Apparently now spending tens of thousands of dollars to scrub her previous
mistakes from the Internet.

~~~
wl
I'm surprised that the chancellor wasn't forced to resign after the release of
the Kroll and Reynoso reports about the pepper spray incident. The police
action against the protestors was illegal and the police department knew it.
They only went forward because of Katehi's mistaken insistence that the
occupiers were not members of the campus community and needed to be removed
before the weekend lest these outsiders rape students. Had the police
department handled the situation the way they wanted to, they would have
removed the tents at night (when the laws against camping were clearly being
violated) and when there weren't large crowds around.

~~~
labster
There's only one reason they ever remove a UC Chancellor: they stop raising
money for the University. Donor cash is job one. Obviously, she's good at her
job if she makes money, even if she moonlights in jobs that actively harm
students.

The only solution is to stop donating to UC Davis -- and UC in general. If the
Annual Fund calls you, ask them "Has Katehi resigned yet?" That's what I do.
If you really want to help students at UCD, give to ASUCD or CalPIRG or
something, not to a slush fund of a Chancellor who spends student fees on her
own image.

Disclaimer: UCD alumnus here.

Edit: Although five lawmakers calling for her resignation might also decrease
donations to the UC: [http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-
eye/art...](http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-
eye/article71848252.html)

~~~
ginko
This might sound silly but why would an alumnus, who spent thousands for
tuition already, donate money to his university in the first place?

~~~
labster
Because University was the best time in your life, and every day now is a
dreary slog of mediocrity. By giving money, you can reclaim a part of your
glory days that won't come again. You can feel like giving to other students
will help their lives, as a pale imitation of what it would be like to be with
that group again, having fun and chasing girls instead of supporting a dead-
end marriage with a mind-numbing job. If you have enough money, you can even
inject your name into student life by getting a building named after you --
you can prove to everyone that you are a success, even if you're still unhappy
and growing older by the day.

Or maybe you just believe in supporting higher education. Either way.

~~~
SilasX
If you believed in "supporting higher education", there are probably better
ways than supporting the one exclusive blue-blood institution you happened to
attend ...

~~~
brianwawok
Your self interest lies in it making your resume better. If you and all your
class gave say 10% of your income to your school, maybe new students would
graduate knowing more and make you look good. Or maybe the school gets bigger
TVs and a better football coach.

~~~
Retra
Or maybe the administrators give themselves a raise.

~~~
labster
That's not how academia works, at least at a public school. Administrators
rarely get raises, and get pay cuts whenever the economy gets bad. This is why
administrators are frequently overpaid when first hired, because they know
that it's close to their earnings ceiling. If you want to get more income as
an administrator, you have to move to a new job.

No, that money is going to athletics for bigger telescreens and not for
student athletes. Ever since the Larry Vanderhoef chancellery, Davis has been
spending more and more on athletics, with little to show for it.

I just wish Emil Mrak was still around as chancellor -- that guy was awesome.
He managed to keep students from massive protests at UCD during the free
speech movement era by shipping them in free buses to protest at UCSB, and he
introduced all of the bicycle infrastructure in Davis. Instead, we have a
profiteer running the campus, in cahoots with the nation's former top cop.

------
Overtonwindow
Well, few things give more attention to something than attempts to bury it.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)

~~~
cjarrett
A search with bing for 'uc davis' highlights three recent articles written
about their coverup. Streisand's effect indeed!

~~~
CyberDildonics
why would you mention a specific search engine?

~~~
mikestew
If a tester entered a bug and you can't repro because the bug doesn't specify
the environment, you'd rip 'em a new one. But someone uses two measly words to
describe their test environment in this case, and now you question them about
their eloquence?

Or maybe I have you wrong, so I'll ask: why would you ask why someone
mentioned a specific search engine?

------
klenwell
_White did not respond to messages left for her last month or Wednesday, but a
résumé posted for her on LinkedIn cites her experience handling “a successful
6 month long strategic SEO (search engine optimization) and online reputation
management campaign for the University of California, Davis, and Chancellor
Linda Katehi.”_

Culminating with a lengthy feature in the Sacramento Bee. Mission
accomplished.

~~~
SilasX
So ... do they get a refund? I'm guessing the consultants' contract covered
them here, as they can't do much about a legit info request.

~~~
deong
Right. They probably executed the original contract well enough, but you can't
game Google to prevent _future_ news stories from appearing.

That's the nature of the game. These companies just flood the internet with
innocuous data about the client in a way that's carefully aimed at pushing
"bad stuff" down in the rankings. This works for a number of reasons, but a
major one is that search engines prefer recency. Searching "Kobe Bryant" today
is going to find way more articles about him scoring 60 in his final game than
about him being accused of sexual assault in 2003.

If you keep making the news for doing bad things, that same tendency works
against you. It's not like these firms can make Google ignore all the articles
about you that haven't been written yet. Success is predicated on the idea
that you'll stop doing stupid shit after whatever initial event required the
service.

~~~
SilasX
Right, but it's also kind of a special case in that your "future stupid stuff"
_must_ include the hiring of the very service that's going to clean up your
previous stupid stuff -- so long as the public regards such hiring as stupid.

I guess this is one case where it's especially true that "if you want to do
something right, you have to do it yourself" :-p

~~~
deong
Yes, this is why this kind of thing probably only really works for
individuals. There's too much public interest in a university or a large
corporation, and so the act of covering your tracks is itself noteworthy.

------
vinhboy
It's been a while since I've looked into these "reputation" services. Do they
actually work, when not hit by the Streisand effect, or is it just snake oil?

~~~
GCA10
The reputation services are actually rather entertaining to watch. I write a
lot online, and a couple years ago, my older posts started attracting dozens
of comments from a couple people who seemed to be in a frenzied hurry to get
visible.

At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. Why would someone be writing
"Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m.? Then I did a little checking
on the names of the posters. Turns out they all had some "incident" in their
pasts. Now they or their consultants were pumping out huge amounts of bland,
benign content from all sorts of accounts (news sites, Tumblr, etc.) in their
real names. The net result: these new accounts and the resulting content
swamped Google, becoming the top 50 or so search results. The bad stuff didn't
totally vanish, but it now was relegated to much lower placement.

In terms of whether this stuff works, that's a tricky call. I think it all
depends on what the nature of the client's problems are ... and how much the
world can/should care about some past mistake as life plays out. Sometimes
it's hard to argue with the desire for a fresh start. In other case, it's
hopeless.

~~~
nerfhammer
> Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m?

I always thought these were linkspam bots, hoping to get a little pagerank
from the url they submit with their name

~~~
GCA10
Them, too. The amount of false flattery in the world is really getting out of
control.

------
ljk
Doesn't seem to be working - top google results are about them trying to erase
it now...

------
coroutines
I wonder how they decided spending money on this would be a good investment.

They must know how the internet works.

What specifically were they paying for that made it worth it? Keeping
references to the incident away from their Facebook page?

Who HASN'T seen that image by now?

What a misguided allocation of funds.

~~~
unabridged
>I wonder how they decided spending money on this would be a good investment.

Its not their money and they have no shareholders. They don't care if works or
not. These PR people cashing the checks are probably friends of friends of the
Chancellor.

------
eveningcoffee
Things like this is why I consider the PR people to be the worst of the worst
scum.

------
awinter-py
Hmm, should have paid that money directly to US News & World Report. Not sure
how tear-gassing sophomores affects the ranking but I'm guessing low six
figures can get you spot #3 on the liberal arts list.

------
ben_jones
Comment I saw on Reddit:

"Right before these conflicts of interest came out, the Sac Bee did a fluff
piece about Katehi without any mention of the pepper spray incident. It was a
female writer talking about how wonderful it was for Katehi to break the glass
ceiling."

It seems there is some conflict of interest here, as the article seems to
attempt to shift blame from the Chancellor to the university. Would it be
unreasonable to assume there is a special relationship between her and someone
at the newspaper?

------
ceejayoz
"Have you tried just... _not_ pepper spraying peaceful people in the face?"

~~~
spacemanmatt
No sir, I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

~~~
alanh
The reference is narrowly escaping me. Help?

 _edit in reply:_ Haha, no, not Green Eggs & Ham

 _another edit:_ I thought the parent & grandparent posts might belong
together, but apparently not. I think GP is simply using this trope:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaveYouTriedNotBe...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaveYouTriedNotBeingAMonster)
— or perhaps this recent Dilbert strip
[http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-03-08](http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-03-08)

~~~
Sanddancer
Mister Horse from Ren and Stimpy.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA)

~~~
spacemanmatt
Mister Horse is correct!

------
tobltobs
This is one of the few areas where the EU is better in protecting the rich
and/or corporations. In the EU you can force Google to remove stuff like this
from the index. I always wondered why the US is lagging behind on this.

------
neves
Am I evil if I vote up this post so it counteracts the consultant job of
hiding the pepper spray event from the internet?

~~~
spacemanmatt
No, you're a good citizen. When I saw the story hit facebook, it got reshared
faster than anything else today.

------
oluckyman
"UC Davis spent thousands...". Shades of Dr Evil.

------
atom-morgan
If you've got nothing to hide..

