The University of California at Davis paid almost $200,000 to obscure a 2011 incident where a campus police officer pepper-sprayed student protesters.
To improve the university’s reputation, consultants were paid “to scrub the Internet of negative online postings,” according to The Sacramento Bee.
The university contracted with two consultants and paid them at least $175,000 for an “online branding campaign designed to clean up the negative attention” the school received, according to documents obtained by the Bee. The objective was “to expedite the eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google” and “to achieve a reasonable balance of positive natural search results.”
The publicly funded university wanted to gloss over the November incident, captured on video, where UC Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike approached sitting students and pepper sprayed about three dozen of them. The students were peacefully protesting inequality as part of the Occupy Movement. Pike was later fired, but won $38,000 in a worker’s compensation case for “suffering he experienced after the incident,” the SFGate noted. UC Davis settled a federal lawsuit by paying $1 million to the students.
The actions taken by UC Davis has led to sharp criticism, and some are calling for Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign.
“While many recognize the value in spending money to promote a college or university’s message, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to bury a controversy can seem disingenuous, if not outright exploitative,” Ellen Wexler wrote for Inside Higher Ed.
Katehi has apologized for the public relations move, though it rang hollow.
“I take full responsibility for being at the helm during some of its most difficult days,” she said in a statement. “But I assure you: none of our communications efforts were intended – or attempted – to erase online content or rewrite history.”
The PR actions were aimed at rewriting history. The university couldn’t erase online content, but that’s more of an unwillingness to violate the law rather than a dedication to the truth.
Contracts with consultants explicitly listed the objectives of the campaign, notably “launch an aggressive and comprehensive online campaign to eliminate the negative search results … through strategic modifications to existing and future content and generating original content as needed.”
Those actions seek to obscure the pepper-spray incident. The university doesn’t want potential students to learn of police brutality on campus, and aimed to obscure the event as much as they could. The non-apology from Chancellor Katehi claims responsibility as she refuses to accept the reality of what the university did.
