[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...

[alanh]

When students from my own alma mater call and ask for contributions, I have on occasion related how I was a student when the 2008 financial crisis happened, and that my school’s response was to charge every student an extra $500 a semester and call it an “economic recovery fee.” This from a state school where the state Constitution required education to be “as free or nearly free as possible”!

[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 ...

[wildmusings]

If you truly want to support higher education, your best bet is to refuse to donate until the colleges cut their wasteful spending and lower tuition. This is doubly true for private universities. When they call asking for money, tell them why they're not getting any. Nothing will change until the money stops flowing.

[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.

[danso]

The alumni who donate do so because they believe they got far more than their money's worth and they have enough money today to "pay it forward", so to speak. Because the return on investment for education is something that takes a non-deterministic amount of time to realize (both monetarily and in personal reflection), it's not coincidence that most most alumni donors do so decades after graduation.

[tkinom]

Good idea, will ask that question next time when I get the "Annual Fund" call.

[sitkack]

But she was a true benefactor for all these wonderful images, https://www.google.com/search?q=uc+davis+pepper+spray+meme&b...

Isn't active "cleaning up" of the internet by a government entity a violation of those people's free speech?

[Sanddancer]

No. The cleaning up, though reprehensible, is not violating their free speech, because there's no prior restraint and no legal penalties. However, the Chancellor will hopefully have a significant amount of explaining to do as to why she is spending so much of the public's money on this whitewashing.

[sitkack]

If someone uses public money to erase your words isn't that cenorship?

[prawn]

#2 is an unhealthy conflict of interest that saddens me. I remember buying $100 textbooks that were quickly out of date and too heavy to lug around.

Anyone in a senior position like this should have the interests of students and their education at heart and be doing everything they can to provide students with accurate and affordable learning materials. In fact, I don't see why their creation shouldn't be subsidised and so they can be freely provided in electronic format to students. The curriculum should be free of copyright.

[ethbro]

I remember buying $200 textbooks that were absolutely terrible.

The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon."

PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is required, and if so, whether a previous version can be used. (I know publishers are getting worse and worse about one-time-use codes and "enhanced offerings" though)

[anamexis]

I'll take this opportunity to plug my current employer, Verba Software. We work with college bookstores to make textbooks cheaper, from making it easy for professors to find cheaper alternatives when they are adopting textbooks, to helping the bookstore source cheap used textbooks, to helping students find the cheapest books through transparent comparison shopping.

http://www.verbasoftware.com/

[ethbro]

I always thought crowd-sourced feedback on whether a class + instructor combination required the textbook would be incredibly useful.

A) There are 20+ students in typical undergraduate classes

B) Professors tend to teach undergraduate classes extremely similarly from year-to-year

So I imagine it wouldn't take long until I could plug in a school, class, and professor and get a list of impressions back. E.g. "Homework taken directly from book"

Second idea. OCR + diff would be incredibly valuable for version diffs of popular textbooks. How much was rewritten? Were the homework questions changed? If so, which ones?

Thanks for the good work though!

[prawn]

I have read about those shady techniques from publishers. Universities should refuse to deal with them and those proven to take favours for making these publishers required should be penalised.

[ethbro]

Ultimately, students make a pretty poor voting demographic (especially in Republican state legislatures in the south).

So if a college earns some kind of financial benefit from choosing a particular text "solution", then that's money the state doesn't have to fund.

If students want this to change then they need to organize politically and make it a clear demand, as they're the only stakeholders impacted by higher priced textbooks.

[kafkaesq]

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

Upwards of $175,000, according to the Sacramento Bee article.

[cloudjacker]

lets see

$500,000 + generous salary

$10,000 for perception management

easy bet for me too