We all remember this iconic image of a campus police officer pepper spraying peaceful student protestors back in 2011. The protest, "Occupy UC Davis," was against the Universities decision to increase tuition. However, after the incident it became a demand for the chancellor, Linda Katehi, to resign. It later came out that Katehi was paid $420,000 to be on the board of a textbook company and she was also a member of the board at DeVry University, a notorious For-Profit University. It seems the more that is revealed about Mrs. Katehi, the worse it gets.

Documents that recently became public showed that UC Davis, a public University, paid at least $175,000 in an attempt to purge the image of the Pepper Spray Incident from the internet. The two companies that they hired attempted to change Google results when searching for UC Davis University in order to preserve public image.

In 2014 the University announced that it will be raising the cost of tuition by $3,300 per year for the next five years, sparking another protest. The reason the administration gave way for the tuition raise was to keep up with pensions and to hire more staff, however now seeing how much the college paid in a failed attempt to remove a picture from the internet shows a failure of proper prioritization and misuse of public funding.

Doug Elmets, a Sacramento public affairs consultant, commented "a public university that is funded through taxpayer funds, who has repeatedly stepped into a vast hole, it is surprising that they thought this could be done without the light of day shining on the act." Mrs. Katehi's refusal to resign despite the constant string of controversy under her administration is the only thing that is harming the public image of UC Davis University.