Female leaders need more support, says ousted Davis chancellor

Seven years after being forced out as the chancellor of the University of California, Davis on debatable grounds, Linda Katehi is no longer taking it personally. But she doesn’t want anyone to forget it, either.

A native of Greece, Professor Katehi was announced in May 2009 as Davis’ first female leader. Right from the start, she was consumed in controversies over allegations that included political favouritism, corporate ties, campus policing and more.

She finally left in 2016, with large numbers of faculty and students and lawmakers calling for her removal, even though an investigation by the University of California system struggled to put much blame on her.

Now, firmly and happily back at her old career as a researcher – she’s been a professor of engineering at Texas A&M University since 2019 – Professor Katehi has just published a memoir with a title that sums up the experience: Higher Ground: My American Dreams and Nightmares in the Hidden Halls of Academia.

Campus resource: We need to notice who is missing from the decision-making table – and act

In it, Professor Katehi concedes that inexperience led her to make some key mistakes, largely in the arena of not knowing who to trust and what political strategies would work best. More fundamentally, she talks of her determination through the book to provide a pathway for future university presidents – especially women and foreign nationals – who can get thrown into an incredibly complicated job without the personal connections and guidance necessary to succeed.

“I don’t believe that people like me have been prepared to understand that there is a political side of those positions,” Professor Katehi said in an interview. “That is extremely important to understand – and also to be trained on how to accept it.”

Professor Katehi came to Davis from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she served as provost. A few years beforehand, the Illinois governor at the time, Rod Blagojevich – later convicted and imprisoned on federal corruption charges – pushed to get two of his nephews into the university’s law school.

That case and other instances of favourable admissions at Illinois led a California state senator, Leland Yee – later convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges – to wage a campaign to get Professor Katehi fired before she even took office as the Davis chancellor.

Professor Katehi argued that as the Illinois provost, she had chain-of-command authority over admissions but little to no involvement in individual decisions. She took the Davis job, but the complaints kept coming. Among the issues dogging her tenure in Davis: she served on the board of a for-profit education company; she allowed campus police to break up a student demonstration; and she paid consultants to improve Davis’ image.

In its formal review, the California system faulted her on the margins – largely about insufficient disclosures and a lack of candidness – but absolved her on key points of substance.

In the book, Professor Katehi describes wanting to have abandoned the Davis job even before taking it, due to the pressure instigated by Mr Yee, but getting pushed forward by her husband. Among other lessons, she said she wishes she had quit then, having later recognised that the senator was using her case to wage a political attack on the California system president, Mark Yudof, and that leaving then would not ultimately have been seen as a stain on her academic career.

“In essence, if I had said to President Yudof, ‘I cannot come under these conditions,’ I don't think anything would have happened,” Professor Katehi said.

In part, she said, “I was not experienced enough to be able to put this aside – I took it personally, and if you are experienced in politics, you never take anything personally. That’s what I’ve learned – you play politics like the way politicians play politics – but I was not in that space at that moment.”

It’s the kind of insight, Professor Katehi said, that new university presidents often lack, especially if they come from outside the traditional gender and racial norms. Institutions could do much more, she said, to provide that kind of training to their prospective and incoming leaders ahead of time.

Universities instead appear to be meeting the challenge by hiring more leaders from outside higher education who bring their own political backgrounds, Professor Katehi said. “Which I don’t think is a good trend, to tell you the truth, because they come to the universities totally uninformed about the academy,” she said. “And that creates other problems, obviously.”

The book is coming out, perhaps with some irony, just as her current institution has lost its own controversial female leader. The Texas A&M president, Katherine Banks, recently resigned over her handling of a case in which conservative activists successfully convinced the university to block the hiring of a black journalism professor, Kathleen McElroy, from the University of Texas at Austin.

Professor Katehi said she agreed that the treatment of the journalism professor “did seem pretty bad”. But she also said that she mentored Professor Banks while they were both at Purdue University, considered her a “wonderful person”, doesn’t know “what exactly happened” to prompt the resignation, and suspects it may have been too hasty.

“The one thing that I observed is that before anybody knew the facts, they asked her to leave,” Professor Katehi said. “That’s exactly what happens to women – before anybody knew what the facts were, they asked her to leave.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com