Students pepper-sprayed by campus police at the University of California at Davis have reacted in anger at the “vastly inappropriate” and “insulting” decision by their university to contract firms to systematically scrub mentions of the story on the internet.

The university is being accused of censorship after quietly seeking to hide web references to a widely reported incident in which police sprayed student activists from the then nascent Occupy movement four years ago.

The photograph and video went viral across the world, prompting a major backlash against the California university and its chancellor Linda PB Katehi, who was accused of using heavy-handed tactics against peaceful activists Students are once again calling for Katehi’s resignation.

Details of the attempt to remove references of the pepper-spraying incident were revealed by the Sacramento Bee, which reported that UC Davis hired a communications firm on a $15,000-a-month contract with a goal of eradicating “references to the pepper spray incident on Google”, including “negative search results” for Katehi.

The information was obtained through a Public Records Act request and is part of a broader investigation by the paper into Katehi’s affiliation with private corporate boards.

“It’s not surprising,” said Ian Lee, who was an 18-year-old freshman when he was pepper-sprayed during the peaceful protest. “It’s consistent with what [Katehi] has done and she should resign.”

“It bothers me because it’s personal,” he added. “It’s a personal thing that changed my life. They’re trying to erase the history of resistance at UC Davis.”

Tom Zolot, who was a senior when he took part in the protest and was also hit with pepper spray, said it was “insulting” to attempt to bury mention of the protest and its handling.

“This was a moment of resistance,” he said of the 2011 campus-wide protests and pepper-spraying incident. “This was a moment of shame.”He described the decision to spend public money on hiring PR firms to seek to conceal the incident from search results was “vastly inappropriate”.

Ian Lee during the UC Davis protests. Photograph: Ian Lee via Facebook

The Bee investigation found that the university, a state-funded institution that has faced severe budget cuts in recent years, paid the Maryland-based Nevins & Associates communications firm $92,971 to work on its online reputation management relating to the November 2011 spraying incident and surrounding controversy.

The contract signed in January 2013, over a year after the incident, promised “an online branding campaign designed to clean up the negative attention the University of California, Davis and Chancellor Katehi have received related to the events that transpired in November 2011”.

The university subsequently entered into multiple five-figure contracts with another firm to improve its online image. In total, there were more than $175,000 in contracts to address issues with the university’s online reputation.

Multiple contracts were with Sacramento-based IDMLOCO, which was awarded its first six-month contract in June 2014 for the amount of $82,500, for “search engine results management” that involved creating new content to push “negative” results lower in searches.

In a statement on Thursday, UC Davis said: “Increased investment in social media and communications strategy has heightened the profile of the university to good effect. As part of this overall communications strategy, it is important that the excellent work underway at UC Davis with respect to educating the next generation of students, pursuing groundbreaking research, and providing important services to the State is not lost during a campus crisis, including the crisis that ensued following the extremely regrettable incident when police pepper-sprayed student protesters in 2011.”

The pepper-spray incident occurredafter students associated with the Occupy movement were ordered to remove a tent encampment in the university’s quad. Students gathered to protest against the closure, and a number of them sat down with their arms linked in a peaceful demonstration across a concrete walkway.



Campus police in riot gear arrived, and one officer doused the seated protesters at close range with pepper spray while bystanders shouted: “You don’t have to do this.”

Lee, who was among the students pictured in the image, sheltering from the spray, said the attack was “extremely painful”. “My entire face felt like it was on fire,” he said.

“For a couple months afterward I wasn’t even involved in the student movement,” he added. “I was just too scared.”

The incident was videoed by multiple bystanders and quickly went viral, becoming the top trending topic on Google and broadcast on TV news programs across the world.

Though Katehi was not directly in charge of the police department and has said she was unaware that force would be used in the removal of the campers, she had ordered the removal of the students and, at the time, much of the criticism was directed at the controversial chancellor. On campus, she acquired a number of nicknames, including Chemical Katehi.



A few days after the pepper-spray incident, Katehi was once again the focus of a firestorm of criticism after another video involving student protests went viral.

This one occurred after students surrounded a small building where she was holding a press conference. The students refused to let her leave, and a campus minister, Kristin Stoneking, was called in to help negotiate a solution.

Hours later, Katehi was allowed to exit by walking past a gauntlet of students seated silently along the sidewalk. This video quickly became dubbed the “walk of shame” and has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.

Katehi has been under a new wave of public scrutiny in recent weeks over her service on multiple corporate boards. She was forced to resign from the for-profit educational institution DeVry Education Group, which paid her $70,000 a year plus stock.

Katehi, who earns $424,360 in her official capacity as chancellor, has also served on the board of textbook company John Wiley & Sons, earning about $420,000 in pay and stock, according to SEC filings. After that appointment received public attention, she donated some of the proceeds to a scholarship fund at UC Davis.

Students have occupied the foyer of her administrative offices on campus for weeks to protest about the board positions and other issues, and to call for her resignation. State lawmakers have questioned her judgment, with at least one also calling for her resignation.

Zolot and Lee both said that they felt the university and Katehi failed to make meaningful changes after the pepper-spraying and that the recent allegations of misconduct by the chancellor are part of a larger pattern of “privatization” of the university that is not in students best interests.

“Nothing systemic really changed,” Lee said. “UC Davis is trying to paint itself as this institution that really cares about its students and that really cares about its workers [but] by trying to erase this history they’re misleading people.”