So I say this saga matters.

Before I tell you how that million was spent instead, let’s quickly review the vast sums, beyond the final million, that were already squandered during Linda Katehi’s tenure. Then I’ll proceed with the big reveal and close with a million-dollar question.

* * *

The story began on November 18, 2011, when UC Davis students were lawfully assembled on a campus quad to peacefully protest during the Occupy Wall Street movement. That is when unusually insane behavior from California’s public sector started:

Some footage of controversial law-enforcement encounters require experts in police training or painstaking frame-by-frame video analysis to adequately comprehend.

Not that infamous video.

In an efficient system, an administrator would promptly have concluded that Lieutenant John Pike, the pepper-spraying cop, should never again police undergraduates. Under a less efficient system that afforded reasonable protections against unfair termination, Pike might have lasted a week during a review and appeal.

Under the insane system that operates in California, investigators took five months to reach the conclusion YouTube viewers grasped in 30 seconds: “Lt. Pike bears primary responsibility for the objectively unreasonable decision to use pepper spray on the students sitting in a line and for the manner in which the pepper spray was used.” The insane part is that even then, Pike couldn't be immediately fired. In total, he remained on administrative leave for eight months after the incident, doing no work but receiving $70,000 in salary by my calculations. Then, when his employment was finally terminated, the police officer found “primarily responsible” for an “objectively unreasonable” use of pepper spray––a cop whose actions forced California taxpayers to pay the undergrads he assaulted $30,000 each––got $38,000 in workman’s compensation for psychological trauma at the way he was treated!

Investigators found that Katehi was partly responsible, too. She bore culpability for the decision to remove students from the quad, the dubious timing of the operation, and the failure to convey that force should not be used. She said at the time that she took “full responsibility” for what happened and apologized to students. Had the matter ended there it would be no incitement for a populist revolt.

We’ve got traffic to fight.

But a few years later, the Sacramento Bee reported that Katehi “contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings” on the pepper-spraying and “to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi.” UC Davis signed one 6-month contract with a PR company at a rate of $15,000 per month. An objective described in the company’s proposal was the “eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor." Scott Shackford called it “another example of colleges no longer fulfilling their roles as defenders of speech and openness, combined with abusive police behavior, with an added dash of the administrative bloat that's driving up higher education costs.” He added, “in the years since Katehi took over in 2009, the budget for the communications office has grown from $2.93 million to $5.47 million.”