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VOLUME 136, ISSUE 3 | THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2017
IAN JONES / AGGIE
CHANCELLOR EMERITA LINDA KATEHI REFLECTS ON CAREER, LOOKS TO FUTURE Katehi talks about discrimination she has faced, salary, upcoming memoir; says she has returned to her calling BY AA RO N L I SS campus@theaggie.org
Editor’s Note: This article has been edited for length and clarity. The full version appears online at theaggie. org. In her office in the Academic Surge Building, Chancellor Emerita Linda Katehi discussed her return to researching and teaching after resigning from her former position as UC Davis chancellor. She also addressed her controversial 2017-18 salary, disclosed stories about past experiences with sexism — an issue discussed in her upcoming memoir — and spoke about how she felt administrative work was unsatisfactory. With regard to her $318,000 2017-18 salary which, when annualized, will be about equal to that of the current chancellor, Katehi stated that her critics do not understand or recognize the complexity of the situation. This quarter, she is teaching a one-unit class. “People don’t understand — everyone teaches one class because we do a huge amount of research,”
Katehi said. “The university expects me to earn $500,000 in research a year, so I will [work] for my salary. Senior faculty members [like myself ] are expected to do a lot of service on committees and review cases, besides teach and research. It’s very hard for people to understand the complexity of the job, so they just look at the one class.” As a member of the UC Davis faculty, Katehi said she is happy to be done with administrative positions. “I always felt like being a faculty member was more respectable than being [an] administration member,” Katehi said. “I was always very cynical of administrators — they are the people who tell you what not to do, even though you’re making so much money for the university. I see being an administrator as a service, not a career. I did not come to the university to become a chancellor, I found myself there. It is much more of a political position, and I don’t want to be a politician. Politics are dirty — they are about an agenda.” Katehi said she originally joined the administration because she thought she “could make a difference” and said she now hopes what she accomplished
while chancellor “will remain” in place. When asked about her progress on her memoir, which she began roughly a year ago, her face lit up. Katehi said she has “found a publisher” and “signed the contract last week.” She has part of the book on the table in her office. The pages of pre-memoir notes were constructed mainly of drawings, thoughts and stories. Katehi talked about her memoir as a monument for her accomplishments against the odds of achieving her goals, including, specifically, the sexism she faced as a woman in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Katehi grew up on Salamis, a Greek island. In her home community, Katehi was first shamed for enjoying math, and so caught glimpses of the cobbled path ahead of her as a female electrical engineer. “I grew up in a very small and remote place and was the only woman to go to the university then,” Katehi said. “I was very good at math. For a young girl to be good at math there was considered weird, and I was considered a weirdo for a long time.” Katehi said she had first-hand experiences with discrimination early in her career.
“People laughed in my face when I was younger and told them I was an electrical engineer,” Katehi said. ”How many kids have seen an electrical engineer that’s a woman?” She spoke openly of one particular experience while still in Greece, after earning a degree in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. In 1977, while applying for jobs, a misogynistic call from an interested employer left her in disbelief — an interested employer had misread her posting and wrongly assumed she was a man. “He said ‘Are you telling me you are an electrical engineer?,’” Katehi said. “He then said ‘Do you expect me to hire you?’ I said ‘Yes?’ [And] he said ‘Thank you, but no.’” She worked at the University of Michigan, from 1984 to 2001 as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Starting in 1994, Katehi became the university’s associate dean of academic affairs and graduate education. Katehi described the status of women’s rights in America as more KATEHI on 9
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BRIAN LANDRY / AGGIE
HUMANS: MADE FOR MORE THAN LABELS
THREE NEW TERCERO DORMITORIES WELCOME NEW CLASS TO UC DAVIS
Fighting transgender community stigma with JVMC, healthcare, hormone therapy at GHC BY SAHI T I V EM UL A features@theaggie.org
Social stigma can take a toll on lives — sometimes quite literally. “Joan Viteri Memorial Clinic (JVMC), as its name implies, [was] founded in memory of Joan Viteri,” said Noreen Mansuri, a fourth-year NPB major and the co-director of JVMC. “She was a community member [of ] Oak Park (a neighborhood in Sacramento) who died due to a treatable abscess. She passed away due to the stigma she received as [did other] people in her community who [used] intravenous drugs.” Essentially, Joan Viteri died from an infection that was treatable, but lost her life due to social stigma against intravenous drug users that prevented her from seeking medical care. She was afraid of the judgement she’d receive from the medical community. “JVMC was founded to prevent any deaths of
that nature from happening again,” Mansuri said. “Right now we provide resources and primary healthcare to all Oak Park community members, but we have specific resources to treat individuals who use intravenous drugs, individuals who work in the sex trade and trans folk. Those are our three target populations.” JVMC, which is located in Sacramento and run by UC Davis School of Medicine students, sends some of its volunteers to help at a nonprofit organization called the Gender Health Center (GHC), also located in Sacramento. The GHC is a resource for members of the LGBTQIA population seeking counseling and therapy services. It also provides people in transition with hormone therapy services. The members of these organizations strive to provide much more than medical services, trying to create a safe space for community members and patients. JVMC on 9
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Tercero Phase Four project also includes communal building BY ALLY R USSELL campus@theaggie.org
Around 600 first-year students have officially moved into the three recently-opened dormitory buildings in the Tercero area. The three new residence halls are part of the student housing development project referred to as “Tercero Phase Four” –– a $59.1 million project which, in addition to the new residence halls, also includes a communal building. New amenities include common areas, a fullyequipped kitchen, a quiet study lounge, a wellness room and a gaming room where students can take advantage of multiple gaming stations as well as foosball and air hockey tables. “We’ve got a music room, so I can practice, and an outdoor kitchen area,” said Zak McGaugh, a first-year political science major living in the new Tercero dorms. Students can enjoy more square feet in the
new dormitory rooms as well as comfortable floor lounges. Tanner Gross, a first-year psychology major and a new resident of Redwood Hall, said he was surprised by the layout of his room. “The room is way bigger than I thought it would be,” Gross said. “I really like the community aspect of [the] housing.” Redwood Hall is one of the three new dorm buildings in the Tercero dormitory area. The building itself has multiple fanned wings to accommodate a nearby grove of redwoods that can be seen from the dorm rooms. Dotted throughout the area are sprawling old cork oak and redwood trees. “The cool thing about an existing site is that it forces the architect to be creative with the design,” said Mike Sheehan, the director of facilities services for Student Housing and Dining Services. The three new dorm buildings are Cottonwood Hall, Redwood Hall and Madrone Hall. Olive Hall NEW DORMS on 9