HIGHER GROUND

Katehi discusses her controversial tenure as chancellor of the University of California, Davis and her childhood in Greece in this memoir.

When the author agreed to become the new chancellor of UC Davis in 2009, she was ready to implement a dramatic series of changes in response to the university’s grave fiscal difficulties. However, she had no idea how impassioned the opposition would be to the “change and discomfort” she represented. Before she even assumed the post, she was criticized for demanding an outsized salary, finding a position as a lecturer for her husband, Spyros, and her alleged involvement in an admissions scandal that occurred when she was the dean of engineering at Purdue University. Democratic state Sen. Leland Yee, whom she never met, publicly called for her resignation. During her seven years as chancellor—Katehi resigned in 2016—the author asserts that her adversaries never let up. She discusses a formal investigation into various alleged improprieties that concluded that she was innocent of the charges. Katehi responded to the investigative report with a complex mixture of vindication, relief, and bitterness. As she poignantly describes, “I welcomed that moment of truth; the moment when I would be able to do what I had wished since late April and move away from the evil that surrounded me, denounce my heinous relationships, and remove the loathsome mask that had been forced upon me since I had come to campus.” This thoughtful memoir also discusses the author’s childhood in Greece; she was born there in 1954 during a turbulent era in which the nation was roiled by civil war and suffered the despotism of a military junta. She lucidly depicts the extraordinary dysfunction of institutional administration, in her telling, a system whose progress is perpetually stymied by petty internecine conflict and an unappeasable fear of change. Katehi also recollects, with great candor and emotional nuance, her fraught relationship with her father, a man who struggles with the trauma inflicted upon him by the war. The author is a natural storyteller—she seamlessly combines astute intellectual analysis with delicate emotional exploration.

A moving memoir, both intellectually and psychologically incisive.