Criminal who’s inexplicably still an educator found yet another way to scam students
After Linda Katehi became unemployed (re: “fired,” except in a nice way that preserves her already flimsy reputation), she needed to find a new hustle. The whole moonlighting-at-textbook-publishers thing wasn’t gonna cut it now that she didn’t have a position of power to exploit. So Linda thought long and hard. What are things that people love? Well, they sure do love pop culture, especially beloved children’s cartoons. What else do they love? Autobiographies written by washed-up public figures who scrape by looking for any way to monetize whatever life situation they find themselves in. Aha! A lightbulb went off.
“I can totally use my infamous name to sell books!” Katehi mused. “And guess what? I’ll write a semi-autobiographical detective mystery that riffs off of people’s love of that silly dog cartoon. What was it again? I can’t remember things these days because my brain has begun to rot from the unethical plotting I’ve been doing all these years.”
So here it comes, something all of us never wanted! A Katehi autobiography. Looks like Christmas came early this year. I’m sure that, considering all of the legitimate achievements that Linda Katehi has made throughout her life (she is an accomplished scholar and a woman in STEM), everyone will be able to look past the way in which she represents a large ugly symptom of public education and higher education in general, where the administrative class of the university system gladly gleans cash off the backs of hardworking, often starving, students. Surely we will be able to ignore the festering sore that is public figures like Katehi, whose self-interest and greed are the reason most things are shitty in the first place.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for Katehi to write her semi-autobiographical detective Scooby Doo fiction. I’m sure we will get a wonderful snapshot of all the ways in which public figures try to manipulate us — and the way in which Katehi represents just one among many who seek to take advantage of students or the working class or the poor or the minorities or any other group of people who find themselves constantly under the boot of a corrupt leader.
And I hope in the end we meddle enough to foil their plans.
Written by: Aaron Levins — adlevins@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
