It was 2011, and the optics were horrible.  UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike was pictured spraying O.C., pepper spray, in the faces of sitting protesters. They refused to obey, so the students were sprayed. This resulted in a settlement of $38,000 to Pike for his suffering.

Chief Annette Spicuzza did her best to explain to those of us who didn’t understand the First Rule of Policing why Pike’s actions were necessary.

Spicuzza said officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them. They used a sweeping motion on the group, per procedure, to avoid injury, she said.

“There was no way out of that circle,” Spicuzza said Friday. “They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.”

Rather than appreciate how hard it is to be a campus cop, to face students violently sitting, the internet kept pounding the optics, the viral picture of Pike showing the world the fun times ahead for UC Davis students.  This was bad for business.

This week the SacBee revealed that Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi shelled out more than the $38k Pike needed to feel better about what he did.

UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.

The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.

Had this happened in a country where the internet was constrained by the right to be forgotten, Katehi could have saved some money. But the nation today is a little different than in 2011, the good old days when wrapping bad things in the rhetoric of hate was enough to twist young minds.

Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”

Since this was about a low tier college and its chancellor, who is female but only of pale skin, plus privileged enough to have two middle initials, it failed to evoke the necessary pathos to cause massive formation of safe spaces to combat the venomous hate speech. Instead, it went viral the other way, putting the memory of UC Davis’ safe space for cops back on everyone’s front burner.

Trying to manipulate the internet, the well-earned reputation of the now somewhat more comfortable, albeit sensitive, Lt. John Pike protecting his cops from students sitting violently, is tricky business.  Clearly, it’s more difficult than some fakers in the space realize, though it can be lucrative when the fee is being paid out of a college budget that might otherwise have been used for more important things, like education or a new Title IX administrator.

But you probably know all this already, the attempt at cleansing the internet of one of the ugliest pictures at a college since Kent State having backfired spectacularly.  So, aside from tossing my two cents into the mix, why bother writing about it? Is there really anything more to add?

Well, yes.  Much has changed on college campuses since the bad old days of 2011, when it was about students being pepper sprayed for protests that might, in some alternate universe, have resulted in a cop’s feelings being hurt.  Regardless of whether one agreed with the underlying purpose of the students’ protest*, there was unwavering support for the exercise of their constitutional rights, the right to speech, assembly, protest their grievances.

The rights at risk in 2011, the students who refused to capitulate to police demands despite being warned that they were about to suffer pain, seem almost quaint today.  There was no talk of microaggressions, of hate speech, of carceral anything. No one cried and demanded a safe space because they weren’t being treated with the level of infantile deference demanded of higher education.

And there was that right to free speech.  That right to speak one’s mind without fear that some word would be found offensive by someone, whipping the frenzy of sensitive minds to demand their ouster from campus for violation of the feelz code.  The inconsistent, if not laughably hypocritical, perspective that the most painful, hurtful thing that could happen on a college campus was that someone of privilege, such as some student wearing fashionable boots from L.L.Bean, took issue with something other than the need for transgender bathrooms.

Would the protesting students at UC Davis have been pepper sprayed today?  Probably not. Indeed, it seems more likely that they would have been offered puppies and Play-Doh, a pass on final exams and free lunch served by the chancellor.

But then, it is also unlikely that these same students would have been engaged in this protest today, as it wouldn’t have been a culturally acceptable cause.  If anything, these privileged students would have been charged with the microaggression of caring only about their tuition, which should be quadrupled so that the less privileged could attend for free plus have a few segregated dorms where they could share their pain.

And there wouldn’t be a damn thing these students could say about it, because it would have been hurtful, and as every college student is told immediately upon admission, hate speech cannot be tolerated.  Does that include hate speech toward a college?  What about hate speech toward the cop doing the pepper spraying?

Court filings showed that campus police Lt. John Pike, who was seen calmly spraying seated students in various videos, was bombarded with more than 10,000 text messages and 17,000 emails that included threats and harassment. The university itself released nearly 10,000 documents 11 months after the incident that illustrated the worldwide negative reaction to the incident and officials’ attempts to contain the damage.

Isn’t this cyberbullying? Isn’t this hate speech? Isn’t this the conduct that the deeply sensitive students of 2016, and their similarly empathetic adult handlers, inform us is intolerable?  Had the protesting students in 2011 used chalk on the sidewalk, would their peers have supported them or cheered Lt. Pike’s pepper spraying these hatemongers for their violence?

Let’s remember UC Davis’ pepper spraying its students. But let’s also remember that there was a time when students exercised their constitutional rights, the same ones that students now demand be eradicated. The internet shouldn’t be cleansed of either.

*It was an Occupy protest directed against tuition increases and budget cuts.